Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 544 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Last week, Megana and I answered 20 listener questions without Craig. This week he’s doing the same without me, because I am not here. This introduction is prerecorded and the show is completely in the hands of Craig and producer Megana Rao, so God help us all. I now turn over hosting duties to them.

Craig: Hosting duties belong to us. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will finally have a chance to discuss millennial stuff. Megana, welcome to our show.

Megana Rao: Thank you, Craig. Thank you for having me.

Craig: We both feel a little bit naughty right now. I think that would be fair to say, right?

Megana: Yeah.

Craig: You mentioned that we felt a little bit like perhaps when the teacher leaves the classroom and we’re put in charge of the class but we’re not really in charge of the class, or like if our dad owned a store and he left and we had to work the cash register.

Megana: It’s like, what amount of freedom do I have but I still care about the store?

Craig: Because you’re the good kid, and I’m the kid that clearly doesn’t care. If something goes wrong, ultimately you’ll be held responsible, not only by our parent, but by your own overactive conscience. You also love me, so you’re really torn here. You’re in a tough spot. All we can do is talk about keyboards. Logitech K860 does have Bluetooth, Megana. Are you aware of this?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: We’re getting into follow-up here. This is what John would normally structure for us. I’m going to read this. Joseph wrote in regarding the keyboard discussion. He went through the same journey that I did, from Microsoft Sculpt to Logitech K860. He knows that he’s never been tempted by John’s crazy, inverted thing, and neither has anyone else.

Megana: Have you ever tried using it?

Craig: Yeah, I did. I think at his house I sat down and did it for a minute and went, “Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.”

Megana: Exactly.

Craig: Joseph was saying while the Logitech does work with Logitech dongles, it also works with regular Bluetooth. What? What? I’m going to have to try that shortly. That’s exciting. I’m into that. Oh my god. Then apparently you and John took a typing test.

Megana: In Episode 543 that John and I recorded, we followed up on the touch typing conversation you guys had, because I was feeling very insecure that I didn’t know what touch typing was, and that maybe I didn’t know how to type properly, but turns out I do.

Craig: Oh, Megana.

Megana: I took a typing test.

Craig: This is so good.

Megana: I got 81 words per minute and 100% accuracy.

Craig: I think anyone over 70 I think is starting to get into really good territory. Once you hit 100, you’re getting into zip zip, and then anything over that, you’re talking about professional stenographers and so forth. 81 words a minute is terrific. It’s terrific.

Megana: Thank you. Thank you. John got a 62 on his stand-up keyboard.

Craig: Which means probably on a regular keyboard he would be 4,000 words a minute.

Megana: Exactly, in the hundreds for sure.

Craig: It sounds like I’m going to have to take this one. Once we finish recording here, I’ll sit down and bang this out and report back dutifully.

Megana: Perfect.

Craig: How I do. Megana, for the love of God, just honestly. Apparently, there’s a bonus question here.

Megana: Yes. Today we’re going to get into 20 questions that listeners have wrote in for you.

Craig: Oh, my. Oh, my.

Megana: There was one question that came in through Twitter that asked, “Did Megana take Craig’s advice to watch Barton Fink?” As follow-up, we’re going to answer that here. I have watched Barton Fink now. I really enjoyed it. I understand why you recommended it to me.

Craig: I’m glad that you liked it. Obviously, a lot of Barton Fink is somewhat obtuse by design, but it’s an incredible view of the screenwriter, both as victim and also as wretch. Dig in a little bit. Tell me what struck you about it. I’m curious.

Megana: First of all, absolutely unexpected turn of events in it. Brilliantly executed and very satisfying by the end. As I was watching it, I was like, “Where could this possibly go?” I’m not sure that I had any of my questions really answered, but I felt very pleased by the end.

Craig: That’s great.

Megana: Barton Fink as a character was so painful to watch, perhaps because of some self-loathing, him talking over John Goodman’s character about how much he wants to be the voice of the common man and never lets him speak.

Craig: The common man. “You don’t listen!”

Megana: When he’s talking about how much he envies John Goodman because he leads the life of the mind, oh god, it was –

Craig: “I’ll show you the life of the mind.” One of the things about Barton Fink that I love so much is that in addition to the kind of baked-in inauthenticity of the writer, I guess the Coen brothers turning the lens back on themselves in a fascinating way. It also is a pretty disturbing examination of writer’s block and the weird, creepy decay that can happen in your own brain where things are just melting inside your mind. The entire hotel that they’re staying in begins to melt.

Megana: The wallpaper.

Craig: The wallpaper. The paste that comes out the wallpaper is the same as this infectious ooze coming out of Madman Mundt’s ear. It’s all this creepy connection. I have all these deep theories about Barton Fink and what I think about it.

I was lucky enough to work on a movie that John Goodman was in. He is lovely, such a sweet guy, very quiet. I wouldn’t say shy. Maybe a little bit. A little bit shy in his own way. I walked over to him at one point when he was alone, and I said, “This is a wonderful moment for me because I’m such a fan and also I get to ask you about Barton Fink, because I have all these theories. I would just be fascinated to know what you thought.” He said, “I have no idea what it means.” He said, “Those guys are geniuses. My job, as far as I could tell, was to make sure that I knew my lines on the day. On the day, I really worked hard to make sure I knew my lines and was able to say them the way they wrote them. I have no idea what it means.” I was like, “That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” In my life. We did talk about the scene where he’s running down the hallway and how they did the fire, so it was fun. Anyway, point is, John Goodman doesn’t know what it means, so I think you’re allowed to think it means whatever you want it to be. I’m glad you liked it, at the very least.

Megana: I did like it. I love the Hollywood of it. I love the head of the studio. It was so fun. It’s like, yes, I know that Michael Lerner’s character flipped so quickly, but what a joy to be on that ride while you are.

Craig: I’ve been there. As awful as they were and continue to be, there’s something of the Weinsteins in there. When they wanted to charm you, boy did they go all the way. Everybody comes here and imagines a moment where somebody who runs a studio, who’s famous and powerful, tells you to your face that you’re a genius. When it happens, it flips switches in you you didn’t realize you had. Then later, boy when you fall down or when they throw you down, boy does it hurt. When I watch that, I’m like, oh man, I know exactly how that feels. I’ve been in that meeting. I’ve been in both of those meetings. The berating of the underling is something incredibly familiar to me as well.

Megana: Oof, yeah.

Craig: Yeah, oof.

Megana: We need an episode that’s a guide of how to deal with that narcissistic charm, because it is…

Craig: Oh boy. Yeah. We do. There’ll be a lot of therapy in that episode. A lot, because ultimately, you can’t do anything about them. You can’t. All you can do is identify the breaks in your own system that they are sneaking through.

Megana: Correct.

Craig: In this way, they illuminate for you. They give you a little bit of a gift. They shine a light on things that need to be fixed. You just need to know when it’s happening.

Megana: It’s like a pressure test of…

Craig: It’s a pressure test, because they are there to find their way in through the breaks and gaps and lean on the parts of you that hate yourself and need approval. They find them. They’re so good at finding them. You don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. Each time it happens you get a little bit smarter, you get a little bit better.

Megana: Are you ready to get into the 20 questions?

Craig: Yeah. The deal is I got to answer all 20 of these, right?

Megana: Oh gosh, I haven’t thought of what the alternative would be.

Craig: I’m going to do it. You know what? I’m going to do it.

Megana: You’re going to do it.

Craig: Let’s do it. We’re going to do it.

Megana: Our first question came from Julien, who asked, “My script’s been professionally read a couple of times and is heavily based on true events. However, the notes say I should weave real moments throughout the script, which I already did, a lot. How do I notate reality? Is it kosher to have an explanation page at the end, or footnotes?”

Craig: What Julien’s saying is that people don’t seem to be recognizing the real moments throughout his script, which I think is not going to be helped by an explanation page or perhaps Julien saying, “No, but I did.” The whole thing with notes is they’re just being the audience. If people in the audience don’t get that you are being real, it doesn’t matter if you’re being real. You actually have to be aware how that’s coming across.

What I would say probably is, “Okay, thank you for that note. Here are a number of real moments. Did they feel real? Did you think they weren’t real? That’s something that we can address or talk about, where are we losing a sense of authenticity.” It could be possible that they just don’t know at all. If you put it in the form of a question, you’ll be better off. If you say, “Dear idiots, here are 12 places I put true events,” you’re probably not going to last. If you say, “Okay, that’s really valuable. Here are 12 places where there were real events, but it seems like it’s not coming across as real events, so let’s have that discussion and figure out maybe how we could do better at that together,” because they may go, “Oh, good lord, we didn’t know. Okay, thank you.”

I’m not sure what the story is. Sometimes when real stories have very wild elements, you have to be aware of that and figure out how to ground them so that people actually believe it could possibly be true. Sounds like you just need to have another conversation with people. When it’s been professionally read, I’m just wondering who are these professionals, what does that mean, and can you get some follow-up from them.

Megana: With Chernobyl, you had a podcast where you did notate reality. You were talking about the events that were real. Most of them were the decisions that you made behind that. I guess I’m curious, is that something that you wanted to do so that people would buy into the show more?

Craig: No, the opposite. I wanted to make sure people knew what we had made up. I remember having this discussion with HBO, because at first they were like, “A podcast? Why? What are you talking about?” They thought I meant a marketing thing. I was like, “This has nothing to do with marketing,” because of course nobody was going to watch Chernobyl or listen to the podcast. I really was like, “This is just because we live in a time when everyone scrutinizes everything. I know they’re going to be scrutinizing this show. If we put stuff out there and don’t acknowledge that we’ve made certain changes to history, people are going to point their fingers back at us and say, ‘You guys made a show about lies and you lied,'” which would be true. If you can be transparent about where you had to dramatize or adjust to fit years of reality into five hours, then it’s much harder for people to point fingers at you, which is why I insisted that each episode of the podcast appear literally 12 seconds after each episode initially aired, so there was no gap. It was like, there you go, no waiting.

There were a lot of moments when I was writing Chernobyl where I was concerned that people just would think, “That’s not real. You just made that up,” because people made crazy decisions that were hard to understand. It was important to me that I present them in a way where the audience could at least say, “Okay, I kind of understand.”

There’s a moment in the first episode where Dyatlov is thinking, and then he’s just like, “The tank. That tank. It’s big enough to have caused this explosion,” because he’s come up with a theory of why it exploded. It felt like I needed a moment where I saw him convincing himself, because otherwise I would be wondering, why would a person just leap to that conclusion and then never question it in any way. There’s moments like that to just help people understand the reality of the human foibles behind the bad decisions.

Megana: That’s so interesting. I’m watching The Dropout that’s about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I find myself asking, because there’s a lot of really specific beautiful details that are in there, and I’m constantly asking was that real, where did that come from. I just don’t know if that’s a helpful question for me to be asking as an audience member.

Craig: Probably not. I think if you’re watching a documentary, it’s always a good thing to ask, what is the perspective involved here, is there an agenda, because editing is a wonderful, powerful thing. Documentaries are questionable, should be questioned, should be interrogated and held to task if they distort. Drama is drama. The point of drama, even when it’s based on reality, is not to journal, but rather to instruct in some manner of humanity. Dramatic instruction. What are we going to learn from the character? What are we going to learn about human behavior and nature? It is not there to be a full book report on a nonfiction event. Some events I think it’s best to be as accurate as you can be. I tried to be with Chernobyl, because I thought actually the beauty was in the specifics, and in a way in the journalism of it.

There’s been a terrific documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, so probably not much of a need to be perfectly documentarian again with the drama. Can you do the voice, by the way? Can you do the voice? Can you do it?

Megana: We’re hoping to change the world.

Craig: That’s great. That was great. Wow. Someone said once that–

Megana: There you go, that’s it.

Craig: That Elizabeth Holmes’s voice was just the voice that women do when they’re doing an impression of a dumb man.

Megana: You know what? That does feel right, because as I accessed it, I was like, this feels familiar, this feels like a pathway that I’ve used before.

Craig: Maybe it was Aline who said that. I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it was Aline. I just thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Anyway, great job. That character should come back, like Sexy Craig, every now and again. Theranos Megana.

Megana: That’s really helpful advice just for writers, dramatizing real events, that you’re not writing a documentary.

Craig: You’re not doing a book report. You get to decide how close or how far you want to be.

Megana: Next question. Andreas writes, “I wanted to ask how you approach writing jobs where you’re brought in quite late and asked to make the dialog funnier, touch up specific storylines, scenes, characters, or make cultural references more specific, etc. How do you curb your writerly instincts that you yourself would tell the story in an entirely different way and just focus on the job at hand? How much feedback on the overall story is expected of you?”

Craig: That’s a great question. So far I have not been called in for cultural references, weirdly. They made a whole movie about Staten Island, never called me. I was shocked. I do get called in from time to time, quite late, later than you would ever imagine, to make dialog funnier or touch up specific storylines, scenes, or characters. Yes, this happens all the time. It takes a certain kind of writer to do it. Not everybody can do that, because you are in a very different mode. You’re in a problem solving mode.

You need to understand production. I think that’s really important, because that’s what you’re writing for at that point, production, almost always. That means you need to understand scheduling, you need to understand who the actors are. Oftentimes you’re being put on the phone with them, because they’re upset about things. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat and been a therapist for famous people because they’re unhappy with the script. Partly, I have to just listen and hear what they need and then come back to everybody else and say, “Look, whether you agree or not, this is what they need. They can’t do it unless they get what they need. I’m going to give them what they need, but I now have to do it in a way that also gives you what you need,” because what they need is more action, or this scene needs to be better.

Sometimes what I suggest is that they have put their fingers on the exact right problem, all of their solutions are wrong. We should not do any of those things. I’m not going to do the seven things you asked me to do. I’m going to do these four things I think you ought to do instead. Oftentimes, and I’m not patting myself on the back as much as just pointing out that I have a job to do and they have their job to do, I’m right, because that’s my job. That’s what I do. Their job is different. In a good way, they’re trying. They’re trying to say, look, we know what a problem is and we have a suggestion of how to fix it, but they are not going to think of the things outside the box. Sometimes, you have to just go outside of what exists and say what we need is actually an entirely different scene in a different spot that is going to solve these 12 problems in one fell swoop.

You have to be a problem solver. You need a lot of experience. It takes time. Nobody who is a fairly new writer to business is going to be pulled in for stuff like that or relied on in that kind of way because they just haven’t done it enough. It’s very specific work. Very specific work.

Megana: Getting back to our screenwriting RPG framework, that seems like a very specific instance where you need a lot of wisdom and confidence.

Craig: Yeah, you need a tremendous amount of wisdom there, because there’s no way to survive that whole thing. Everyone is upset. When you walk into those situations, there’s tension. Everyone’s scared. They’re scared not only because they’re in a scary situation. They’re also scared of you, because they don’t know what you’re going to do. Everyone is quietly lobbying you to not mess everything up, meaning we’re going to call you in here and we’re going to tell you that we have some problems. Please do not tell us that we have 29 problems. Please do not tell us that we actually have six other problems that we don’t think are problems. Please don’t make our director leave. Please don’t make our actors angry. Please don’t make us upset.

You just have to listen really carefully and then understand that what everyone wants, what they’re dreaming of is that you’re going to sit down and go, “I have the solution. The solution will not upturn the apple card. It’s going to answer everyone’s questions. It’s not going to upset anyone. It’s not going to set you back in a huge way. We’re not going to tear all the stuff down. we’re just going to do this fairly easy series of things, and it will be much, much better.” That’s what they want and that’s in fact exactly what you have to deliver. It has to be effective. Not easy, but they do pay you a lot, so there’s that. Best money in Hollywood. Weekly production rewrites.

Megana: Speaking of money, I think this is going to be a question you’ll like, Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School wrote in and said, “I’m 23 and wrote my first screenplay in 2020 and got good scores on the Blacklist and met a director hoping to make it. He’s been taking the script around trying to get us a deal. He’s had it read by Paramount, HBO, etc. The most exciting news he told me was that Paramount liked it so much that they recommended it to their team.

“With my very first script already having made it as far as it has, it’s given me a lot more confidence in my ability to turn this passion into something real. Now, the problem is, I haven’t written a second script. I have the idea. I’ve slowly been mapping it out, but working part-time and going to school full-time has left me with virtually zero space to fit in my just-for-fun hobby. Obviously, I can’t quit working, but at this point it’s starting to feel like school not only isn’t benefiting me anymore, but that it’s actually holding me back from jump-starting my career. On the other hand, I’m four years into it, and I would only have about two terms left to finish my degree. It feels like either option I choose results in a waste of my time, either finish the degree and waste the next year of my life getting something that I don’t think will help me instead of actually writing, or I drop out and have the last four years of my effort and money be for nothing.”

Craig: Sunken costs fallacy here, writ large. It comes down to this. We struggle with the notion that we’ve wasted time and money. We struggle with it so much that we insist on finishing something that is a waste of time and money, which means spending some more time and money. What will that degree get you? I don’t know. As far as I can tell, nothing. We were on set just yesterday and I turned to Bo and I said, “Did you learn any of this at NYU, any of this?” She said no in such a hard way. It was the hardest no I’ve ever heard.

Megana: I don’t know that Bo has any soft no’s though.

Craig: This was one of the harder… It was like a no and not even close. It was sort of like she went to school and she was supposed to study how to make television and movies, and then when she arrived in Hollywood and saw how we made television and movies, it seemed like what she had really been studying was veterinary medicine and they just called it television and film studies because it had nothing to do with what we do. Nothing.

If Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School is 23, he’s already young, he’s getting some interest, he’s just starting. 23 is a fantastic age to be starting, because you have lots of energy. You have lots of enthusiasm. Everything is still exciting. You have lots of scripts ahead of you. You don’t theoretically have a family. As John and I pointed out, children are not zapping your life away. You can really make inroads.

As he points out, he’s just languishing in this school to get a piece of paper that no one will ever ask for. Ever. The only paper anyone’s ever going to ask to see is a script, if that’s what he wants to do. Furthermore, the degree will not get him anything anywhere else. In fact, all it’ll get him, and I think this is something else Bo and I were talking about, is that he will qualify to teach at film schools. That’s what those degrees give you, as far as I can tell.

He can finish it another time. It’s not like they go, “All that time is gone.” You can always come back and finish, I think. Take a year off. Take two years off. You don’t have to decide right now whether or not you’re going to flush the prior four years. Take a couple years off. Work on your career. If it happens, don’t go back. If it doesn’t happen, and you want to go back and complete it to get the paper and do something else, do it. Seems to me like you don’t have to make this choice right now. You can punt. I would punt. I would take the two years. I would take some time off, write some scripts, get some work, and see how this actually functions instead of whatever film school is teaching you.

Megana: I do agree with a lot of that, but I just worry that that piece of paper would get him a foot in the door or some entry level jobs and it would help him as his resume is being screened through a job at a big agency or something, that he has a completed degree. Not that I agree with that, but I wonder if that would help him to have that.

Craig: I don’t know where he’s going to film school. If he’s not going to NYU or USC, I’m not sure what networking there is available. Film schools are barfing out humans at a remarkable rate every year. They’re not all getting jobs because they went to a film school. What if he just went to a temp agency and got placed and started working at a company somewhere? Paramount’s looking for people to be assistants. You don’t need to have a film school degree to get those jobs, do you?

Megana: I think that you might. That’s what I’m worried about is I feel like even those jobs are so competitive. I’m very bad at rationalizing with the sunk cost fallacy, so I know this is a weak point of mine. He’s so close.

Craig: I think we’re getting to the real of it. I can hear your parents talking through you.

Megana: It’s like just do the two more terms and then do whatever you want. Become the doctor and then become a writer.

Craig: Become the doctor and then become the writer. This is your parents, and by the way, a useful voice to have. The internalized parental voices are important to an extent. We don’t want to nourish them too much. If we don’t have them at all, then we theoretically might head down sociopath lane. Don’t you agree, or perhaps I shouldn’t lead the question, do you agree that he can take a break, see how it goes, and then come back?

Megana: Yes, I do think that he can take a break. I am a huge advocate for taking time off before or during while you’re getting higher education, because it is such a privilege to be able to take classes and to spend time learning. I think you want to set yourself up in a way that you are getting the most from that experience that you can.

Craig: I think it’s a privilege to not go to film school. Anyway. Sounds like at least we agree on this. You can take some time, punt on the decision, see what happens. If it doesn’t work out, then you got an option to finish it and do what Megana’s parents would want you to do.

Megana: Correct. I hope Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School writes back and lets us know what he does do.

Craig: Yes, please. Yes, please do, Please.

Megana: No Context asks, “What tools do you use to keep track of notes and ideas that happen when you’re not at your desk, visual or analog?”

Craig: Here’s where John and I probably diverge. I have no doubt that John has an entire team of people working on a perfected software application to do precisely this. In the meantime he has six or seven different integrated processes.

Here’s what I do. I email myself. That’s it. It’s pathetic. On a given day of writing, I will typically think about what I’m writing that day in the morning, walk around, take a long shower, whatever it is, and then I know what it is. I don’t need to write it down. It’s in my head. It’s the scene of the day. I can do it. Sometimes when I’m thinking ahead about things that are coming or moments, as I walk around I will stop and go, “Okay, there’s actually a specific way I just said that line of dialog in my head that I want to make sure for this flow of lines that this leads to this leads to this interesting twist of line. I’m going to just quickly tap this out to an email to myself,” and I send it and then I have it and then I refer to it. That is as analog as digital gets, I suspect.

Megana: John’s answer was actually surprisingly more analog. He just uses index cards.

Craig: What?

Megana: He has stacks of index cards around the house.

Craig: What? When you say index cards, you mean individual miniature iPads of his own manufacture that are in the shape of an index card, that synchronize to some Cloud-based–

Megana: No, I mean paper and pens, pens with ink. I don’t know. Who’s the robot here?

Craig: Megana, I feel like I’m going to cry. Oh my god, never meet your heroes. Never meet your heroes. Oh, man. Wow. You rocked my world there.

Megana: Paul asks, “Will Zoom pitches still play a big role in post-pandemic life or will this all go back to in the room?”

Craig: Zoom pitches are here to stay. It’s not that we will eschew the room completely, as we did when we were in lockdown. Of course there will be in-room meetings. Inevitably, the Zoom pitch is here to stay because people’s schedules are tight, because they are all over the place. They’re traveling all the time. They’re in different spots, because of convenience, because a lot of people now have home offices that are just as comfortable and obviously more convenient than the at-office offices. While I don’t think the room is gone, the Zoom room I do believe is here to stay. What do you think?

Megana: It makes so many of the logistics of my life easier that I imagine that that’s probably true for everyone.

Craig: Certainly if you’re the kind of person who is going to a meeting as opposed to a person who’s receiving a meeting, way easier to do Zoom. When I started working on The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann, we had a series of early story sessions. Because he was still hard at work on The Last of Us 2, I would go to the Naughty Dog offices in Santa Monica. Driving to Santa Monica for me is–

Megana: From Pasadena?

Craig: That’s right. Essentially I said, “I can meet you roughly between 11:30 and then I’m leaving by 2. That’s it. I’m going to be nowhere near the edges of the day.” We would never do that now. We talk to each other all the time. I’m in Canada right now. He’s in Santa Monica. By the way, not that much further than Pasadena. It may actually be faster, because I could fly and land at LAX and get to Santa Monica faster.

Megana: 100%.

Craig: We Zoom all the time, and we will continue to, and we’ve all become incredibly used to it. If one thing the pandemic achieved, other than a horrifying death toll, is it normalized video conferencing, which prior to the pandemic, people forget, everyone was like, “Eh.” Even Google couldn’t get us to do it. We were like, “Eh. FaceTime, ew.” Then suddenly–

Megana: Google had Google Meet, but yes.

Craig: They had it, but nobody liked it.

Megana: Yes, but coming from working at Google, I used it all the time.

Craig: Of course. Of course. That’s like, “Coming from a cattle prod factory, I did occasionally use a cattle prod. I didn’t like the feeling of being cattle prodded.” It was not and continues to be not a good solution. Google does a lot of things brilliantly well. Google’s social, what was it called, Google Circles or something?

Megana: Oh gosh. Google Plus.

Craig: Google Plus. Google Minus.

Megana: That was tough. Speaking of The Last of Us, Matt asks, “When you have a project to write where you’re the main stakeholder, do you subconsciously change your style? John and Craig talked before about Ryan Johnson’s scripts being for himself to direct, so he can do what he likes with regard to the rules. Basically I’m wondering if Craig has so much to write for The Last of Us in such a short amount of time that he’s going gonzo freestyle.”

Craig: Oh no, I don’t have a gonzo freestyle. Hopefully, people don’t think that I wrote all The Last of Us in a short time. The Last of Us, which is entirely written and we just have a little bit more to shoot, was written over the course of essentially two years. I’m a very deliberate writer. For the scripts that I was writing while we were still in production early on, because the production of this is rather lengthy, they were so well outlined and thought through. I mean thoroughly outlined. I’m not praising myself. The writing of the script was not ever going to be anything approaching gonzo freestyle. I don’t know how to write gonzo freestyle. The only things I write gonzo freestyle are birthday cards. Even those sometimes I deliberate.

The fact that I am over-empowered and have too much authority has not made me any less fastidious or nervous, because ultimately, you can say you’re the main stakeholder, you’re in charge, you’re the boss, the audience is waiting. If there’s one thing that people who wrote comedy features know, it’s that they’re out there with their knives and you are going to have to face the music sooner or later, so do what you can to get it right and never just think, “Oh, I’m in charge. I can do whatever I want.” You’re not in charge. The audience is in charge.

Megana: There are so many other departments that you have to communicate with. It’s not just about shorthand between you and the director.

Craig: Oh, certainly. In this case it’s me and the directors, because we have quite a few, because there are 10 episodes. You’re putting your finger on something huge. Every department has 4,000 questions. You are accountable to them as well. The one thing I can never do is say to our special effects team or our costume team, “Oh, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ever. I am not allowed to say that. I have to know. I can’t make it up in the moment either. I have to pre-know what I mean and what I want, because they will say… Look, in good ways, they want to make sure that I’m getting what I want. They will say, “Here’s what we’re planning for this.” Sometimes I go, “Oh my god, nailed it, perfect.” Sometimes I say, “180 from what I want. That’s okay. I see why you did that. Here’s what I want instead.” What I can’t do is go, “Oh. Huh. Maybe.” They’re like, “What would you want different?” “Hm. Oh, I don’t know. Do other things and let me see them,” which maybe other people get away with, but we have too much to do.

I am accountable to everybody that’s working around me. They need fast answers because we’re on a schedule over here. This train don’t stop. I am accountable to HBO. I am accountable to my creative partners, my other producers. I’m accountable to my actors, because on the day, if they go, “What does this mean?” and I go, “I don’t know,” that’s not good.

Then ultimately, I’m accountable to the audience, which is why editors are a good early punch in the face. Editors represent the audience. They advocate for the audience. They don’t know how hard it was to write that line or how hard it was to get that day shooting. They don’t know about the weather. They don’t know if the actor is cranky. They don’t care. They just look at the footage and they’re like, “This is bad, so I think I’ll do this instead.” They don’t care. That’s actually quite refreshing, because once shooting is over, you get to shake it off like a wet dog, take a breath, and then say, all of the creation, the raw creation, is completed. This is what we have. Now, let us begin the final act of creation, which is narrowed into this world of finite possibilities, as opposed to that world of infinite possibilities. No gonzo freestyle for me. Sorry, Matt, or you’re welcome, Matt, if you’re not a gonzo freestyle guy.

Megana: Sort of a follow-up question to that, because how you got to where you are now, Cat asks, “How did you find your voice and what are some steps to produce your own if you’re having a hard time finding it?”

Craig: I have no idea. There you go. I have to gonzo freestyle that one. I don’t know. Someone, maybe it was Scott Frank, he said he doesn’t like to delve too deep into the how did you get your voice question out of terrible fear that it will make him self-conscious about something he didn’t realize was just his voice. It’s a little bit like if somebody ever says back to you, they’re like, “Oh my god, you have this interesting vocal affectation that you say this thing all the time.” You’ll suddenly realize that you say it all the time and you’ll say it less.

Neil Druckmann, the other day, not the other day, it was a couple months ago, I asked him a question and he went, “Correct.” He went, “By the way, that’s what you say all the time. You know that?” I said, “What?” He goes, “Yeah. Instead of saying yes, you go, ‘Correct,’ just like that. ‘Correct.'” He’s like, “Correct.” I’m like, “Oh.” Then I was like, “I don’t know if I do that.” Then seven minutes later I heard myself do it and I went, “Oh, no.” Now I don’t do it as much because he ruined it.

I don’t want to stare too much at this other than to say I don’t know, but that is a metaphor. Don’t get too tripped up, because I think maybe voice is just a small word for confidence in your own mind’s organization of words, thoughts, and feelings. You have a point of view. You have thoughts. You have a way of saying things. Whether you realize it or not, you have your own quirky bits. If you become confident that your quirky bits and your way of presenting things are interesting to other people and you continue to invest in that, other people might point at it and say that’s your voice. Thinking about what your voice is and trying to find it is counterproductive, because that’s calculated and it will never work. You want other people to tell you afterwards about it. What’s your voice?

Megana: That’s really helpful. If you define it too much, then you also somehow limit yourself and limit the potential of what it could be.

Craig: You can’t hear it. You can’t hear your own voice the way other people do. Even the sound of your own voice physically sounds different. Really what you’re saying is how did you find the way to do things that create the following impression in other people and how can I do that. I don’t know. Megana, you have a voice. You have a very specific way of thinking and talking and presenting things. If I heard 12 people and all the voices physically were turned into the same pitch, I think I could still pick you out.

Megana: Aw.

Craig: Because it’s about your mind.

Megana: Friendship.

Craig: It’s about the way your mind works. Friendship. Is that a millennial thing to just go, “Friendship.”

Megana: No, that’s just me.

Craig: That’s just you. See, you have a voice. You have a voice.

Megana: Oh gosh. We can’t talk about it too much, because then it’ll go away.

Craig: I know. I’m ruining it. I’m ruining it. Next question.

Megana: We’re going to do some quick ones. Christopher asks, “What’s the best way to format a quick flash of memory three seconds long or a quick image? Do you simply write it in description or add a CUT TO?”

Craig: Oh, easy. I usually will just, in an action line, all caps, say FLASH TO: colon and then return and then write the little bit that I’m flashing to or even keep it on the same line with the colon. I might put the stuff that I’m flashing to in Italics. I may say FLASH BACK TO: or MEMORY FLASH: or something like that. I don’t add CUT TO’s. I just write it into description and then flow. Basically, I’m just including it the way you would experience it watching the movie.

Megana: Another craft question. Brilland asks, “Purposeful pauses, beats. When should silence carry a scene?”

Craig: Constantly. Constantly. Here’s a quirk of mine. Okay, Cat, I’ll give you a little piece of the voice. I know, because I feel myself doing it and I don’t care, I write the following thing, I don’t know, at least 12 times a script: “They sit quietly, then,” or, “There’s a moment, then.” I’m writing that all the time, because I believe that people pause. There are moments when people stop because they don’t know what to say. The importance of those moments is that they inform how the next line must be, because when you break a silence, you break it in a certain way. You don’t break it without deliberation. What you say next has been considered, because that’s what was happening in the wait. Somebody didn’t want to say something, made a choice to say it, thought about how to say it, and then they said it. I think this is incredibly valuable, because most of the time when we’re talking it’s extemporaneous, it’s flowing, it is impulsive. We make mistakes. It’s clumsy. It’s not well thought of.

I like movies where people speak brilliantly and quickly, like Sorkin or Tarantino, but it is mannered. It is not meant to be a reflection of how humans actually speak with each other. They don’t do it that way. That is more of a stylized presentation of reality, which is wonderful. Those guys are excellent at it. It’s not my jam. I’m not excellent at that. I like clumsiness. I guess I just dig a little bit more in drama work into the authenticity of how people speak to each other. Pauses are a huge part of it. Do not be afraid of silence. Embrace the silence, for in the silence is great opportunity. Just like we just had.

Megana: I was trying to hold for silence for a bit, but I am conscious of your time.

Craig: We did it. We did it.

Megana: Hannah from Minneapolis asks, “How important do you think reading classics/popular literature is for both improving your writing and for social capital and respect within the TV/film writing industry? Do other writers expect that of you?”

Craig: This is such a good question, Hannah. When I first started, I would go on these meetings, and for whatever reason, I don’t know what it was at the time, but in 1994 when I was having these meetings initially with producers and so forth, and I was working in comedy, they would reference the Peter Sellers film The Party all the time. They would talk about The Party. I had never seen The Party. I had seen The Pink Panther. That was when I was a kid, because my dad made me. I hadn’t seen The Party. I would just go, “Oh yeah,” because they would never say, “Have you ever seen The Party?” They would be like, “It’s like The Party. If we can aim for The Party but do this or this or this.” I’m like, “Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that’s great.”

The funny thing is, in 1994 watching a movie that was slightly obscure was actually hard to do. You had to find it somewhere and rent it. I was just like, “I got to go and rent The Party at some point.” I finally did and I watched it and I was like, no offense to Party fans, like, “Wah? Wah?” I guess when I was done, I thought like, oh, I think what they mean is cheap. I think they mean a comedy that’s mostly in one building that there’s a party in. That’s the whole movie. I don’t know.

Anyway, it is a little important. Try and keep up as best you can. At some point, it will be impossible, and that’s okay, because you’ll be old, Hannah. When you’re old, nobody expects you to know anything other than old stuff. They think it’s adorable when you know new stuff. When you are young, yeah, you do need to be plugged into what’s going around. You should be, because that’s the time of your life when you would be. It is helpful to know what the hell is out there, and look, too much for everybody to watch. Do you feel a pressure, Megana, to keep up?

Megana: I do feel a pressure. It’s also a desire. I want to see what’s out there and what’s going on. I love television and film, so that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Her question asks, “Reading classic/popular literature, how important is it for improving your writing and for social capital?” I think that a lot of the writers that I talk to, I’m not talking to them about classic literature. I think that’s something that they probably have read. A lot of my writer friends have lots of references, whether that’s a very random nonfiction interest that they have or a specific genre of television shows that they watch or types of books that they like.

Craig: By the way, you don’t have to be. You could also be just really into what you’re into, and people know that one of your quirks/voice is that you don’t know what the hell is on TV right now, but you are a master of 1960s action films, and that’s okay, as long as there’s apparently some interest.

What will happen, Hannah, is if you start doing well in this business, then the reference that you’re most familiar with, the TV show or the film that you’re most familiar with is the one you’re making. Then that’s the only one in the world. There’s only one television show I really care about right now, and that’s The Last of Us. That’s all I work on. That’s all I think about. That’s my job. The fact that I haven’t seen 12 other things that have come out in the last month, no problem, because no one needs me to. They just need me to make the thing that they want me to make, and hopefully they’re happy with it. Then in the in-betweens I catch up a little bit, as best I can with some things, but the truth is, I feel like it’s more important when you’re in your early stage, your young years in the business.

Megana: I agree with that. I also think agents and producers tend to be really plugged in. It’s incredibly important for them, with good reason.

Craig: That’s their deal is they need to know everybody and everything, because that’s their trade. They’re not sitting down and writing stuff. They’re watching and reading, watching, reading, watching, reading. They have to know everything. I could certainly see where your fancy boss mentioned something and you haven’t heard of it, then they’ll throw a stapler at your head.

Megana: The classic Hollywood punishment.

Craig: Classic.

Megana: Anders asks, “What are some important questions to ask oneself during the pre-writing phase?”

Craig: What is this about? What is the point? Why would anyone care? Would anyone want to watch this? Why would they want to watch this? If I create it in such a way that they feel compelled to watch it, why will they keep watching it? How will they feel at the end? What is the purpose and point of all of this? Then get into the rest of the stuff. I think that people forget to ask that first. Why? Why should this exist? There’s a lot of television. There are a lot of movies. There are a lot of books. There are a lot of songs. Why should this one exist and why would people care? It’s not about being cruel to yourself. It’s just about, again, respecting your ultimate boss, the audience.

Megana: I guess going back to what Hannah’s question, what you were saying about that, is that it is important to be plugged in culturally so that your writing is responding to the moment.

Craig: Yes, and not only to the moment as you see it, but the audience consists of people much younger than you, when you are old. When you’re young, it doesn’t, unless you’re writing for children’s television. If you’re in your 20s and your 30s, you’re probably writing comfortably for people in their 20s and 30s, and that’s no problem. Most stuff is aimed in that, whatever, 18 to 45. That’s the big classic TV demo. If you’re in your 30s, yeah, of course you’re writing for people between the ages of 18 and 45. You are between the ages of 18 and 45.

As you get older, you may forget or discount what 20-year-olds might be interested in, and you will certainly, certainly, you will overestimate how important things that are important to you are to others. In Hollywood right now, I’m sure there are people that are trying to remake things that people really enjoyed in the ’80s, but no one in their 20s cares because the ’80s is 5,000 years ago to them. When I started out early on, so again, let’s go back to 1994, and Disney was attempting to do a film adaptation of My Favorite Martian. Have you ever heard of My Favorite Martian?

Megana: I have.

Craig: What is your awareness of it?

Megana: I think it’s a show.

Craig: Go on.

Megana: Was it on Nick At Nite or Turner Classic Media?

Craig: Yeah. I’ll get you off the hook. They did make a movie. They did it. They made a movie. I did not write it. They made it in 1999. The movie My Favorite Martian was based on a television show that aired on CBS from September 29th, 1963 to May 1st, 1966. Now you can imagine that I, who had been born in 1971, and who felt that things from the early ’60s were essentially from the Stone Age, how I felt hearing that Disney wanted to make a live-action movie of this that no one would care about, because they were overestimating how beloved the things that were beloved to them were, because the people who made it were children who watched that show and loved it. Right now there are things that children are watching and loving that eventually they’re going to want to make a movie of and people are going to be like, eh, because we don’t care. We just don’t care.

Part of this whole thing is just making sure that… Just ask yourself, okay, what would people not like me think? What would people who are not my race, my gender, my age, my orientation, what would people not like me think of this? Are they going to roll their eyes hard? Because man, in 1999 when they put My Favorite Martian out, I’m sure a lot of people went, “Okay, whatever,” but they did it to themselves. Everyone’s going to do it online right now and in your face and they’re going to make fun of you. Just interrogate yourself before you start writing.

Megana: Fair. Leah asks, “Do you have tips on simplifying a complex world for an audience? Any other exemplary scenes like Minority Report’s PreCrime Unit or Chernobyl’s courtroom reactor explanation?”

Craig: Thank you for putting me in there with Scott Frank’s excellent script. The tips are that you need to be a teacher. Again, you’re thinking about other people. You don’t want to bore people. No one likes homework. No one likes sitting in a classroom. Whatever it is about your complex world that thrills you, that makes you passionate, that excites you, hold onto those bits and relay those bits and build your case carefully and always with an eye at keeping them interested. Take breaks.

You notice the courtroom, one of the reasons I structured that the way it was was, A, I just didn’t want to do the usual, okay, episode 1 is a sunny day and then it ends with something exploding. The other reason was because I knew that when it was time to walk people through what happened and solve the mystery, that I wanted to give them breaks. Otherwise, it would’ve just been awful. You may enjoy those scenes as they exist, but if it was just 40 minutes straight of that stuff, you would pass out, because you just can’t. You’re stuck in a room for too long. Give them breaks. Structure it. Make it interesting. Teach them carefully and use what makes you excited as a signifier for where you ought to put your sign posts along the way.

Megana: Super helpful. We’re going to do another little lightning round. Adrian asks, “In what part of writing the script do you think about music? Not like the movie Yesterday where the plot revolves around the music. I’m particularly curious about music rights you don’t own.”

Craig: I don’t think about it much, only when I think to myself, oh, a song would really add something here, hearing vocals and pulling people out of the reality for a bit and hearing something. Then I think about it. Then I do a little research. I also remind myself, I don’t need to solve that now unless I’m literally seeing somebody singing it on screen. Yes, I think if you’re making Baby Driver and you’re Edgar Wright, it’s incredibly important to think about that. That would be more like the movie Yesterday. The plot revolves around it, but also I think somebody like Edgar also really does key in how he writes and creates scenes to pre-imagine songs that have to go there and function like that. I don’t, for what I do. I would say just listen to yourself and ask that question. Don’t get too bogged down in it if it’s not crucial to what you’re doing.

Megana: David asks, “Should the writer acknowledge in a note that they are aware that something a character says is insensitive or ignorant if that detail will be confronted later in the series?”

Craig: Oh wow, that’s a really interesting thought. It’s a pretty rare circumstance, I would imagine, where you’re writing something that’s going to be in a series. Maybe if it’s a pilot, then yes. I think if it’s a pilot, so that script exists on its own, and if somebody says something like that, I think it’s fair to acknowledge on page 38 someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant and upsetting, it will be confronted later in the series, to let people know you are aware of that, so you don’t just get this note back like, “What’s wrong with you? Do you not live in the world right now? Do you not see how people are functioning?” Yeah, that’s perfectly reasonable to do.

If you are in a flow of a season, that means the show’s already running. There’s probably a room or at least there’s a showrunner or other people, so people will be able to just pick up the phone and discuss it. When I say pick up the phone, I mean text each other. I guess if you were doing a pilot where that would be coming back around, and you don’t have the opportunity to address it right then and there, it’s not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.

Megana: I wasn’t expecting you to say that.

Craig: Oh, what’d you think I was going to say? “No! Wrong!”

Megana: No, just to have good faith that it would be resolved or addressed later.

Craig: I don’t have that faith. I got to be honest. People surprise me all the time. They really do. They surprise me, because when you’re like, “Do you not know how that’s going to… You don’t get how that’s going to come off, really? You’re not on Twitter? You don’t read?” Let’s put it this way. If I saw that in a pilot script, I would not go, “I hate that.” I would think that’s reasonable, you’re taking care of me.

I wouldn’t spell it out, other than to say there is a moment. You don’t even have to say on what page, because they might flip right to that page. You might just say there is a moment in the script where someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant, it will be confronted later in the series. Perfectly fine. Smart.

Megana: Cool. Tom in LA asks, “I have a script that’s been optioned and reoptioned, two times, different 18-month options. During that time I was paid to do a rewrite. Then another writer was brought on to do a pass. The option has just lapsed, and I was wondering what happens now. My agent says that it’s not as simple as just getting my original script back, since the production company did spend money on development. I’ve had many producers hit me up for the rights, but my agent said any new producer might have to repay the original producer. My hope is to get rid of all the changes and start with a script that I originally had.”

Craig: Here’s what I think is happening. Tom writes a screenplay. It is optioned and reoptioned. It is not purchased outright. The rights to the screenplay belong to Tom. The producers have paid him some money to have the exclusive right to develop that at this point, meaning he can’t sell it to someone else. They then pay him to do a rewrite. Kind of curious why they didn’t just buy the script at this point, but okay. They pay him to do a rewrite. Now what that means is that’s a work for hire. The rewrite is something they do own.

Now, at this point I’m very confused, because I as Tom’s agent never would’ve allowed this. The reason why is, they’ve created… I don’t know how this works. In their agreement, they must have created them in such a way where they own this, regardless of whether or not they own the underlying rights, because he’s granted them the… I don’t understand how this functions, because essentially, they’re… If they don’t have the ability to properly own that rewrite, which they would, as work for hire, because he says it’s WGA, once the option lapses, that rewrite doesn’t have any value to them at all. Meanwhile, Tom’s problem is, if he goes to sell the script that has reverted [unclear 00:57:50] the original script to somebody else, he obviously can’t sell those rewrites, because somebody else owns the rewrites. What his agent is pointing out is, anybody else buying this thing knows that the other company’s out there with the rewrites. Any rewrites they ask for, if they come even close to what was in the rewrites the other company owns, they’re going to have to buy those out from the other company or they’re going to get sued.

This is a mess. I don’t see why this went down this way. I would say you can say your hope is to get rid of all the changes, Tom, but the problem is, other people might ask for the same damn changes. Now what do you do? Do you write them? Do you say, “Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t do that change because I did it once before for someone else, or I can do it, but I can’t do it the way I would normally do it.” It’s a mess. If this is going to go somewhere else, I suspect your agent’s right about this, new producer would just have to repay the original producer and then some to buy out those things. Why was this done this way? I don’t know.

If you’re going to option something, you’re holding back the big, valuable thing, which is copyright. If they want you to do a rewrite, don’t sell it. You do the rewrite and it’s for you. You’re doing it for you. It’s your rewrite too. You own that also. It’s like I own a house, but I’m going to let you come and own the first floor. I will own the foundation and the second floor. What am I supposed to do with the foundation and the second floor, without the first floor? It doesn’t function. Confused about how this went down. Would not recommend that method. Yes, I think your agent is right that it is not as simple as just getting the original script back.

Megana: Oh man, that’s so tricky. Poor Tom probably hasn’t been paid. Two times 18-month options for three years on this?

Craig: He got paid to do a rewrite, so he was paid. That’s the problem. In a way, you just have to understand, if you’re going to sell it, sell it. There’s nothing wrong with selling. That’s what we do. We’re professional writers. Brush off anyone that calls you a sellout, because that’s a feature, not a bug. You’re a professional. You get paid. If you’re going to sell out, sell out. Don’t rent out and sell out at the same time. You’re going to do worse than you would’ve otherwise. Otherwise, you took a little bit of short-term money and you, I think, muddied the water on something that could’ve been more valuable if it had been kept intact.

Megana: Got it. I guess I feel for Tom, because I can understand how in his position he would want to get paid, but your advice is…

Craig: Absolutely, without question. This is why I’m just wondering where his agent was on this one, because I would just say, look, if you guys want to develop this, let’s do it right. Now, if they were like, “No, we just want to pay WGA minimum for a rewrite, I smell a rat. They’re making a very low commitment for something that’s valuable and disruptive to the chain of title and I would just advise my client to say, no, hold out, let’s sell this. If they have a plan for how they want to develop it, convince a studio that they have a plan, and then have the studio buy the script and finance the development of this property. That’s the way we do it, or in the network or the television production company. I agree with you. I commiserate with Tom completely.

Megana: Richard asks about another project that hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped. He says, “I’ve recently finished my first film, a short on a very low budget, and it stinks. I tried so hard, put everything into it, but it’s rubbish. I’m not too disappointed, as it’s my first attempt and I only had 10,000 to work with. It made me wonder what it’s like to make a flop when the budget is 10 million as opposed to 10,000. More specifically, when do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings, opening weekends, or way before? Secondly, how do industry people dress it up? Are they honest and admit that it’s a turkey or do they wrap it up in ‘maybe it will have a second life on DVD’ sort of rhetoric? Thirdly, what’s the follow-up for the writer specifically? Do you lose work? Do people start answering your calls? Is there resentment from the people who took a chance on you, or is it understood that some films just sink without a trace?”

Craig: Oh, man. Richard, I’m sorry. For what it’s wroth, we’ve all been there, except for Lord and Miller. I don’t know, Chris and Phil have never tasted the… No, I take it back. They have. They have. Every time I say this to them, they’re like, “Ah, [unclear 01:02:36].” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, right.” You got fired before any… Okay, you were fired, but you didn’t have a bomb under your name, see, so your track record is 100%. I still hold them up as the rarest of rare unicorns.

For the rest of us humans, it happens. It often happens early on. It is devastating. It is particularly devastating the first time, Richard. Yes, it’s your first attempt. Yes, you only had $10,000 to work with. This was going to be a small thing. I’m sure you also were thinking to yourself as you were making it, people have done things with $10,000 before and made big, wonderful things. You know it. This one hurts. It hurts more than it will ever hurt again, because you have nothing else to compare it to. You are currently oh for one. Oh for one is rough. When you have one victory under your belt, it buys you at least a certain amount of emotional ability to withstand another flop or two, because you feel like, okay, I’m not just Ed Wood, but most normal people are walking around nervous that they’re Ed Wood as they’re trying to do something good. Feel your feelings.

I’ll tell you that the difference when the budget… Budget’s irrelevant, to me. I think for producers and network and studio people, that’s a huge part of it. They don’t care. Oh, whatever. They’re looking at budget cheats and they’re looking at what they’re accountable for. As an artist, humiliation is humiliation, and failure is failure, no matter what the budget is. Sometimes the only factor is how much you cared. If you care a lot about the thing that cost $10,000 and you cared sort of a little about the thing that cost 10 million, the $10,000 failure will hurt more.

When do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings are definitely a big indication. There’s no question about that. A bad opening weekend, unless you are one of the .01% of movies that somehow just keep on trucking and build and build and build, that’s a pretty good indication. The first time you watch it, you may think it’s… If you just watch it and you go, “That’s just absolutely unsalvagable,” then it’s unsalvagable.

How do industry people dress it up? There’s a certain layer of people in our business that are paid to lie and will do so. The way they dress it up is just by announcing that everything’s fine and it’s great. They use that to get their next thing. I think the non-creators, the business folks, when they sense a flop is coming, they just work hard to make sure that they’re protected and already have the next thing working, so that they can’t be fired and ended permanently. For the rest of us, not so easy.

What is the fallout for the writer specifically? Depends. If you have created a television show, you are the showrunner and it fails spectacularly, that is on you. I do think there’s going to be a bit of a work your way back in process. If you are a writer in feature films, generally speaking you are not going to be blamed. People will blame the director. It is the only upside to a system where the writer is demeaned and deprived of any positive credit whatsoever. It’s that when there is a disaster, they just blame the director. Is there resentment from people who take a chance on you? Only if you fought them tooth and nail every step of the way and told them they were idiots and insisted on things and wouldn’t change things and then it failed and then, yes, they will absolutely resent you.

Do you lose work? Not if you already had work ahead of time. Always keep the treadmill going. Do people stop answering your calls? No. It doesn’t really function that way. People weirdly love to talk to you when something has just failed. It makes them feel better about themselves. Is it understood that some films just sink without a trace? Yes. Sinking without a trace, vastly preferable to being noticed while you sink. Lots of boats sank, but everyone remembers the Titanic. Be one of the boats that quietly sank that no one talks about.

Megana: Gosh. John is so good at segues. I’m really appreciating that skill level now.

Craig: You’re missing segue man.

Megana: I’m missing segue man.

Craig: That’s an interesting point. The thing that you just said has nothing to do with the next question. So-and-so asks…

Megana: Speaking of films…

Craig: Segue lady.

Megana: Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instructions come in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get taught in film programs?”

Craig: Oh my god. Of the last how many years?

Megana: 20 years, so 2002.

Craig: I’m the worst person to ask this question of, because I don’t know. Taught in schools?

Megana: Taught in film programs, your favorite institutions.

Craig: None of them. None of them, because it doesn’t matter what they teach you. There are things that are instructed to me that don’t mean anything to anyone else. There are things that other people seize on that just blow their minds and make them be in love again with movies. The answer is what blows your mind. The premise is flawed. Indeed, it is the premise upon which these programs are constructed, which is to say there are objectively valuable, wonderful films that if you study and dissect all the way down to the atomic level, you too will be able to create. You will not. The people who created them created them. You’re going to create what you create. There’s no Codex.

What are the movies that film schools obsess over? We all know that they have an unhealthy obsession with 1970s and particularly with Spielberg and Scorsese and Coppola, but also then they like to go to the Italians of the earlier years, ’60s and ’50s, Sica and Fellini, and they should. They’re wonderful movies. Also, what are we looking at there? Those guys all sound alike. They all look alike. A lot of the movies come from certain schools of thought and ways of being. All those men came out of the years they were born, in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. Now when we talk about the movies that come out now, all those people were born in certain years and they did certain things and it doesn’t matter. You just like what you like. If you don’t like The Godfather and you don’t like Reservoir Dogs and you don’t like Casino and you don’t like The Bicycle Thief, that’s okay. You don’t like them. That’s fine.

What do you like? Why love it? Some of these movies, you watch them and something sings in you, starts singing. Listen to the thing that starts singing in you. In the end, these schools and all of the thousands of para-academic discussions that happen around films, on Reddit and everywhere else, are just people being critics, not in a boo I hate it or yay love it way, but rather in an analysis way. People are critiquing films. They’re analyzing films. They’re discussing them. They’re breaking them down. What they’re not doing is creating anything. They’re just contributing to the howling tornado of film opinion. In that howling tornado, there are about three or four people I’ve ever listened to where I thought, oh, I’d like to listen to them more talk about movies. I’d like to listen to them more talk about television. My answer is, the ones that make you sing. Those are the ones.

I don’t care what they choose to teach in film school, at all. In fact, I almost feel like don’t watch those movies. Go find other ones, because all you’ll end up doing is you’re in a camp where they’re all teaching you how to play Kumbaya. Then you leave and you start writing Kumbaya-like songs. Just go listen to your own music. Do your own thing. Do I sound like a hippie or do I sound like… I don’t know.

Megana: It also relates to the thing you were saying about My Favorite Martian. If you were going to an institution where someone was teaching you something, they’re teaching you the things that were important or meaningful to them, but those references have changed because you are a different age than them. You are a different person than them. I feel like there’s a lot of parallels to what you were saying earlier on that too.

Craig: I just feel like I’m on an island sometimes. I feel like I’m alone.

Megana: I guess you are your own sort of little cult leader, like, “Do what makes your heart sing.” I don’t know what you would call your acolytes, your followers, the Mazinites?

Craig: I wouldn’t have any. I would say that that’s already disqualifying. You fail to be a Mazinite if you’re following me.

Megana: That wouldn’t stop them.

Craig: Really what I’m saying is be your own cult leader and make sure that your cult is a cult of one person, which is you, and show us something new, or just show us something you. Why do we care what six grouches in a conference room that smells like bad coffee think we should watch? Bicycle Thieves, by the way, not The Bicycle Thief. I’m an idiot.

Megana: We’re almost done with the 20 questions. We have one more.

Craig: Great.

Megana: Spencer asks, “I’ve heard from a few different sources that one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity over perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts. However, no one talks about the point at which one should put that script down, after just one draft, after two or three. While I feel comfortable putting a script down when I feel like it’s good, what is the point at which the learning stops and I should start a new project?”

Craig: Wouldn’t it be nice, Spencer, if there were a graph, we could just go, draft amount quality increase, chart it, hit the sweet spot, and stop there? I don’t know if one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity. Focusing on quantity is a weird way to start. Over-perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts, here’s the uncomfortable truth. If you want to be a professional writer and continue to work and have a lengthy career, you need to both focus on quality and perfecting a project over the course of several drafts, and quantity. You have to do it a lot.

I think sometimes when it’s early, you think, is it better to write eight different scripts or is it better to write eight different drafts. The answer is, write 400 drafts. That’s the answer. You can say that those 400 drafts are over three movies or they’re over 58 movies. Doesn’t matter. You just have to write way more than you think. Way more. If you’re worried now about whether you should be doing two or three drafts a script or should you be doing five drafts a script, those numbers are not different. They’re the same number, as far as I’m concerned. Quantity of scripts will create a lot of pdfs. Nobody cares. You want to talk about a quantity of scripts, the collective screenwriting humanity has written a massive quantity of scripts. You are competing against the rest of the world. You’re not going to hit their output, which is four million bad scripts a day. I would try and write one good one. How about that? You know what? There we go, Spencer. Just start and say you are allowed to write and focus on quantity when you’ve written one good one.

Now when people say you learn more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity, I have no idea how that functions. It could be that if you write lots and people give you lots and lots of feedback and each one gets better, then yes. I wouldn’t call that quantity as much as evolution and improvement. At some point you need to be able to write good enough to be a professional screenwriter.

Is it better to perfect one pitch or learn five pitches? Doesn’t matter, if you’re never going to be a Major League Baseball pitcher. Probably a false dichotomy. Most of these questions I just end up disputing the premise and then saying a lot of things that must cause tremendous discomfort in people, because what I do is I sow uncertainty. I sow uncertainty because indeed it is uncertain.

Megana: We all have to be more comfortable with it. I think you’re doing us a service, all of us Mazinites.

Craig: Dammit. I don’t want anyone in this church. Get out. That’s how all my sermons begin, with, “Get out.” All right, well, if you’re not going to get out…

Megana: You can’t help but speak in slogans. Like you said, what did you say, be you, be…

Craig: See how bad that slogan was?

Megana: No, you had a really good rhyme. I wish I could rewind this and go back.

Craig: You’ll be able to later. I have perhaps the trappings of a cult leader, without any of the ambition.

Megana: What is the line?

Craig: They always say you want to elect someone who does not want to be president. That’s the person you want to elect as president. I do not want to be a cult leader.

Megana: It will inevitably happen precisely because you don’t want to be a cult leader.

Craig: I can’t wait to just disappoint people on a weekly basis as I refuse for us all to live in one compound, and I insist that we do not randomly murder people to make a point.

Megana: The cult is wondering, Craig, what is your One Cool Thing for this week?

Craig: My One Cool Thing for this week, so everyone is caught up in Wordle, of course, Wordle Qordle Septidurdle Schmurdle Fertile Framle Lamle. That’s exciting. As somebody who is an avid solver and loves puzzles of all kinds, I love it when everybody nerds out over puzzles. I wasn’t surprised to see the New York Times, of course, bought them, and we discussed this before. I wanted to call out a little bit of old-school New York Times variety, since people are interested now in what I would call a variety puzzle. It’s not a crossword, for instance. The New York Times also features variety puzzles. If you have a subscription to their puzzle service, which is not too expensive, and I think much worth it, they have the typical things like Sudoku and so forth. They have, every Sunday, in addition to the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, there is a variety puzzle.

There’s a kind of puzzle called Split Decisions, where there’s pathways of letters that then split and then resume. There might be three letters in a row, and then it splits, and on either side there’s two letters, and then it resumes with another four letters. There are words where the only difference between them are those two letters in the middle. As you fill them through and they cross each other, you’re able to fill the whole grid. It’s fun. I think one of the more venerable forms is the acrostic. Have you ever done an acrostic, Megana?

Megana: I’m Googling it now. Is this just a crossword puzzle?

Craig: It is not at all. An acrostic is, in its traditional form, is a quote, some sort of pithy quote. Maybe it’s 20 words long. It is presented to you in grid format, just straight across, white squares, black squares separating the words. Then you are given a list of clues below. They’re not for the words in the quote. They’re their own things. As you fill those in, under each letter is a number. All of the letters in the quote have a number. You’re answering one kind of clue and then assigning those letters to various spots in the quote above. As you begin to fill in the quote above, you can start figuring out some of the clues below. As you figure out the clues below, you can figure out the quotes above. It is a really interesting way of doing things.

There is a lovely reveal at the end, because you get a really interesting answer and all of the letters, the first letters of these things will ultimately also spell out the name of the author and the book or source from which the quote comes. It’s all very clever. It’s well done. You can do it online, which is the best way to do it. When you do it on paper, it is tedious. “Okay, so this letter goes to, oh, here. This one goes to this.” Online it’s super easy to do.

I believe they’re a husband and wife team, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, have been doing the New York Times acrostic for as long as I can remember. Every two weeks, without fail, they deliver. It’s wonderful. It’s like a mystery. It resolves itself a little bit like a mystery. It’s fun to watch it all come together. If you love puzzles and you do have a New York Times crossword puzzle subscription, definitely on every other Sunday online check out under variety puzzles right there the acrostic by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

Megana: Very cool.

Craig: How about you?

Megana: My One Cool Thing for this week is a podcast called Not Past It. It’s produced by Gimlet and hosted by Simone Polanen, who is one of my dear college friends. That’s why it’s also not weird if I say that if honey could speak, it would sound like Simone.

Craig: Oh, my.

Megana: She has a lovely speaking voice. She’s very smart and very talented. The premise of the podcast is each week they look at something that happened that week in history and provide more cultural context and history around it. She has a lovely episode called The Last Queen of Hawaii. Spoiler alert, the US government does not look good in this story.

Craig: Wait, what?

Megana: Yeah, I know, shocking.

Craig: We’re the greatest country on Earth.

Megana: I know. She has another episode called World’s Most Famous Virgins. It’s spectacular. In 30 minutes she goes from the Virgin Mary to the Jonas Brothers and George Bush purity politics.

Craig: That’s amazing.

Megana: Lots of fun episodes. Really bold swings. Give it a listen. It’s called Not Past It.

Craig: I love that you’ve referenced in the notes here Mary’s immaculate conception. Even Catholics a lot of times will mistakenly believe that the concept of the immaculate conception refers to the conception of Jesus, but it does not. It refers to the conception of Mary herself.

Megana: This is so fascinating to me. The biological mechanisms that they traced sin with are so interesting. Something she talks about is how I guess the Catholic Church determined that original sin from them taking this bite of the forbidden apple was then solidified or manifested in Adam’s sperm, so all of us who are the product of sexual relations are burdened with–

Craig: We’re tainted.

Megana: We’re tainted. We’re tainted.

Craig: We’re tainted. Something had to break that line, and they had to break it when Mary was born.

Megana: Mary could not have been a product of sin because then she wouldn’t have been pure, but then what about Mary’s mom?

Craig: Mary’s mom was sinful and that’s the miracle is that somehow Mary was born without sin. You could say, hey, Catholic Church, if you can just stop it wherever you want, just stop with Jesus, or what about Mary’s grandma, whatever, the rest? That’s when you realize that all of modern religion in this fashion is as if 8,000 years from now people discovered this ancient record called The Simpsons, believed it was true, and then built an entire series of laws and moral determinations around it. There was no Garden of Eden. It’s so stupid, but it’s very organized.

Megana: It’s the power of storytelling, Craig.

Craig: I know, cult. It is a cult. That’s what it is, just all cults.

Megana: That’s our episode for this week.

Craig: Who’s Scriptnotes produced by?

Megana: Megana Rao.

Craig: What? Who’s it edited by?

Megana: Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Our outro is by whom?

Megana: Let’s just go ahead and say Matthew Chilelli. We haven’t picked one out yet.

Craig: If you at home have an outro, to whom or to where should you send a link?

Megana: To ask@johnaugust.com.

Craig: Oh. That must also be a place where they can send longer questions, but for shorter questions on Twitter–

Megana: Where are you at, Craig?

Craig: I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust. We must have T-shirts. They’re surely great. They’re from Cotton Bureau. Megana, where can we find the show notes for this episode and all episodes?

Megana: At johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

Craig: That’s all great and fine, but what if I want to sign up to become a Premium Member? Where do I go?

Megana: You can sign up at scriptnotes.net, which is also where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record.

Craig: Right now. Megana, that was a joy. Honestly, if people at home aren’t clamoring for you and I to do this every day, there’s something wrong with them.

Megana: You guys can request more content with hashtag #craigana.

Craig: Yes! Hashtag #craigana. Thank you, Megana. That was fantastic.

Megana: That was fun. Thanks for a fun episode, Craig.

[Bonus Segment]

Craig: What should we talk about today on our Bonus Segment for these fine folk?

Megana: I think that it’s time for us to face on issues of millennials.

Craig: It’s happened. I’ve been clamoring for this for a while as well. Megana is a millennial extraordinaire. Unlike a lot of my grouchy generational cohort, I love millennials. I think they’re great. Millennials are better at a lot of things than we were. Also, millennials, as they get into their dotered ages, the dotage, as they arrive at dotage, meaning they’re in their 30s and 40s, they’re going to be running this business. I’m going to need a job. I need millennials to take care of me. I think it’s time for us to dig in a little bit more into this generation that a lot has been said about, but probably quite a few misconceptions have been formed about, and who are indeed going to be shortly assuming the mantle of being in charge of this whole place. Megana, it hasn’t happened yet. Millennials have not yet taken over Hollywood, but surely it’s coming.

Megana: I think I would argue that it is happening. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a millennial, Greta Gerwig, Michaela Coel, Chloe Zhao. I think that there are a lot of millennials who are doing exciting things in Hollywood right now.

Craig: There are a lot of exciting millennial artists. The question is, where are the millennials who are in charge? I think about Hollywood, and Hollywood has always been very good at exploiting the young. They practically invented the art of it. When it comes to running things, I do remember when I started out, most of the people that were running things were white men who were seemingly between 50 and 60. Right now the people that seem to be running things seem to largely be white men and women between 50 and 60. Is that always going to be the thing? Are millennials going to get there a little faster? It certainly seems like the one thing that your generation is not patient about is changing stuff.

Megana: Are you saying in terms of studio heads and executive leadership?

Craig: Yeah. I’m saying why haven’t you stormed the Bastille yet and taken over? In I think it was the ’80s, CAA was swarmed from a bunch of, they called them the Young Turks, but I think they were all in their 30s. They were the millennials of their time and broke away from the old, frumpy agencies and began their own thing. It seems like that some sort of millennial revolution is going to happen sooner or later. There are some things that are built in to the way life functions right now that might make it a little bit more difficult for them than it was say for Baby Boomers in the ’80s, specifically the fact that our world is falling apart, slightly.

Megana: I don’t know. I wonder if there’s some economic reasons why it would be tougher for millennials and the industry to assume that sort of risk.

Craig: Oh, really? You seem to be suggesting that perhaps there have been some sort of multi-year pandemic and shutdown and that housing costs were at an all-time high and that the entertainment industry itself had undergone some sort of minor upheaval, like the disappearance of the theatrical film business. Things are changing too damn fast. It’s hard to get a hold on it.

Megana: Also, things aren’t changing fast enough. As we’ve talked about with the Pay Up Hollywood stuff, the cost of living in LA is increasing very quickly, but other things like wages are not matching that.

Craig: Millennials found themselves trapped in between two things. The business is transforming, but on the other side all this other stuff isn’t transforming, but just continuing, including, I think probably, as much as Hollywood likes to pat itself on the back, diversity at the higher levels of things probably is not where it ought to be. I think we can say for sure. I don’t know, from my point of view, as Oldie Olderson, to seem rather hopeful, I will say from my longer point of view, things are definitely better now in lots of ways than they were back then. Shall I count the ways or will it be depressing?

Megana: No, I’d like to hear it.

Craig: For one, the consciousness around diversity didn’t exist. I’m not going to say that it’s higher now. It literally did not exist at all. No one talked about it. If you were to say something like, “Oh, that’s weird, everyone in this room is a man,” then somebody would be like, “Whatever. Shut up.” No one would care. Much less, “There’s no one in here who is a person of color.” No one cared about anything. It just was not a topic at all. That has changed dramatically, and certainly for the better. The ability to make yourself known to the world was a zero back then.

Now everyone has a megaphone to the planet. What we do with the megaphone, certainly there are toxic impacts. Everyone does have a megaphone to the planet. The amount of material that’s made now is I believe larger than it was then. We can say, “Hold on, they made lots and lots of movies back then.” Yeah, true, but there were essentially three networks, and now there are streamers that put out so much context. Netflix alone I think makes more stuff in a year than everybody combined made in 1994. There is more stuff, but I suspect that you’re going to tell me, there are some areas where things are worse or have not improved at all.

Megana: I think with more content and the more shows that we’re getting from streamers and places like Netflix, we’re also seeing shorter season orders and smaller rooms, and so whereas on a network show in the ’90s you would have, what, a 22-episode season?

Craig: Yeah, or 26 episodes, something like that, something nuts.

Megana: If you were a staff writer on that show, there’d be so many opportunities for you to write an episode or go to set, because there’s just more material to be written and to be worked on. Now it seems like you have to elbow your way in to get one out of six or eight episodes on a streamer.

Craig: That’s a great point. That’s a great point. The streaming business has introduced a slight McDonaldsization to how we employ people. The people who are always going to get squeezed by that are the people who are on the younger end of things. In your cohort, is there any sense that at least you’re no longer the rookies, that it’s Generation Z are in the rookie zone, and you guys have a little bit of seasoning, picking up a little bit of authority as you progress through this business?

Megana: Gosh, I don’t know, it’s hard because right now the mood feels so like we’re all sort of coming out of this sluggish, depressive few years. I talked to so many millennials who have been assistants for sometimes over 10 years and I don’t think that that’s something that older generations necessarily dealt with. I would imagine that it’s more like welcome to the bottom.

Craig: Oh, my. Welcome to the bottom, that’s a decent title for… That’s depressing.

Megana: Not for all millennials. I don’t know whether that’s because the idea of pursuing film and television as a career has become more popular, so the people who are pursuing this, the pool has expanded. I don’t know, I’m curious what you think about that.

Craig: Everyone talks about everything more, so yes, it’s possible that everybody wants to do this. I think there is more of a sense that everybody can do anything they want, because access in a way became both worse and better at the same time. I guess when everybody has a megaphone, nobody’s listening to anyone, so there is that problem. I’m part of the weirdest generation, Generation X. We don’t know what the hell we are. We never considered ourself really generational. Nobody likes Baby Boomers. I think we can all agree on that. They’re the worst. Even they agree. They know. They know they’re the worst. I don’t think we ever thought of ourselves as a cohort in a really weird way. I just didn’t. Is there a sense among millennials and/or Generation Z that Generation X is the problem, that we’re the ones that are blocking the path up or creating that kind of permanent bottom?

Megana: No. I think we should just continue to blame everything on the Boomers.

Craig: Great. Thank God.

Megana: Do you think it’s Generation X that is the problem? I don’t think it is. Generation X, let’s define terms, that’s 45 to 55?

Craig: Yeah, I think that’s about right. Let’s see, Generation X is born between 1965 and 1980, so I’m a younger Generation X kind of person. It seem like actually you can go even up to 62 kind of thing. Oh no, 1965 is just 57. Then 1980 is young. Now we’re talking about 42. 42 to 57. Let’s just call it 40s and 50s. That seems reasonable. The 40s and 50s people, we are mostly in charge of this business. There are definitely some Baby Boomers sitting on boards and thing, but not too many that are still in charge, I think. It seems like we’re the ones that are in charge. I don’t know, I hope that we would be doing better than our Boomer people before us.

For a generation that has been labeled as soft and afraid and fragile, it’s endured quite a bit. I don’t see that as a reality. I worry about this permanent bottom thing. That’s bad news. There’s something that happened, I noticed, in the feature business, where studios empowered producers, and producers became incredibly abusive of screenwriters, and it got to the point where essentially we were running out of screenwriters, because everyone just left. Nobody wanted to do it. Either they never got a chance to get good because they were replaced constantly and treated like widgets, or they fled to television. We were running out of feature writers.

Towards the end of my feature career, because I started really concentrating on TV, I was getting a stupid amount of calls for work, to the point where I’m like, “I am not this good. I don’t deserve this number of phone calls. No one’s left. This means no one’s left.” When I say no one’s left, no one’s left who has 20 years of experience. No one was allowed to become experienced. Everybody who wasn’t allowed to become experienced was punished for their inexperience, and so all that was left were the few people from my generation that had been allowed to become experienced, who essentially had been allowed to fail, because they kept making movies. They were doing things. We were taught.

There’s no system for teaching. I’m worried that the same thing is happening everywhere, that no one is allowed to learn and be taught, and so we run out of people to come and refresh the troops, to be the new A-list people of tomorrow. For all the lip service that we pay to bringing new kinds of people in, it doesn’t matter if we don’t teach and nourish the next group. This is nerve-wracking to me. Actually, I’m shooketh, as millennials say. I’m shooketh.

Megana: I have a question for you, because I think feature films are interesting, because I had a friend who also pointed out that a part of this problem with trying to have a career as a feature writer as a younger person is that the mid-range studio films don’t really exist anymore.

Craig: That’s right.

Megana: It’s very hard, and reflective of what we’re seeing is that it’s almost impossible to go from being someone who’s making these low-budget indies to then being granted the reins to a major studio tent pole. To your point about teaching, who taught you? What was your process like? Do you think that it was the opportunity to make some of those mid-tier movies?

Craig: Yes, which is all I made for a while, because the movies that I made, generally speaking, cost between $18 million and $50 million. That was the meat and potatoes of our business, movies that weren’t tent poles, that weren’t massive budget items, that were producable and shootable and makable and releasable. If they failed, they failed. If they hit, they really hit. That was great. Everybody loved that. That was where you learned. There was a lot of it. Then there were rewrites and there’d be other rewrites, but you learned, because there was stuff to move around in between. Then it all just went away. Who do people hire? When they don’t have a lot of stuff to make, they hire the most experienced, quote unquote, best writers they can find who are available, because there’s not that much stuff. Then what happens? Those people age up.

As we get older, we start to lose touch. Our goodness becomes more narrowed to certain areas and we are less good in other areas. Comedy, notably. I’m not being ageist. I’m just being factual, that people who are in their 60s cannot possibly be plugged into what is culturally relevant to people in their 20s in the way the people in their 20s are. Just factually impossible. There was nobody then left to turn to, because so few people had been trained, because there was nothing to train them with.

It was like if you get rid of the Minor Leagues in baseball and you just go, look, everybody has to just come from high school and then we’re going to throw you into the Major Leagues and you’re good or you’re not good. No one’s trained. You just keep going, okay, well let’s just trade for the people who have been trained in the Minor Leagues when they existed. Then those people all get old and then what do you do?

I’m worried that the same thing is happening in television because of the way, like you say, the shorter season orders, the mini rooms, how fast things go. People don’t get trained. They cannot grow up with this system. They start carping at each other and blaming each other for things, because when there’s scarce resources, people start to hurt each other in their attempt to get those scarce resources. It’s a mess. Basically, what I’m saying is I’m worried about your generation, especially when I’m saying, okay, people have been an assistant for 10 years. Some people want to be assistants. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you don’t, and you’re on your 10th year, that’s problematic.

Megana: Last question for you, I see the benefits of what you’re saying and how it would grow the next generation of writers, creators, directors, executives, people to move up into leadership roles. Do you think that there are business benefits towards doing that, because I don’t think that it would necessarily change unless there was an economic impact that studios would also see.

Craig: A massive benefit for studios. It’s research and development. Other industries understand this inherently, but in Hollywood, everyone is so focused on what you just did and are you making money right now that they don’t have time to think about sowing a field for the future. As far as they’re concerned, they’re going to get fired soon anyway also. What are they doing? Growing the next generation of brilliant writers to benefit the person that knocked them off the perch? This is the issue. I’ve said as much to people who run studios, that ultimately somebody is going to be left without a chair in the musical chairs game, and they’re not going to have people who are any good to write these things, because they’re not being trained properly at all and they don’t care. They don’t care, because that’s going to be somebody else’s problem.

If I were the chairman of one of these corporations, not just the person running the studio, chairman of one of these corporations, the answer is pretty simple. Look, there’s certainly plenty of good in what they call their training programs, which are almost exclusively focused at increasing diversity in the hiring pool. Those are fine, but they’re not the same thing as getting hired and working. The experience of being hired and working in the real situation, not a simulation, but the real deal, live fire on the battlefield, there’s nothing like it. That’s how you learn. That and that alone is really how you learn. They are not going to get, they meaning the businesses, are not going to get the people they need at the level they want unless they start increasing those opportunities and that means paying people and keeping them on longer so that they can live and afford a home and can have a family and learn and get better. We had this for, I don’t know, 100 years, and then we just suddenly went, meh.

Megana: That’s really helpful. I’m also interested to hear what other people have to say and would love for people to write in with their experiences.

Craig: Yes, and as always, tell me I’m wrong. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’m worried.

Megana: Unshake Craig.

Craig: Yeah. I want to be an optimist. I do. I think every pessimist wants to be an optimist. This is not a rosy picture. The fact that my generation’s cranky about your generation isn’t going to help. Tell me I’m wrong or tell me I’m not even right enough. That’s my other favorite kind, like, “You weren’t angry enough.” Sorry.

Megana: As always, do what makes your heart sing.

Craig: Do what makes your heart sing.

Links:

• Logitech K860 has Bluetooth!
• Take this typing test – Craig got a 110 wpm!
• Barton Fink
• Chernobyl, Chernobyl Podcast and The Dropout
• 60 Seconds With Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon and puzzle here
• Not Past It Podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 540 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do we get characters to meet each other, and can we make it adorable? We’re looking at the history and mechanics of the meet-cute in rom-coms and beyond.

Then we’ll be digging into our overflowing mailbag to take a look at listener questions on brands, managers, and what a novelist should expect when selling a book to Hollywood.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss onboarding. How do you get somebody started in a story, and particularly in reference to a new game called Elden Ring, which Craig and I have been dying in a lot.

Craig: Yes, indeed. John, I just noticed that I should bring this to everyone’s attention that because we’re going to be doing some listener questions, that means that Megana’s going to be with us. You mentioned that we had some questions on managers. I just noticed that managers anagrams to Megana Sr, so I thought it was important to share that with her.

John: Oh my gosh, that’s really important. Now we know.

Megana Rao: You have such a special brain.

Craig: Isn’t it?

John: It’s a good special brain.

Craig: It sure is.

John: We can’t get started on this show that we’re recording on the 5th day of March, 2022, without talking about the change in the world order that’s happened this last couple weeks. Your boy Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who you met doing Chernobyl, is trying to keep Ukraine from falling to the Russian invasion. It’s a lot going on here.

Craig: It’s such a mess, and it’s so tragic. Ukraine, which regardless of what Putin says, is in fact a nation with an incredibly long history, has been invaded for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than Putin being a dick. Currently Ukraine is fighting back. If you know Ukrainians and if you’ve been to Ukraine, that part shouldn’t be a surprise. Similarly, the kind of Keystone Cops clown party that is the Russian military is also not surprising. If you have an incompetent massive army versus an incredibly competent and small amount of people, of course it means that there are going to be and there have been Russian casualties and Ukrainian casualties, but also quite a number of civilians have died in Ukraine. This is absolutely heartbreaking.

President Zelenskyy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has proven himself to be just about the most remarkable leader I think I’ve seen in my lifetime in terms of a political leader. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime. There were people that you and I have been taught about in school and Megana’s been taught about in school, and they seem so fricking far away from what we’ve had. Here is this guy who’s just been absolutely heroic, dodging assassins, remaining with his people, and rallying the world. He’s a wonderful person.

He’s also one of us, John. He’s a writer. He’s a performer. He’s an actor. He came out of the industry. He very famously played the part of the president of Ukraine. He was a comic writer and a comic actor, and a very good one. I was actually supposed to meet with him again when he came to the United States a few months ago, but he had to change his schedule so that he was going to meet with Biden. There’s your answer.

John: He made choices. It’s a tough choice but he made his choice.

Craig: There’s your answer. Anybody was wondering who’s more important, me or the President of the United States, Joseph Biden, the answer is Biden. I’m very grateful that he’s still alive. For all the people that I have met in Ukraine, I’ve talked to a few of them who are there or have left but are safe and sound, I’m very pleased that they are all still alive. I don’t pray, but I surely do hope fervently that this ends quickly.

John: Watching this over the course of the last week, I’ve just really been struck by the degree to which it does feel like we’re seeing history being made, because clearly, one order is falling and a new order is beginning. Whenever you’re seeing history happen, you’re always wondering, okay, how is this going to end. You try to think of this as a story, try to think of what are the next beats, how does this all go. It’s a natural instinct. I was frustrated by the desire to cast the movie at the very start, because it’s just in the opening pages of this.

It can be useful to look back in history and find the story in it, but finding the story in the moment as it’s actually happening I think can be a very dangerous and destructive thing, because it can take you away from the actual realities of what’s in front of you, because then when reality doesn’t match the story you’ve had anticipated, you’re caught flatfooted. I felt caught flatfooted by when Russia clearly going to invade, I kept thinking every morning I was going to wake up and see, okay, Ukraine has fallen. Then when I didn’t, I was like, oh, it’s awesome that they didn’t. Then it sets this pattern for… I keep trying to rewrite the story and it doesn’t match my expectations, rather than looking at what the actual facts are on the ground. Stories are fantastic, but facts are more important.

Craig: Just the way that when you and I were kids, nobody really cared about the Box Office. The news didn’t report the Box Office. Then suddenly it became something that everybody talked about and cared about. The adaptation of history into the dramatization has become so prominent and so frequent, and the window between event and dramatization has shrunk so dramatically, that people immediately start doing this. I find it rather upsetting actually. People are fighting for their lives, and I’m getting tweets like, “You should do Chernobyl part two.” I’m like, guys, that’s not how this works.

John: When we do a How Would This Be A Movie segment, obviously we’re not doing one on Ukraine. When we do those, it’s because there’s a unique slice of story that is finished, that we can look at and have some relatives to things. I don’t think anything about the Ukraine situation is finished to a degree that we should be looking at the adaptation.

Craig: No. There are small events or interesting bits of true crime or weirdness that you can just go ahead and make a story about, but when you’re dealing with unfolding history, the most important gift to the dramatizer, assuming that they are doing the right thing, is perspective. Perspective requires time. How in God’s name could anybody write a… You can’t write Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List in 1943. It’s insane. We need time to see what happens and to absorb it. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but in the long run I have to believe that Ukraine, a nation and a people that have suffered dramatically throughout the 20th century and now here in the 21st, will prevail. That’s just my great, great hope. I don’t know how, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take, and I don’t know what it’s going to look like.

John: All you can do is watch and take the actions that hopefully will get you to the place you want to end up, rather than assuming the story’s going to end up there.

Craig: You know the way people now will go back, listen to early episodes of our increasingly long running podcast and say things like, “Oh my god, listened to you guys before Donald Trump was elected, ha ha. Lol so innocent.” That’s the point.

John: We didn’t know what was going to happen.

Craig: No, and we don’t know now. If you’re listening to this 12 years from now, you might be giggling at how absolutely stupid we were, because it turned out that everything ended on… They recorded it on March 5th. March 6th the Russians left and then blah blah. Then it turned out that Zelenskyy was terrible.

John: Zelenskyy was not who you think.

Craig: I’m sure you are laughing at us. That’s the point. We don’t have perspective yet at all.

John: That’s why you should not even be thinking about making the movie now or telling the story now, because there’s not a story to tell.

Craig: What we’re saying, Megana, is stop writing the script.

John: Stop your adaptation.

Craig: Stop it, Megana.

John: Megana, what you can do for us is give us some follow-up. We have a letter here from Derek in Provo, Utah.

Megana: Derek wrote in and said, “In Episode 536 you gave a lot of great explanations for why the movie is never as good as the book. I just watched a really interesting video that explained the human mind’s bias for thinking that, even when it’s not statistically true. Here’s where the bias comes in. We humans don’t generally care about bad adaptations of unremarkable books. When thinking of adaptations of good books, we can think of lots of good and bad examples. It’s likely that the only adaptations of bad or unremarkable books you could think of right off the bat are all pretty good, because that’s the only situation in which that kind of adaptation would be remarkable.

“It turns out this is a phenomenon that applies to various attribute relationships called Berkson’s Paradox. That means these biases act sort of like a filter, accentuating the correlations that are already there, to the point where people feel totally comfortable making ridiculous claims like the book is always better than the movie, or even Hollywood ruins books.”

Craig: Makes sense.

John: I wasn’t familiar with Berkson’s Paradox, but it also reminds me of the phenomenon of silent evidence, which is that you can see these two things and say, oh, there must be a correlation here, but then also you’re not actually looking for all the other examples of things that would show those aren’t correlated or that there’s other things out there that you just haven’t paid any attention to because they weren’t what you were looking for. That does feel true to this idea that all book adaptations are bad book adaptations, because you’re only looking at the ones you happen to notice.

Craig: That is really interesting. Thank you for sharing that with us, Derek. Let’s file Berkson’s Paradox under our big header Our Brains Stink, because they do. Every time I hear about one of these things, I do think, oh, I’m going to try and avoid doing that.

John: I’ll push back. Our brains don’t stink. Our brains were designed to do very specific things. They’re designed to keep us alive, to regulate our body temperature and our internal processes and to make sure we didn’t get eaten by predators. The things that we were selected for got us here. They’re great, but they’re not really good at judgment calls about which book adaptations turned into movies in a good way and whether that’s systematically true.

Craig: What’s more important than that though?

John: Nothing’s more important than that. Literature to film adaptation, the cinematic history of that is the most important thing. It’s much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, absolutely at the top, or the base. It’s the whole pyramid.

Craig: We can do calculus, and that’s super amazing, but we’re blowing this fundamental requirement we have to properly analyze the relationship. Anyway, I like hearing about these new biases and logical mistakes that we make.

John: We’re all fallacies. We’re all fallacies. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the meet-cute. This is based on last week’s installment of the newsletter Interesting, where Chris looked at the original of the term meet-cute. It turns out, I didn’t know where this actually came from, but it goes back to 1941. I thought it was much more recent. There’s this book, this mystery novel, Case of the Solid Key, in which a character says, “We met cute, as they say in story conferences.” It’s already in existence by 1941.

From Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, a character explains, “Dear boy, the beginning of a movie is childishly simple. The boy and the girl meet. The only important thing to remember is that in a movie, the boy and the girl must meet in some cute way. They cannot meet like normal people, perhaps at a cocktail party or other social function. No, it is terribly important that they meet cute.”

Craig: I actually thought that this phrase meet-cute or this term meet-cute was older than that, because it is so damn weird. It has always bothered me. It should be meet cutely or cutely meet. Why is it meet cute?

John: Cute may be one of those words that can function adverbially.

Craig: It cannot.

John: Maybe it could at one point. I think that’s why you thought it was archaic.

Craig: I refuse. I will not use cute as an adverb. Also, it’s backwards. It’s German. Instead of cutely meet, it’s meet cute.

John: Meet cute.

Craig: It’s meet cute. It always bothered me. It was one of those terms, Megana I’m curious if you have had this too, when you first get to Hollywood and people start throwing jargon around, I had no idea what the hell they were talking about when they said meet cute, to be honest with you. I also didn’t know what a set piece was. They kept talking about set pieces, and I was like, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” In my mind I’m like, “What’s a set piece?” Megana, see, back then we did not have the internet. Actually, there was an internet, but it wasn’t really the internet. There wasn’t even Google. I don’t know, Megana, now does everybody know everything because of the internet before they get here?

Megana: You would think, but I don’t think that the internet has really helped people.

Craig: That’s curious.

John: I’d be curious whether a non-screenwriter person would know what a meet-cute was. Is that just a thing that’s just out there in culture? I think we’re going to commission a Scriptnotes survey of a thousand households and figure out whether they know the term meet-cute and if they’re involved in the film industry at all. It’d have to be a non-Los Angeles sampling of people.

Megana: As rom-coms have become more self-aware, I feel like they do reference them in The Holiday, the Nancy Meyers classic. They have a whole scene about the meet-cute.

Craig: It’s become meta, in other words. Got it.

John: When we had Greta Gerwig on the show, she was talking about the structural changes she made to the adaptation of Little Women so that she could introduce the eventual love interest very early on in the story, because she said that the first person you see that character with is the person you feel like they need to end up with at the end. I think that is also just what we’ve learned about romantic comedies, watching romantic comedies. She recognized that the audience was not going to be happy with her ending up with this guy who showed up late in the story.

Craig: That makes total sense.

John: They need to have a meet-cute.

Craig: They need to have a meet-cute. I guess part of this concept, and it connects back to what we were just talking about with stories and history and things, when we meet other people in a non-meet-cute way, another couple, eventually someone’s going to say, “How did you guys meet?” with the expectation that there’s going to be good story, when in fact it’s never really good.

John: Almost never. Puts weird pressure on things.

Craig: You know how I met Melissa? I was running across the street because I was late for a big meeting where I was going to get a promotion or be fired, and she was running the other way with an armful of books, because she was on her way to an exam, and we smashed together and everything fell down and I picked up and I met her in the eyes. Then somebody honked at us and we laughed and then we left each other and then I had to find her. No.

John: I met Mike on a gay dating site that doesn’t exist anymore. He had a profile. I responded to it. We had talked on the phone before we actually, because pre-texting. We exchanged emails. We talked on the phone. We met for a coffee at The Abbey.

Craig: Of course.

John: The Abbey was not even a bar at that point. It was just a coffee shop.

Craig: It was a coffee shop, I remember.

John: Before they had a liquor license. That was our first. That was our meeting.

Craig: The Abbey was such a coffee place that I would just go there for coffee sometimes, because it didn’t feel like a club. If I went to The Abbey now, I think I would feel like, okay, I’m–

John: You would have to push all the bridal parties out of the way.

Craig: Oh my god, there’s so much bitterness smashed into that sentence. So much gay bitterness. Get out of my club. This is how it functions. It’s not cute. Of course, the entire concept of a romance or a romantic comedy is the enormous lie that gives us the most, as you said, adorable, heart-swelling, awe golly gee version of human relationships possible, so of course it must start in a wacky way.

John: Let’s take a look at first the rom-com meet-cute and then let’s generalize it back out to any two characters meeting each other, because that’s going to happen in all of our scripts. We’ll start with rom-coms. There’s basically four different patterns you can see with this character meets that character and what is the dynamic there. Sometimes they immediately have chemistry. You can see, oh, they should be together and there’s an obstacle in the way. A great example of that would be Her, is that you have Joaquin Phoenix’s character and you have the AI character, and they clearly have a spark and a thing, but she’s just an AI, so there’s an obstacle in the way there.

Craig: It wouldn’t be an obstacle for you.

John: No, not for me. Just 100%, just plug right in there.

Craig: Just one subroutine running into another one.

John: They have their mutual attraction. There’s also the mutual hatred of each other. When Harry Met Sally is a great example of that. We meet the two characters at the same time. They just do not like each other.

Craig: (singing)

John: Another dynamic that’s common is one is really into the other, and the other can’t stand the first person. The Notebook is very much that, where he’s a stalker pursuing her and eventually wears her down. Then the fourth dynamic I’d say is when they don’t know who the other person is. That’s what they did in Big Fish. That’s also Romeo and Juliet, where these two characters have this immediate spark. They don’t recognize what the obstacle is between the two of them. They can’t find each other.

Craig: All of these are way outside the bounds of normal human relationships. It’s actually quite rare that people meet each other and hate each other instantly or people meet each other and one hates the other instantly. The only time in my life I think I met somebody and hated them instantly was Ted Cruz. Instantly. Does that count as a meet-cute? I don’t think so.

John: It would count as a meet-cute if ultimately you did, down the road, fall in love together.

Craig: Exactly. All the vomiting has just happened. In general, when people meet each other and hate each other, they will continue to hate each other. What we like about these circumstances is the notion that we as humans just can’t quite get to where we belong, and so God or fate is going to nudge us together, because like most of the stories, ultimately it boils down to fear. I’m afraid of something, and so I am not living the best life I can. I’m living according to a different theory. Fate smushes me together with another person. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be a story. It actually has to be hard.

The point is, the nature of the meet-cute sets up, in a way, or exemplifies, in a way, the problem, that one or the other or both people have. That meet-cute is a little microcosm of why they are not with somebody that they love. By the end of the movie, they will overcome their problems and be with each other.

John: In any rom-com or any romantic movie, the premise of the whole thing is that central relationship. It’s understandable that there’s such a spotlight on how those two characters meet. Of course, all of our scripts and all of our stories have characters meeting each other for the first time.

Let’s generalize this to look at how you introduce two characters to each other. This can be, a few examples that Megana and I were thinking through, 21 Jump Street, how those two guys meet the first time. Only Murders in the Building was all about how those three characters meet and get hooked up. There’s this whole special mentor meet-cute situation, Training Day, Devil Wears Prada. In all these cases, you’re setting the audience expectations for where this relationship is going to go. Even though it’s not a romantic relationship, we know that that relationship is going to be important, we’re going to be following those two characters and ups and downs together throughout the course of the story.

Craig: For our friends out there who are writing, hopefully most of you, let’s talk about how we start. As is so often the case, we have to think about how we want it to end, and then go all the way backwards, as far as you can, as close to 180 degrees as you can get. It doesn’t have to be 180 degrees in some obvious way, but really more about the internal thing. Don’t think so much about how they care about each other in the beginning of the story or how they care about each other in the end. Think about who they are in the end. Think of who they must therefore be in the beginning. Then you might get a sense of what would be the most natural kind of thing. Even though the meet-cute is an extreme circumstance or a weird circumstance, the characters in that moment behave in the most them way possible. That’s the problem for them. That maybe will help you build your meet-cute.

John: Indeed. Obviously, we talk about protagonists. These are the characters who have to grow and change and face the obstacles. You can also think about that relationship as being the protagonist, the idea of that relationship growing and changing over the course of the story and facing struggles. If you think about that as idea as the protagonist, you can maybe really see the arc of what that relationship is changing to over the course of the story.

Let’s think about the situations in which characters meet. The most common one in our stories is that the audience knows one character, generally your hero, and is being introduced to the second character. That’s going to happen not in every scene, but so many scenes, where we’re getting information about this new character the same time the character, our hero is getting information about it. As a writer, we can just choose what information we want to get out, because we don’t need to tell the audience anything new about our hero necessarily. Our hero is pulling information out of this other character, or if anything, we are seeing some new side about our hero about how they are describing themselves, how they are introducing themselves to this new character.

Craig: It’s an interesting question, I guess, listening to you talk about that. Are there examples or would it be advisable at this point, given how many meet-cutes there have been and how now, like Megana says, there’s a meta meet-cute discussion that happens in these movies, to meet not cute, even to disregard or violate the rule that George Axelrod laid out and say meet boring? Is there value in a meet-boring?

John: Megana and I were talking about this. I think there’s an example of characters who know each other, but over the course of the story, that overlooked character or recontextualized character becomes important. That red shirt in Star Trek who actually does have a name and becomes useful, Hermione when she shows up in the dress. She was always just a friend. Now you’re seeing her now as a romantic character. Paul Rudd’s character in Clueless, which is that he wasn’t perceived as being a romantic character, so therefore he doesn’t get a meet-cute really as we introduce him into the story, I think very cleverly, not making him seem like a potential love interest down the road.

Craig: That’s an interesting method is that it’s not so much about a meet-boring, it’s about a not-meet-at-all, that even though characters are meeting, there are meetings and there are meetings. If you happen to be introduced to somebody, along with three other people in a scene, then you haven’t met that person in a meet scene. Now you just know them. That’s an interesting notion of just avoiding. It’s not so much the cute you might want to consider avoiding. It’s the meet itself.

John: Now, we were trying to think of examples of situations where we as an audience meet both of our central characters at the same time. This is how we’re getting information now. When Harry Met Sally is basically that situation. We’re with Billy Crystal for moments before they get in the car together. Licorice Pizza from this year literally just is this long tracking shot where we’re meeting both of these characters for the first time. They have this very long conversation, where we’re getting all the information about both of them. That’s an example of they really are setting this up as a two-hander, like these are the two people we’re going to follow and we’re starting this on equal footing.

Craig: As we get smarter and smarter and more and more sophisticated, because we have seen more and more versions of the same things over and over, the idea that maybe the way we approach shopworn but necessary moments like two characters meeting is to just fling ourselves in one direction or the other really far, just triple down or underplay it completely, because I don’t know if there’s room any more for Matthew McConaughey to bump into Jennifer Lopez in the middle of the street. I don’t know if we can do it anymore.

John: There’s no way to do it without making it feel like it’s that kind of moment, where just you can hear the music behind it. I was watching Worst Person in the World, which is I think one of the best movies of the year. I really absolutely loved it. Norwegian film. Everyone should check it out. Nominated for Best Screenplay for the Oscars, which is pretty remarkable. It does a really interesting thing about the two love interests, the two men that she meets up with and connects with over the course of the movie. Both of those meet-cutes are handled in… The first one’s just an offhanded way. She’s just talking to different people, and she talks to this guy, and that becomes the guy. The second one is a much bigger spotlight on this meet-cute moment that just extends and extends and extends in a way that’s really rewarding. The example of the first one slips in through the back door and the second one is just really aware of the tropes that… The characters are aware of the tropes that they’re entering into, which is fun.

Craig: That’s good, because I think smart filmmakers, smart television makers are aware, at least in part, of all the stuff that’s come before them. It’s harder and harder to say I’m doing something in a new way that hasn’t been done before, but that’s not necessary. Sometimes you just need to let the audience know that you know. I never want people to think, does he not know that that already happened a thousand times? Does he think he invented that? Because that’s just an annoying, prideful sort of thing.

John: Last scenario. We talked about the audience knows one character’s meeting another character for the first time. We’ve talked about where the audience knows neither character. The last example is where the audience knows both characters separately, and then we see the characters meet each other for the first time. This happens a fair amount. It happens, obviously, if you’ve seen the villain separately, and you’ve seen the hero separately, and they’re suddenly crossing paths. Think about Jack and Rose in Titanic. We establish both of those characters for a long time separately before we see them together.

Craig: That’s a good point.

John: Crazy Ship of Love does that. You’ve Got Mail does that. Even later seasons of Game of Thrones, it was just really weird when Jon Snow and Dany finally met. We spent years with these characters and they’re just meeting each other for the first time. It’s a thing that does happen.

Craig: That was weird.

John: It’s also just strange how we are so ahead of the characters in that moment, that if they were to talk about where they came from, what this stuff was, it’s not interesting to us, unless you can find a way to make that interesting, because all that we’re learning new about the characters is how they interact with this character we’ve already established.

Craig: It’s funny, I was just thinking about one of the strangest and most effective meet-cutes in cinematic history is in Titanic. I don’t think you would be able to do it like that today.

John: Remind me of the actual scene, because I’m not picturing where they first meet.

Craig: Rose is going to kill herself. She’s preparing to throw herself into the ocean to avoid having to marry this awful man. She is seconds away from committing suicide. Then Leonardo DiCaprio wanders out, being all cool and everything and like, “It would sure be a shame for you to suicide yourself there.” Then he pulls her back and she’s like, “Oh, sir.” The thing is, I don’t think you could do that today. On the other hand, for the tone of that movie it was perfection, just utter perfection [crosstalk 00:27:24].

John: Everything being elevated to where it was going.

Craig: You got the sense that she wasn’t actually going to jump, that she actually suddenly panicked and didn’t want to jump, which I think was very important for the tone of that, but you remember it. Actually, you didn’t.

John: I forgot in the moment.

Craig: I remember it.

John: Gave me an extra 20 seconds, I would’ve remembered it.

Craig: There you go. Very good.

John: It’s got that iconic imagery there. Takeaways from meet-cuting, I think it’s useful to think about all the ways characters meet in rom-coms, because if you’re writing a romantic comedy or something that deals in the general space of a rom-com, you’re going to be dealing with all the expectations of what that initial meeting’s going to be, but then to just generalize it back out to your characters are always meeting each other, so what are the situations that they’re meeting, and can or should this be an interesting, unlikely, surprising way of these two characters meeting, or should you deliberately not do that, because otherwise it sets this expectation of some kind of future for this relationship which may not be realistic.

Craig: Certainly don’t think that you are limited to this question for romances. There are meet-cutes across almost every genre, but in particular, when there are people that are partnering on a job together, when they are thrown into some sort of collective dramatic scenario that they didn’t know each other and now they do, whatever it is, it doesn’t have anything to do with romance. It’s really about relationship. It’s about two people who are going to have a relationship. It doesn’t matter if there’s romance. It doesn’t matter what their age is, gender, any of that stuff. Think about the meet-cuteness of things and how to apply it to the specific situation that your characters are in, as it relates to who they are and what their damage is.

John: Last takeaway I’ll give you is that whenever you’re introducing characters to us as the reader, as to the audience, and there’s another character there to talk with, don’t do the thing which I’ve seen in so many bad movies and so many bad scripts, where characters feel like they’re introducing themselves to a character they already should know, where you as a writer are trying to get information out, and so they’re saying it to a character who would already know that. That’s just a bad habit we need to get out of. You can feel the development notes that got into that.

Craig: “It’s John, the assistant DA in Trenton. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. As I recall, we didn’t get along too well last time.”

John: “How’s the wife and the kids? How’s your dad who’s suffering from PTSD?”

Craig: Boo.

John: Boo, don’t like it.

Craig: Boo.

John: Now, we’ve done a lot of shows. I kind of feel like introducing a new segment to the show.

Craig: Great, let’s do it. (singing)

John: Love it. Megana, do you have a question for us?

Megana: I do. I had a busy week this past week.

Craig: (singing) On to our next thing.

Megana: For me, because of my entry point, I think of the writing behind a project as the genesis. I guess I had this naïve assumption that everyone else also thought that the writers and their idea or take was the most important part of a project, the foundation, but through some of my recent conversations, I am realizing that that’s not necessarily, in fact it’s very rarely the case, whether it’s this hot piece of IP or a talent attachment that’s driving the project. I guess I just had this moment where I was like, oh, that’s the shiny thing, and the writers are just this tool you can slot in to make the shiny thing shine. I’m curious whether that’s always been the case. Is that just normal for the industry? Is it normal to feel that way? Is this a more recent shift? Have I just been sheltered?

John: In the context of general meetings or meetings on a project, to realize, oh, okay, I’m not the most important part of the project, yes. I would say yes, certainly at my early stages in my career, but even as recent as this past week. There was a project that was sent to me. It was a book adaptation, a good book. I wanted to meet with the producers ahead of time to see what is it about this book and why are they coming to me. It became very clear that these producers, they like me, they like this book, but man, they really, really, really like this director who’s attached to the book. That was the most important part of the project, really, honestly. That was fine. That’s the way sometimes these projects go. It did influence my decision about is this a project that I should necessarily pursue based on relative value of things? At an early stage of my career, but even as of this past week, yes, I’m rarely the most important part of the project.

Megana: To Craig’s earlier point about jargon that you learn in Hollywood, mandate is a fairly new word for me.

Craig: What the hell? What does that mean? Oh, like the company’s mandate is to create a franchise-friendly event film that blah blah blah?

Megana: Exactly.

Craig: Oh, lord. You mean like what you want? Mandate.

Megana: I’m not saying this against… I’ve met such lovely people. This isn’t anything about them. It’s more like this coming-of-age realization where you realize the world doesn’t revolve around you and Hollywood does not revolve around writers.

Craig: This is fascinating. This never occurred to me. I always presumed that I had to work my way up from the baseline, which was here’s a writer that we don’t care about, who we want to spend as little money on as possible, and unless they save everything for us and make a green light happen, we want to fire them into the sun. It never occurred to me that I would be the most important part of anything. Now in television, yes, if I say, “Look, here’s a project. I want to do this thing. It’s going to be this many episodes. I will be the showrunner. I will write the episodes. I will be there every day,” then yeah, okay, clearly then I’m the producer, I’m the boss. I’m the most important part of the thing. In movies or anything else, it just never seemed possible.

Megana: I don’t know, we’re all writing heads over here. Even if I wasn’t in this industry, the storytelling is usually the thing that I am most attracted to in a movie anyways.

Craig: Of course.

Megana: Not that I as the writer would be the most important thing, but that’s what I think is most important. It’s a weird recontextualization where, oh, actually nobody else feels that way.

Craig: I’ll pretend to.

John: Everyone pretends to. Here’s the useful thing I think you can take out of that, is that in any project, you can just look for what’s really driving it and what is the reason why this project is exciting to this studio, these producers at this time. It goes back to what you’re asking about a mandate. What are they trying to do? What is their overall stated goal of the things they are trying to do? What things are they trying to not do? For example, this place is like, we’re not doing musicals. That’s just clearly a mandate. It’s like, great, it’s good to know that musicals are not part of it.

If you can go into a project and get a sense of what are they actually looking for and who is driving this and are they trying to make this kind of movie or that kind of movie, is incredibly helpful just in terms of both which projects you’re going to pursue and figuring out how you’re going to pursue these projects and whose notes you’re going to listen to the most. Is this really being driven by the producer? Is it being driven by that director? Is it being driven by the studio head, the actor? You got to know those things, because that’s going to really influence the work you’re going to be doing for them.

Craig: Megana, have you ever seen Barton Fink?

Megana: No, I haven’t, actually. It’s on a long list of movies.

Craig: It’s on a long list of things. Move it up to the top, because aside from being an absolutely brilliant film by the endless brilliant Joel and Ethan Coen, it is a fantastic exploration both of what it means to be a writer in Hollywood and what writing is and what writers block is about, and about managing your desires with what is required of you and also managing your own romantic notions of writing with the reality of writing. It’s brilliant.

There’s a couple of scenes with Tony Shalhoub. John Turturro plays a playwright, loosely based on Clifford Odets, named Barton Fink, who’s brought up to Hollywood in 1941. He’s brought out to Hollywood, which was often the case. They would bring out these playwrights to put them to work, like Fitzgerald, also a novelist. Of course these brilliant people were then put to work writing nonsense, and really struggled with it. John Turturro’s struggling a little bit. He’s been assigned a job. He’s supposed to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture, which would be the equivalent of a Steven Seagal movie now or 10 years now. He’s struggling with it. Tony Shalhoub plays his producer, Ben Geisler, who basically says something to the effect of, “What are you talking about? It’s Wallace Beery. It’s men in tights. He hits him, he falls down. Write it.”

This is where Barton Fink just suddenly realizes, this is machinery. I’m in a machine and nobody cares about me at all. The way that the more sinister studio head, played by Michael Lerner, makes him feel like he is the center of it, and then what happens after is so brilliantly, wonderfully true. Highly recommend it. It’s a very funny movie. It’s a very weird movie. John Goodman is incredible in it. Strongly recommend Barton Fink.

Megana: I can’t wait. My new analogy for how I’m feeling is like a sunglass salesman at the beach. You know when you’re hanging out at the beach and these guys come up to you with their tarps full of sunglasses? I just feel like I’m going up to these different companies and I’m like, “I can unroll this and show you all the cool things that I’m working on.” They’re like, “Yeah, I’m good. I actually brought sunglasses to the beach.” I’m just going to continue bumbling down.

Craig: That’s right.

John: There’s also a moment in those meetings where they are unrolling their sunglasses. It’s like, “Here are the sunglasses that we have that we like.” You’re not sure if you’re actually allowed to touch them or put them on. They’re talking about the things they’re working on. I do find though, looking at their sunglasses that they have laid out gives me a sense of what I could actually provide for them and what they think they need. That’s useful as a part of that conversation too.

Craig: It’s like some weird singles bar, where every time you show interest in somebody, they run away from you until they finally show interest back, at which point you run away from them. It’s so weird. The worst thing you can do in Hollywood is actually get what you wanted, because I always feel like… John, you’ve had this thing where people pursue you and they’re like, “Oh my god, we need you, we need you, we need you. You’re everything,” blah blah blah, “Anything, anything.” Then you’re like, “Fine, I’ll do it.” Then they’re like, okay, now we’re going to treat you like crap.

John: 100%. Situations like there was an animation project that was stalking me for so long. I finally said, “Okay, yeah, great.” I went back in and pitched them the thing. They were like, “Oh yeah, I don’t think we could do that.” It was like, ah, so much time has passed doing this.

Craig: So much.

John: So much time.

Craig: Basically we’re all Barton Fink. (singing) and it was good.

John: Let’s do our other listener questions. Let’s start us off with Katie here.

Megana: Katie writes, “I’m a novelist and an avid Scriptnotes listener. My husband’s a screenwriter. While my career has taken off, a book deal with the Big Five, healthy advance, lead title status, and a film TV agent at WME, my husband’s has not. We both understand that we’re just at different stages right now, but I have so much confidence in his talent. I know with hard work, he’ll break through. I’m at the beginning of my career, so I’m reluctant to shove his scripts at my agent. At a certain point, I’ll feel comfortable doing so. How do creatives at different points in their careers manage the early/late/staggered arrival of success? How can I practically support him when screenwriting seems so much more Sisyphusean than traditional publishing?”

Craig: I don’t know the answer to this, because I’ve never had any experience with it.

John: No, but it feels like a good story. I can visualize the tension between these two people, in one person being successful, one person not being successful. I guess Marriage Story had a bit of that, where her career was taking off in one way, his career was taking off in another way, but not as quickly. You don’t want to be in a story. You want actual practical advice right now. I can’t give you great practical advice right now other than to be there and positive and supportive to what he’s doing. Make sure that it never feels patronizing. Help him where you can help him. Introduce him where you can introduce him. Also, he’s going to have to find his own way into his screenwriting career, and just as you found your way into your novel writing career.

Craig: There’s some danger here, Katie, it seems to me, that you have to be aware of. While you’re asking the right questions, I would strongly advise you to be directing these questions towards a professional, rather than your favorite podcast hosts, because this is the kind of thing that can wreck stuff.

Don’t think that if I just say or do the right things in the right order, it won’t wreck stuff, because it can, because what happens is, you are people who have dreams and desires and hopes. You meet each other and you fall in love with each other, and then it happens to somebody and that person is changed because of it. I’m not saying you’re changed because suddenly it went to your head. Not at all. It’s just your life changes. When you become successful at this particular thing, your life changes. Your partner can feel left behind or shut out or less than if they’re trying to also change their life in the exact same way. The cascade of issues, I don’t have to list them for you, quite large. Regardless of who gets there first, there are so many issues.

I would urge you, if you have concerns about this or if you feel like your husband has concerns about this now, start talking about it now with somebody. I think that’s the important thing is communicate. Really communicate about this. Honesty is incredibly important. What you will never want to feel, I think, I hope, is a sense that maybe anything that does befall him was only because you begged and somebody threw you a bone.

This is a storyline we did in Mythic Quest where a woman gets married to a man, she becomes this incredibly successful novelist. He is not. He only publishes a series of books that are not well-read, and only with the publishers that she was publishing with. Clearly, people were throwing him scraps, and he knows it. This can be a real issue. I feel for you. I don’t know the answer myself, other than to say take it seriously. Don’t let this fester.

John: I would also want to acknowledge there’s a gendered component to this. The valance shouldn’t be any different, but I think societally the valance does feel a little bit different when the woman is so successful and the man is not successful. I agree with Craig that I think getting some help now and just talking through it will be helpful down the road. Also just make sure, Katie, you’re not ever self-sabotaging to make this feel better, because that is another worry I would have is that you might not take some opportunity because you feel like it’s going to feel bad for your husband.

Craig: Just take it seriously. It sounds like you are. I would say escalate it. You’ve called the first level of customer service, which is your favorite podcasters. You haven’t said that we’re your favorite podcast. I’m just deciding. We’re going to escalate this to a supervisor, aka therapist.

John: Next question, Megana.

Megana: Baggage asked, “For the first time in my career I’ve been asked to be on set for several weeks of international filming. Do you have any packing advice or travel hacks? Should I only bring athleisure and sensible shoes, a jacket for every possible weather? Are there certain items you’ve learned to never leave home without, things that can help make an extended stay in a hotel feel more cozy?”

Craig: Oh boy, I wonder what this would be like, to figure how to live somewhere else for a long, long time.

John: For a long time. A couple things that Baggage is already suggesting is that you need to make sure that you’re going to feel comfortable on set, and so wearing stuff, honestly dark clothes that you can keep wearing a lot can work great. You may not always have great laundry facilities, so always be thinking about, okay, if I need to use hotel laundry that takes two days to get back, how I’m going to get through that. Make sure you have enough changes of clothes.

Make sure you have something nice to wear out to the occasional dinners with actors or producers and anyone else who comes in. Depending where you’re at, that may mean a jacket and a tie or it may mean a dress or whatever it is that you need to wear to be a little bit more formal.

Shoes for on set, just think about you’re going to be on your feet a lot. Think about how to not be on your feet. Think about actually sitting down where you can sit down. Just be comfortable. I would say layers is good, and if you’re any place that can get cold, just anticipate being cold, because being on a set is honestly standing around a lot, and that can just get really cold.

Craig: I suspect that Baggage is a lady. Men generally are slobs and have way less… We just get caught unaware all the time. We just show up somewhere and it’s freezing, we’re like, “I got my hoodie.” Here’s the thing, Baggage. When you’re on set for several weeks, you will have access to the lovely folks in the costume department. If you need a hat or something, they’ll just give you one. You can’t keep it, but they can lend you something. Don’t feel like you need to cover everything. You don’t. Cover the basics. Make sure you’re comfortable.

Going to dinner with actors, lovely, happily, most actors that I go to dinner with are also slobs, so everybody can be a slob together. Sloppiness, it depends on your role. If you are a producer, executive type of person, generally yes, you do dress a bit better. Everyone expects the writer to dress like Barton Fink.

I am a big believer in comfort items. Here’s what I have learned to bring with me: my slippers, my robe, because my slippers and my robe are my morning things, and my pillow. I like my pillow. I want my pillow. I don’t want their pillow. I want mine. Then just remember the little things, sometimes it’s just easier to just buy them there. Yes, you can absolutely pack your luggage full of every possible little, tiny, tiny thing you would need, or you can just remember that unless you’re going somewhere particularly remote, you can just buy some stuff that’s cheap there and you’ll be okay. Just remember, you’re not going to the moon. You’re going probably to a place that has lots of other stuff.

John: If you’re filming Mad Max: Fury Road, then yes, you’re going to the moon, but anywhere else, you’re in a city where you can do stuff. I was thinking about a pilot I shot up in Vancouver. I thought I had rain gear, but I did not have Vancouver rain gear. I did not have Vancouver production rain gear. I needed the absolute, not just breathable GORE-TEX it needs to just be pure rubber that you’re wearing and the rubber boots and the rain pants and everything. That stuff you get there, because that’s the place where they sell it. The producer just sent me off with a PA, saying, “Go get him… ” I went, tried on the stuff, put it on the card. That became my rain gear. Some stuff you’ll just pick up locally.

Do think about what’ll make you comfortable. For Craig it was his slippers and his robe. Maybe the kind of tea you like that’s hard to get other places, pack a bunch of that so you’ll at least have the tea that you like there and have a way to get started in the morning or wind down at the end of the day, something like that to enjoy yourself.

Craig: Way more important to have those little things than 14 different weights of pants.

John: I will say, we do travel with our Apple TV. Apple TV is a nice way to get all the stuff that I want to see at home. It’s a little bit of a hassle to set it up on a hotel WiFi, but I’ll put a link in the show notes for how to get your Apple TV to connect to hotel WiFi, because when you don’t have the ability to type in the WiFi password, it can be a hassle, but there’s ways to do it.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. Another question.

Megana: Luke from LA asks, “I’m another aspiring screenwriter currently doing a screenwriting graduate program at UCLA. The other day a professor in class said something that troubled me. He said when we’re starting out, we have to know our brand.”

Craig: Oh for God’s sakes.

Megana: “When trying to get an agent, the two or three scripts that we show them should be of the same type/genre, instead of, for example, trying to show our versatility, and go with a couple of different types of products. That way the agent can quickly see how to sell this new writer.”

John: The question is should your samples be similar to each other or should they be wildly divergent? I remember at the Austin Film Festival we had an agent and manager on the stage with us, and we were talking through that, did they want to see the range of what you can do or do they want to be able to target and focus you. I think the answer we got from them was a little bit more focused. It wasn’t all that dissimilar to what this professor in the class said.

Craig: The dissimilar part was that, the key was you had to have a script that they could sell. If you had five scripts that were all B minuses, then they were probably going to look at you and say, “I don’t know what you are. I don’t think you know what you are.” That’s not about brand. That’s just about your voice. If you walk in and you have an A-plus script and a C script, they’re going to say, “Okay, guess what? We actually don’t like that script at all, no big deal, but we do love this one. We’re going to put you out there with this one. You may get offered jobs in the genre that this one is in because it’s a good script.”

My thing is, how in the hell are you supposed to know beforehand? How do you know beforehand? If you write two or three scripts that are all the same genre and type, they might also say, this person really just is writing the same script over and over again. Maybe one day a professor at one of these places will say something that I like, but we’ve been doing it a long time, and I just find that all of this advice is circling around the most obvious thing, which is they don’t sell you at all. They sell a script.

John: I’ll put an extreme example, but an example that could make a little more sense here. Let’s say your samples are here is a historical war drama, it’s a retelling of 1812, battles of 1812. They have a half-hour multi-cam script, and they have this weird quirky sci-fi indie thing. That is a hard thing for an agent or manager to put their hands around and say, oh, you need to read this writer, because, oh, I’d love to read another thing, something completely different that won’t actually validate this experience.

The other thing, I’ve talked with a lot of writers who are thinking about, oh, I want to be starting TV, give me examples of some things you think I should be writing for this. I often say, I love to read a sample that is so, so good that I cannot wait to meet this person. Then when I meet this person, I’m like, “Yes, that’s exactly the person I hoped wrote that script.” Something that feels like it introduces you and your voice and why you would be asked to be in that room, these are great things. Writing something that is unique to your experience is a great choice if you’re thinking about how am I going to be an asset in that room or on this project. If my script can give a sense of what my personality is like, what my unique voice is like, that’s great. There are going to tend to be things that will speak to a genre.

Craig: I don’t see it that way.

John: That’s fine.

Craig: I just think that basically everyone is reading a fire hosed volume of crap every day, every script stinks, and then one day they read one that’s good. I don’t think they’re going to even care what the other ones are. They’re so happy that they found somebody who can write. If that person has written other scripts, and they’re like, “I want to read another thing that you wrote,” and it’s completely different, then that person might say, “Okay, you know what? I just like this one.” Reading two scripts and going, “Okay… “

Here’s the deal. If you can write a good script, you’ll write another good script. Any good writer can write at least something that is competent in any genre. I may not say I want to make this movie. You give me a genre to write, I’ll write it. At least I will apply basic writing skill to it and things like characters and relationships. Everyone’s trying to figure out the secret or the way you’re going to get through. The way you’re going to get through is you’re going to write something good. I’m not sure if you have a script that you love and you wrote, and then someone’s like, “You got to write it again in that genre,” and you want to write something in another genre, your thing in the other genre might be even better. I would never dissuade anybody from that, nor would I ever ding anybody for having things in different genres. I guess then again I’ve weirdly become the poster child for somebody whose genres are completely all over the place.

John: Now I will say I was hired and getting work before Go, and my script was a romantic tragedy. It was funny enough, but it wasn’t a great sample for some of the things I was getting, which were How To Eat Fried Worms and Wrinkle In Time, kids book adaptations. My other sample was the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which was not a laugh riot. The useful thing about the script for Go was that people could read it and see anything they wanted to see in it, and so it could serve as a sample for any kind of genre you wanted to put me out for.

Craig: It was good.

John: It was good. I would say just write Go, and then your problems are solved.

Craig: Write Go and then add an OD to it and you’re there. Just write something good. That’s your brand, good writer, because literally everyone else’s brand is bad writer.

John: Megana, another question.

Megana: Cranky Screenwriter writes–

Craig: That’s me.

Megana: “I started working with a manager a year ago. My manager has not set up a single meeting for me in this time, although there’s always an excuse, and usually ignores my emails unless they pertain to projects on which director she also represents is attached, meaning the manager would get paid twice if they’re successful. Recently she had me write a treatment for a remake of a major studio picture for a Hollywood super producer with an all-around streaming deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I was not paid for this treatment. My manager didn’t provide notes, nor did she ever even confirm that it was even sent to the producer. Obviously, there’s no meeting forthcoming either. Is this sort of behavior normal and do I just need to be more patient, or is it time for me to cut her loose and find someone who will work harder on my behalf?”

John: Craig, I don’t know, it sounds like… Cranky Screenwriter is so lucky to have a manager. I don’t know why they’re… Why are they emailing us? Because listen, you’re so lucky you have a manager.

Craig: What’s the level below cut her loose? What can you do that’s even more extreme than cutting her loose?

John: You need to fire her into the sun.

Craig: Fire her into the sun. By the way, this behavior is normal among terrible, predatory, crappy, peripheral managers. She’s awful. She’s awful. Having her as a manager is worse than having no manager. She is exploitative. She’s not helping you at all. While she’s hurting you, she’s also not even balancing it out with help. She’s terrible and you should, yes, cut her loose.

Megana: Angel of After School Specials asks, “Last year a script of mine was produced for what I thought would be a streamer, but ended up being a cable channel. I was a little bummed, as it wasn’t what I’d envisioned, but something made is a win, right? Another script was recently optioned is gearing up for production on a streaming service, but through their TV arm. Two scripts, two TV movies. I kept telling myself I didn’t need to be nervous, but something just happened that has me wondering. I’ve sold two projects and pitches, one to a major studio and another to a streamer. Yet, I just had a call with my reps about a project I’m really excited about. I saw it as a big theatrical play, but they told me I should aim for cable, again. I’m not sure if that’s because that’s where they have more relationships or if this is the box they’re putting me into, but either way, I’m not happy about it.

“Honestly, I’m scared. Currently, I have a team. That sounds good. It feels safe. They know me, and I don’t feel like I have anything to prove. Honestly, no other reps have shown interest. When you’ve had success that’s quantifiable in sales, but not produced work, how do you move up the ranks, and what should my expectations be? I think my biggest concern is that I see myself one way, but they’re pushing me into a smaller category because that’s where my work actually belongs.”

John: A lot going on here. Angel has some self-doubt, but also some success and some perspective, but also is feeling frustrated and trapped. It’s the flip side of our last question. You don’t have a terrible manager. The manager’s getting you work. Stuff’s selling. That’s great. You got a career started, but you’re also getting pigeonholed as being a cable person, and you really see yourself being able to do bigger, more exciting things than that. Craig, what do you advise?

Craig: Angel of After School Specials, the one thing that you said that made me the most nervous for you is at the very end. You said, “I think my biggest concern is that I see myself one way, but they’re pushing me into a smaller category because that’s where my work actually belongs.” I want to tell you, that is not why they’re doing that. Your work doesn’t necessarily only belong on cable. By the way, cable used to be good. We’re talking about smaller cable channels here.

You may feel like, am I missing something? Is there something super cabley about what I’m doing? No. They’re moving you there because that’s who’s paying them. That’s who’s paying you, so that’s who’s paying them. Representatives in general will take the path of least resistance to money. There are some that are smart enough and have enough perspective to take the long view, to turn things down, to aim higher. Most, especially when you’re starting out and you’re early on, do not. They just want to go where they know it’s easiest. What they’re telling you is that’s what’s easiest. Certainly when you say, I want to write a theatrical play, what they hear is, oh, we’re not getting paid at all, because–

John: [Unclear 00:58:34].

Craig: 99% of theatrical plays don’t generate a penny. They’re saying, look, over here are people who basically they have a checkbook out and they want to do it again. Let’s go over there where the checkbook’s at and let’s do it again. I understand why you’re scared. It is scary. Here’s my very practical advice for you, Angel of After School Specials. You can divide your time and work and energy into two modes. You can write things that you know are going to get picked up and put on that thing, table, and you’ll get money in your pocket and you pay your bills, but write the other thing. Write the other thing too. See what happens. If you see this one as a big theatrical play and they say aim for cable again, you can say, “You know what? I actually am going to aim for cable again with another thing that’s very cabley, because I like getting paid too.” Then you work on your big theatrical play.

You can’t live only by one way or the other. You won’t survive if you’re just writing passion projects for yourself that nobody’s going to pay you for. You also won’t survive if all you do is what you’re being told to do. Carve out some time, one for them, one for me. It’s a classic bit of advice that I probably should’ve heeded sooner in my career than I did, and protect that. You will feel much better. If they don’t get it and they don’t want you to do that, they don’t even need to know about it, do they?

John: No. I agree that you should be doing this, writing the stuff that you actually want to see happen on your own time. Make sure you’re splitting your time. I agree with Craig with that completely. I think there’s an opportunity to switch agencies though. I think that time is probably going to come pretty soon. It sounds like you have another thing that’s going for a streamer that’s ramping up to be in production. Once that’s in production, once that’s closer to coming out, that may be a good moment for you to start meeting with other places.

How do you find those other places. How do you find people who might be interested in working with you? It’s talking with the executives and on projects you’re working on or projects that are in development, to see, hey, where do you think is a good place for me to end up, or talking to other writers who are having good experiences with their agents or managers, because switching agencies, Craig will tell you, I will tell you, is an opportunity for a bit of a reset in terms of how the town is seeing you, going out on new generals, meeting with new people, and getting people re-excited about the next thing that you want to do. I think you need to do the work for yourself, but then you also need to really look at changing agencies, because it’s going to be hard for you to make that change at the same agency where you’re at, because they’re just used to you being a certain kind of client.

Craig: There’s going to be a space open with Cranky Screenwriter’s manager soon.

John: That one seems fantastic.

Craig: Sounds amazing.

John: Those are our questions. It’s now time for our One Cool Things. Craig, start us off. What’s your One Cool Thing?

Craig: My One Cool Thing is just a little shout-out to a very faithful listener of ours over the many years. Her name is Cara Anderson. I’m just flagging her for everybody, because she is also not only a listener, but a fantastic member of our special effects squad on The Last of Us. She’s based out in Vancouver. Special effects people spread out all over the place, because they have their laboratories where they’re blowing things up and then they have their places where they’re buying things and moving stuff in and out of warehouses. Then of course we have our team that’s on set blowing things up in person or spraying blood on things. I’m giving away stuff. Spoiler alert, there’s blood in The Last of Us.

John: I can’t believe I can’t watch the show anymore.

Craig: Let’s see if [cross-talk 01:02:22] deadline. Cara Anderson has been doing such a good job for us for so long. I just wanted to say hi to her and let her know we’re very happy to have her as a listener.

John: Now Craig, just because you brought this up, special effects versus visual effects, at what point in the pre-production process do you figure out which team is handling this thing that you’ve written into the script, like this is an explosion. When do you know that it’s going to be special effects being done on set versus something that’s being done later on in post?

Craig: The interesting thing is pre-production never ends when you’re making television. You’re always in prep and production and post-production. This conversation never stops. Once the script comes out, everybody breaks it down, goes through it. The first AD usually spends a little bit of time with the effects and special effects, asking the questions. Some things are obvious. Some things are clearly going to be visual effects. Some things are going to be special effects. A lot of times the real question isn’t should this be special effects or visual effects, the question should be is this going to be visual effects or should we just build it or should we be there? That’s more of a discussion. The special effects stuff is pretty well defined. There was one, actually just shot it last week, the sequence where there was a huge discussion about whether it should be special effects or visual effects, and where we landed was it should be both, and indeed it will.

John: Nice, I love it. My One Cool Thing is the half-marathon, just the half-marathon as a concept. This last week I ran a half-marathon in Las Vegas.

Craig: Congrats.

John: It was really fun. It was called the Run Rock and Roll Half-Marathon. What I loved about it, it was a nighttime one. I hate the sun. It was nice to be able to run at night, and the Strip is a fun place for that. I don’t like the sun.

Craig: You look like you don’t like the sun.

John: I’m a very pale person. This was fun because it was all on the Strip, and it was pretty well lit. You could see things. It was a giant crowd. It was fun for all those reasons. I want to talk about the half-marathon as a distance, because I think it’s actually one of those really good benchmark things, because it’s difficult but it won’t kill you. I don’t think I could ever do a marathon, but a half-marathon I can do. It’s 13.1 miles. If people are curious about running, because I was never a runner until [unclear 01:04:37] so during the course of this podcast I became a runner.

The first app we used was called Couch To 5k, which basically just trains you how to start go from walking to actually being able to run short distances and ultimately run a 5k. During that first year, I did a couch to 5k, then 5k to 10k. I ran my first 10k. I ran a 15k. Now I’ve run two half-marathons, which is 21k. Running is pretty great. I’m surprised to be saying this now, because I was never a runner before this time, but human beings are uniquely well-designed to run. Once you learn how to do it, it just feels great to have that kind of fundamental skill under your belt. If you’re curious ever about running a marathon, I would say don’t. Don’t run a marathon, but try to build up to run a half-marathon, because it’s a thing I think most people could probably do.

Craig: It’s just a quirk of history. Maybe the half-marathon should be the marathon, and the marathon should be a double marathon.

John: Sure. That would make a lot more sense, because a half-marathon’s, it’s 13 miles, but 10 miles is also a pretty good distance. It’s a lot of work, but again, it’s two hours of your day, rather than four hours. In fact, four hours really kills you in a marathon.

Craig: Four hours and heat stroke.

John: Heat stroke, yeah, all those things. Never good. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

Craig: You know it.

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. A special thanks this week to Chris Sond [ph], who put together all the initial research for the meet-cute segment. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. Almost all the T-shirts we’ve made, you can now get as a pullover hoodie. Our special zip-up hoodies are… Craig, I guess you still haven’t gotten your zip-up hoodie.

Craig: Not yet.

John: Our special zipper hoodies are back to print. For the next two weeks, you can order a zipper hoodie. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on onboarding. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you guys.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, this week as we were preparing to play Dungeons and Dragons, you and I got into a long discussion about Elden Ring, which is the new video game that we’re playing. I think the short review of it is that it is a gorgeous-looking game, it is a game in which you die a lot. You know that you’re going to die a lot going into it. We were also both struck by the weird onboarding and, to me, unsuccessful onboarding in this game. I thought we’d talk about onboarding as it relates to video games, but also of course every movie and every TV show has an aspect of onboarding too, where you’re getting the audience familiar with how your show is going to work.

Craig: This is a term I’ve become obsessed with ever since I heard Neil Druckmann say it. This is a concept in video game production. How do you get the player from I just hit start for the first time to where you need them to be to start playing the game? We deal with this all the time. Somebody sits down, presses play, probably on their iPad or their television or weirdly maybe sits in a movie theater, and they have to go from nothing to something. You have to get them there so it’s okay. Elden Ring is an extension of the Dark Souls series, which the company FromSoftware is notorious for this kind of brutal format where you’re constantly dying. I knew that part was [unclear 01:08:39] but what I didn’t expect was that I would have no goddamn idea who I was, where I was, and why I was. It’s really weird, because there’s an incredibly long opening sequence that you have to watch.

John: Written by George R.R. Martin apparently.

Craig: It explains nothing. No offense to George.

John: It’s like, what is the Elden Ring? I have no idea. Is it a person? Is it a place? Is it a thing? I don’t know.

Craig: I don’t know. I can’t blame it on George, because he probably wrote quite a bit, that then they took and put together. There’s so much happening. It was the weirdest thing, because they told you everything and nothing at the same time, because there was no progression. I think about how the Lord of the Rings, I still think about how brilliant that screenplay was for Fellowship of the Ring, because they onboarded you through this narration by Galadriel and an explainer about the rings and what they were, who made them, why there was a problem, how there was a big fight, how one of the rings got lost. By the time you get to the hobbits, you basically know what you need to know.

I think, weirdly, everyone’s been chasing that forever, and now it’s at a place where there was so much of that crap in there and none of it connected to anything. It felt like it was written by somebody who didn’t speak English, to be honest with you. I thought it was a bad translation maybe.

John: It felt poetic. It was a poem that took me to a good place. One of the real challenges here, and we should both acknowledge that we’re in the early stages of playing the game, and so as I look at these reviews, everyone’s just like, oh, 40 hours in you realize, oh my gosh, what a big world this is and how it all fits together. I’m like, I’m looking forward to that, but also, just as the screenwriter in me, I think I should be beyond the inciting incident by now. I don’t think I am. I don’t know what my objective is. I don’t know who I am or what these forces are around me. That is frustrating. Now, it’s unique to video games but also to apps, because I am building Highland for the Mac. There’s also an onboarding process where you’re teaching people how to use the controls, how to do the things that they want to do with that.

Craig: Tutorials.

John: Tutorials. There are tutorials in Elden Ring, just as there are tutorials in Highland to get you started. I largely figured some stuff out, but I think I would not have been able to figure them out if I didn’t have my phone next to me and I could Google, how do I do this thing.

Craig: It’s a failure of onboarding then.

John: Is it a failure of onboarding in 2022?

Craig: Yes.

John: We have an expectation that people can look stuff up. I just feel like they were expecting I would look some stuff up other places because I couldn’t figure out where these controls were.

Craig: That’s just crazy at that point, or just say to people, “Google it.” Literally have the video game by like, “Sorry, Google it.” I’m okay with them wanting to throw you in the deep end and everything, but for instance, in Elden Ring, after you watch the endless and indecipherable prologue, you’re asked to choose what kind of character you want to be.

John: Essentially a character class.

Craig: What character class. You have no idea what any of them mean. They don’t tell you what is interesting or special or good or bad about any of them. It seems almost like it’s just a random choice.

John: Of course what I did is I Googled to see what do the choices mean, what are they good for.

Craig: My whole thing is, no, you owe me.

John: That’s not how it works.

Craig: I bought this. You owe me. What’s next in television or movies? We put up a card that says, “Press pause here and Google what is confusing to you,” or, for instance, at the end of the second Matrix movie, it should just say, “If you didn’t understand what the architect said, please Google it.” No. That’s a failure. In my book, it is a failure of onboarding.

John: I do get and acknowledge that. The other experience of onboarding I had recently is I switched over from using Mac Mail to using Superhuman, which is a web-based mail system which I really like a lot. They do not let you use the app until you go through onboarding with a live person on Zoom talking you through how to do it. This seems incredibly restrictive and silly, because I should be able to figure it all out just through the app, but you can’t, or you could figure out how to do it, but you wouldn’t actually recognize the smart ways to do it. It’s like in Elden Ring, someone came to your house and sat beside you, Craig, and said, “Okay, let’s talk through this and let’s figure out, get you really good on controls. Let’s try to do some dodge rolls and do a guard so you can actually get that power attack in there.” It was strange to have this experience with Superhuman, because honestly kind of great, because I feel like I’m a really good user of the app now, because they forced me to go through that training.

Craig: Do you think that I would like it?

John: Superhuman?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah, I’ve told you about this before.

Craig: I know. I remember. I think I probably stumbled over the, sorry, you’re making me do what? I guess I would say to you, is it way better than the other experiences? I ditched Apple Mail years ago.

John: I would say it’s way better. In terms of the actual being able to replay to things and get down to inbox zero, just not have stuff sitting there, is really good. How it filters stuff out, and your important stuff and your not important stuff, is really good. It’s worth a shot. Should you stop your life right now to do it? Maybe wait until after you’re done with some production.

Craig: Done ruining my life.

John: It was Rachel Bloom who put me on to it. I think that she and I both agreed it’s a good app.

Craig: Rachel Bloom was already a superhuman, so it makes sense.

John: Back to our Elden Ring experience, I feel like also part of what you’re dealing with with any video game or any sort of piece of entertainment is you’re dealing with expectation. I have certain expectations about what buttons are going to do what kinds of things. I find myself drinking all of my potions because I’m expecting the square button to be–

Craig: Oh my god.

John: It’s not just me.

Craig: No. It’s so frustrating. Megana, I know that you’ve literally slept past into the ninth level of coma at this point, but hear me out. You’re wandering around in a world where you have no idea where you’re supposed to go really and whether or not you’re facing off against creatures that are way too strong for you or not. All you have to keep you alive are three swigs of your potion.

John: Your vile of crimson tears.

Craig: Which they don’t tell you that’s what it is, but you eventually figure it out.

John: It was red so of course it’s [crosstalk 01:15:11].

Craig: It was red, yeah. The way they’ve said, usually in these games, you’ll have to hit a button to bring up a little menu, and then you press a button to drink it. You can’t mistakenly do it. In this game–

John: Glug glug glug.

Craig: The button that generally is crouch for every other game is drink your very, very limited amount of health potion. I’ve done it twice. I’ve drank two health potions within seconds and just wanted to just jump out my window.

John: I’ll be in the middle of a fight and my character will stop to drink a health potion and I’ll get stabbed in the back. That’s what’s going to happen.

Craig: I’m at full health. Everything’s fine. I’m walking across the thing. I come to something, and then I just drink a health potion for no reason. The other thing is, most video games will not let you drink health potions if you’re at full health. They’re like, no, you don’t want to do that. This game’s like, do it, lol.

John: Lol.

Craig: Lmao.

John: We’re going to get so much email about this, because we’re–

Craig: Video game players.

Megana: No.

Craig: Sorry, Megana.

John: Megana’s going to get so much mail about this.

Craig: Megana, if it makes you feel better, the fans of FromSoftware games are even more intense than most video game fans. The thing is I’m going to keep playing it. It is gorgeous. I can see where after 40 hours, once I get out of this training area, that I’m also ill-equipped to survive in, it’s going to be amazing. Neil Druckmann has been playing it, and he tweeted some things. He’s gotten pretty far. He’s really good at video games, isn’t a big surprise.

John: No surprise there.

Craig: He’s gotten pretty far, although now that I’m thinking about it, I’m like, hey, I emailed him the other day, and he was like, “Oh sorry, it took me a while to get back to you.” I’m like, you know what?

John: Game.

Craig: I know what’s happening. I know what’s going on here.

John: I limit my time to 30 minutes. I will set 30 minutes on my watch when I play and then I will just stop at a certain point, because otherwise hours just dissolve.

Craig: For me, I don’t think I played more than one hour at a time, because it’s so frustrating. Instead of setting an alarm on my watch, I just listen to myself wanting to kill myself, and then I think, oh, I should probably stop playing this right now.

John: I’m playing this video game.

Craig: This video game is way too frustrating for me. There are some wonderful videos online of people almost beating a guy and then losing it and freaking out. It’s wonderful. Sorry, Megana. I apologize for everything, Megana. I got to be honest. Everything. Everything we’ve just talked about.

John: That’s Megana’s job to apologize for everything.

Craig: She’s like, I’m sorry that you’re so sorry. We’re sorry. We’re all sorry.

John: Everyone’s sorry.

Craig: Everyone’s sorry.

Links:

• Volodymyr Zelensky and the ongoing war in Ukraine
• Does Hollywood Ruin Books? by Numberphile on Youtube on Berkson’s Paradox
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter and the Meet-Cute edition here!
• Scriptnotes 433: The One with Greta Gerwig
• Elden Ring video game
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 541 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, which trades are the most important when it comes to a career in screenwriting? We’ll wade into the discourse to help you maximize your stats.

Craig: Awesome. It’s like the Elden Ring of screenwriting. I love it.

John: 100%. We’re going to min-max the heck out of you.

Craig: Nice.

John: Then it’s a new round of the Three-Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and tell them it doesn’t really matter because it’s all a social game anyway.

Craig: Wait, what does that mean, it’s all a social game anyway? What does that mean?

John: We’ll get into that. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, you know who doesn’t do a lot of their own writing?

Craig: No.

John: Composers. We’ll take a look at film and TV scores and how they’re written and ghostwritten.

Craig: I want a ghostwriter.

John: I want a ghostwriter.

Craig: [Cross-talk 00:00:47].

John: A ghostwriter feels pretty good right now. Craig, mixed news on the labor front this past week. Gizmodo, which is represented by WG East, reached a new contract with Kotaku and the other websites that they write for. That’s great news. They went on strike. They were picketing around. They got a new contract. Congratulations to them.

Craig: Very good.

John: We like when writers get contracts, union contracts. Meanwhile, we still don’t have a deal for the Animation Guild, which represents folks in animation, including animation writers. There’s still ongoing efforts to try to get a new deal there. I recorded a video in support of animation writing, reminding everybody that animation writing is writing. I’m frustrated. I really hope that we can get a better deal for the folks who need to work under the Animation Guild contract. I will remind everybody that writing under a WGA contract is a good way to improve your life as a person who is writing for features and television.

Craig: This is going to be a tough one, for all the reasons we said before. In case people are just checking in now, the Writers Guild does represent some animation writing, notably primetime television animation box. The Animation Guild represents most animation writers, story artists who do narrative work, who are unionized at all. The Animation Guild is part of IATSE. There are also a lot of people writing in animation without unique contracts at all. Pixar, for instance, non-union. It’s a tricky fight for the Animation Guild, because they very much are a small Rebel force facing up against a fairly large Death Star, but as you know, there is one exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor.

John: A thing I just want to remind our listeners is that if you are creating a new animation project, you got a choice. You got a choice whether you are going to sell that project to a place that will force you to take an Animation Guild deal or a non-union deal, or you can say, you know what, I’m going to take a Writers Guild deal or bust. I think you’re going to find more writers who have the leverage to say that just say that.

Craig: You’ll also find a lot of people getting bust. They’re going to be tough about this. I don’t want to make it rosier than it is. I was able to do this once. I was successful in doing it, because what they do is they just can create a company.

John: That’s all they have to do.

Craig: That is a signatory to the Writers Guild. They create companies all day long, the way that we all generate laundry for ourselves. They can do it, but it’s a precedential issue for them. It’s a big fight. You just have to be aware that when we say… You might have to go in there and say it’s WGA or bust. That bust is a real option.

John: Bust is a real option.

Craig: They may just say, “Okay, then we’re not doing it.”

John: That’s always a choice. Craig, did you follow any of this story? This is a screenwriter who is suing their management company for breach of contract. We’ll put a link from the show notes to this. This is really interesting. This is a writer who had created a project, and his management company said, “Oh, you should sell it to this company. Here’s the deal you’re going to be able to make,” and had not apparently fully disclosed that they were actually a producer and an investor in this company. It feels very breach of contracty to me. It feels like people were not doing their fiduciary duties as managers, to me. Not a lawyer, not a lawyer, reminding everyone, but I can see what the arguments are here.

Craig: The problem is, managers don’t hide what they are. I’m not sure it is a breach of contract of fiduciary duty, because they are literally telling you, “We’re not talent agents. We can’t procure you employment,” although they do that all the time, and also we do produce things that our clients do. There is an inherent conflict of interest in that. It’s wide open and blatant for everyone to see, which is why I get so frustrated when anyone recommends managers as the solution for whatever problems we may have with agents. They’re not.

I think management as a whole is a deeply problematic profession in our business, particularly as it relates to writers, for this very reason. They tell you up front that it’ll work out great for you if they produce the work you do, because you won’t have to pay any commission on the money you make. The problem is, once they’re producers, they’re management. They are deeply incentivized to have you be paid as little as possible. You never want to decouple your income from your representative’s income.

I just find all of management, the entire thing to be problematic, and so I am entirely on Kurt McLeod’s side. He’s the writer who’s suing here. I am concerned that a court may look at this and say, “Oh, you went to murderers and then they murdered.” That’s what they do. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to clean up the management business. It’s inherently troubled.

John: We can’t clean up the industry as a whole, but what we could do for a writer in this situation is to say, you need somebody else looking at your deal in your contract. That person who actually has by law, clear fiduciary duties to you would be a lawyer. I do feel that if a lawyer had looked through these contracts and really examined them, would have been in a better position to say, “Listen, this does not feel right, and the cap they’re trying to put on this does not make sense. This does not track with my own experience with what these budgets are going to be. I think there’s a problem here.” I would just urge any writer who’s dealing with a manager who may be involved in these productions to get an outside opinion on this from a lawyer who actually knows what there doing.

Craig: Just caveat scriptor. We’ve said it many times. They’ve told you what they are. Believe them. I am extraordinary wary of managers. I had one once.

John: Yeah, you did.

Craig: I fired him.

John: You like to fire managers. That’s a thing Craig likes to do.

Craig: Did it once, felt great.

John: Let’s have some happier follow-up. We had Jack Thorne on the podcast. He was talking about the need for accessibility coordinators on sets on productions to make sure that folks who need things on set or things in production to let them do their best job would have someone that they could go to for this. It looks like in the UK, ScreenSkills is stepping up to help fund this for productions of a certain size.

Craig: Great.

John: Accessibility coordinators will be a thing happening at least in the UK, soonish, the same way that we have intimacy coordinators to make sure that sex scenes and sexual material is handled in ways that are appropriate to the performers and everyone else on the set. We have COVID coordinators who are there to make sure that the sets are safe for COVID protocols. Having an accessibility coordinator feels like a right, smart step for everyone involved in production to make sure that we are thinking ahead about really just fundamental things like where are the bathrooms and are the bathrooms accessible for everybody.

Craig: That’s great. We are currently shooting an episode with a deaf actor, the child. We have all sorts of folks that have come and joined us so that we can do this right, including a director of ASL and translator. It’s shocking to me that people wouldn’t have done this already in the first place with anyone who has a disability. Now, with unseen disabilities, we talked about invisible disabilities with Jack, and those are tougher, because sometimes you just don’t know.

When you think of how much money productions spend on things that are just a bit wasteful, honestly, weird decisions, bad decisions, confusion, “Oh, you only wanted one car? We got you 80 cars,” all things like this, the expenses for people to help other people feel welcome and capable and cared for and thought of is nothing. It’s negligible. We should always be doing it. Jack is a terrific person. He’s a saint and he’s done the saint’s work here. I think it’s great that UK has stepped up to fund the training, because that’s the most important thing. We can’t just send people in there who have a title. They need to actually know something, because everyone’s going to be relying on them.

John: It’s making sure that these coordinators are actually trained, you’re hiring a person who really knows what the heck they’re doing.

Craig: Otherwise you’re just handing somebody an extra $500 a week to pretend to do something.

John: Jack is a person we spoke to on the show, but of there’s a bunch of other people behind the scenes doing this. We’ll link after the article that really highlights the work that they’ve been doing too.

Craig: I only give credit to Jack. [Cross-talk 00:08:56].

John: Craig, this last week my daughter was working on a rewrite for an essay she was doing for school. She was doing an essay on Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was a pretty good essay. She’d done a rough draft that she turned in, and then she had to do a rewrite. She had to do revisions on it. I was talking through with her what my process would be on revisions, and she rolled her eyes, because that’s what a teenager should do. She was rolling her eyes.

As I was thinking about this, I came across this article that Jeffrey Lieber had written about his rewrite map. It’s basically when he gets notes on doing the next pass on something, he tries to avoid that paralysis of just not doing anything by actually really thinking systematically about, this is the work I need to do, creating a separate document that’s like, here’s the checklist of what I have to do. Here are the scenes. Here’s how it’s going to affect every scene. I thought we might spend a few minutes thinking about that in terms of how you approach a rewrite, how you approach a significant revision, so that you are actually doing what you need to do and not moving commas around.

Craig: It is its own organizational task. I can see here from what we’re looking at that lists are important, a list of tasks, to-do lists. Those are very good for what I would call the more easily or focused notes to achieve, having to go through this list, ah, in this scene I need to make sure that so-and-so appears, in this scene I need to change that line from this to this. Then there’s just a conceptual rewrite kind of thing which I think comes first. We have your big things and we have your little things. The little things go into lists gorgeously. The big things don’t. The big things just need to take the same kind of time and thought that initial preparation does.

John: In some cases, what you may need to do for those bigger rewrites is really think about, okay, what is this episode, this movie, this series, what does it want to become, where is it trying to go to, and really think about where are the big strokes things that I need to do. Once you have this overall plan for this is what the movie’s going to become, then you will be able to make some sort of task list things for the new stuff that needs to happen, new stuff that will change.

I do often find that, and I’ve said this on the show many times, is that it’s going to be most helpful to really think about this from a new document point of view, and what are you going to bring from the current document into this new document versus trying to just make the changes in that original document, because so often then you will find yourself saving too much. You’ll be so concerned about this perfect sentence that you had, that you won’t be looking at what the overall goals are of this brand new thing that you’re creating. It’s really an adaptation of your previous work into the next work.

Craig: I think sometimes all it needs, and I feel for Amy, because I suspect she didn’t get this, is time. You just need time to let the other one go a bit, the way that sometimes if you’re working on a puzzle and you get stuck, you come back the next day and you just see stuff.

John: You see where all the jigsaw puzzle pieces really want to go.

Craig: No, I was talking about a puzzle, John, a puzzle that you solve.

John: Yeah, exactly, a jigsaw puzzle.

Craig: No. Sorry.

John: With all the pieces that go in. Sometimes you get like, oh here’s the bumps and here’s the connects.

Craig: No.

John: You’re like, oh does that row actually fit into that row?

Craig: It would never happen.

John: [Cross-talk 00:12:00] similar?

Craig: Literally would never happen, because it’s just this rote task of just pushing pieces of cardboard into each other. It’s not a puzzle, and time won’t help you. Nothing will help you. Nothing. It’s not a puzzle. It’s a smashed picture.

John: Here’s what did help Amy with rewriting her essay is that she came up with her new thesis statement and she went and talked to her teacher about like, “This is what I think my new thesis statement is.” That was a five-minute meeting. She’s like, “Yeah, that’s great. I can see how your essay’s going to revolve around that.” She picked a new thesis that could actually find evidence that was supported in the text and could bring in the stuff that was useful in what she’d already written. Many times really what you’re doing with a rewrite is going back to what is the thesis for this new thing that I’m trying to write.

Craig: Yeah, going back to basics. You are writing a new thing, but you get a huge head start. You’ve learned a lot of lessons from the first thing. It’s important to also not forget the good stuff. You don’t want to leave the good stuff behind. There are things that people connected to. It’s fair to want to try and preserve things as you go.

Rewriting is, like everything in writing, a product of experience. The more you do it, the better off you get at it. You get faster. You get smarter about what to keep and what to not keep. You get I think more efficient about not having to go backwards and forwards quite so much. With all the stuff, just doing it… I know we do a podcast, and I know that the point of the podcast, in part, is to help people, but there’s only so much we can do. Really, if you listen to all these podcasts, I think we might save you 1 year out of 20 years of experiencing, which is a lot, by the way, I think.

John: Which is a lot.

Craig: I think a year is an enormous amount.

John: It’s a good amount. I’ve been thinking about, listen, if she could tolerate listening to any podcast, she hates podcasts, but if she could listen to any podcast that was about writing essays for high school, she’d have listened to the podcast and listened to a whole bunch. She could listen to 541 episodes of that, but it wouldn’t get her all that much closer to actually writing her thesis, because you just actually have to learn how to like, okay, how am I going to get these thoughts to stick together, how am I going to make transitions between stuff?

As a person who reads all the stuff she writes, I do see her progressing tremendously in terms of just fluency of sentences and ability to get thoughts to connect right and link this paragraph to that paragraph. It’s still hard work for her in a way that’s just not hard work for you and me, because we have craft. We just have the ability to make these little pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle that she just doesn’t have yet.

Craig: Again, just to be clear, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is far more complicated than a jigsaw puzzle, which is just moron’s work. What’s happening is her mind is growing. Her brain is growing. Neural pathways are forming, that we have reinforced over and over and over, over many years. Think of all the things that our daughters have to study in school. We don’t. We’re in one class. Everything else we do is an extracurricular, but we’re in one class.

John: I have forgotten everything I knew about chemistry, and that’s okay.

Craig: It’s okay.

John: It’s okay.

Craig: We’re in one class, and that class is screenwriting and deadlines. Her brain’s still growing. Part of parenting is having the humility to say, actually, I’m not doing much here really, which is, again, waiting, and waiting for their brains to finish. Then we’ll see what we got. She’s got a good one. I like the fact that she rolled her eyes at you. I think that’s great. It’s appropriate.

John: That’s her job and her function.

Craig: It’s appropriate.

John: Let’s get to one of our marquee topics here, because this was part of a Twitter discourse. We actually had a good listener question. I think it sets up a lot of this. It’s a long one, but Megana, if you could start us off with what Patrick wrote in to say.

Megana Rao: Patrick writes, “Your conversation last week got me thinking about the recent online vitriol about peer writing versus networking as competing imperatives for advancement in this competitive industry. In my own view, these two capacities constitute the inalienable double-helix structure of any viable screenwriting career. It’s fundamentally a false choice. We’ve all known either A, an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable, but simple can’t wrangle a useful meeting or make a constructive social connection to save their life, or B, an average or underwhelming writer possessed with such charisma, social gravitas, and yes, just occasionally connections. They’re able to effortlessly secure prized business opportunities that stubbornly allude most.

“It all got me thinking, what if one applied the timeless RPG character leveling framework to the enterprise of screenwriting. Screenwriter A above, for example, might be a chiseled level 65 tyrant on dexterity, but a paltry level 2 on charisma. I’m curious how seasoned nerds of our distinguished hosts pedigree would rank themselves and what their dream allocation of attributes would be in crafting the ideal questing screenwriter.”

Craig: Wow.

John: I think Craig and I are going to fall back to what we know best, which is the six attributes which you use in Dungeons and Dragons.

Craig: Correct.

John: There are three physical attributes, which are strength, dexterity, and constitution.

Craig: We don’t need those right now.

John: Those are pretty self-explanatory. Strength is how much you can lift and move. Dexterity is how nimble you are. Constitution is your just overall fortitude, your ability to take a blow, keep going, your workhorse-ness. Those are the physical ones. The mental ones would be intelligence, which is your overall genius, wisdom, which is your ability to recognize patterns, to see things as they truly are. Charisma, which has probably been the most retconned in the DnD world, which is your force of personality, your personability, your ability to inspire either admiration or fear among those around you. Safe description of what those six stats are?

Craig: Yeah, I think that’s about right.

John: I think we could all agree that charisma is what we’re talking about in terms of a person who’s really good at networking and playing that social game.

Craig: That’s right. That will be charisma. I suppose we could argue that pure talent would go under intelligence, which is a dump stat for most classes in DnD, but if you’re a wizard or a screenwriter, it’s the one that directly influences your magic.

John: Intelligence, it’s not a perfect thing, because you could be… Stephen Hawking is probably not a very good screenwriter. You can be very smart but not a good screenwriter. We’re really talking about verbal dexterity. It’s the ability to string words together. Intelligence is about as close as I guess we’re going to have for that, even though it’s not a writing skill.

Craig: It’s not a perfect fit, because intelligence as an attribute doesn’t mean pure IQ per se. Then there’s this wisdom thing, which is the third thing that I think everybody left out in this whole debate, which look, the debate basically boiled down to what’s more important or do you need both. Look, I will go down with this ship. You don’t have to be good in the room. You don’t have to be good at networking. You could have a charisma of zero as far as I’m concerned. You could have a charisma of negative two. It doesn’t matter. If you’ve written a great script, that document, which is completely detached from you as a human being, is going to circulate around and someone’s going to buy it.

Now, if you are a weirdo, that may limit you to some extent, but it won’t limit you completely. We’ve all known let’s say an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable but simply can’t wrangle a useful meeting or making constructive social connection. I know people like that who are very rich from screenwriting, because they’ve written excellent screenplays. Everybody just knows, okay, that’s the way they are. They have their function, and then at some point somebody else may need to come in to help. Yes, there are also people who can, for a while, surf entirely on charisma, but eventually they cost someone money and that’s the end. It’s wisdom that I think has been left out of this debate.

John: Wisdom is a tough attribute to say, because you could start your career with a certain amount of wisdom, but really that wisdom will grow as a function of your experience. Experience is that level 65 of it all. You and I have leveled up enough times that we could just see how things work in ways that it’s very hard to at the start of your career. We got hit by the sword more times and have a sense of when to dodge and when to duck and when to parry, in ways that a brand new screenwriter may not recognize. We should also know, oh, let’s maybe listen at that door before we open that door, because there could be monsters inside.

Craig: That’s right. Wisdom helps people decide what should I write. What would be a good thing to write right now? Whose advice should I listen to, and whose advice should I ignore, which is a huge one. A lot of young writers, new writers have low wisdom. Because they have low wisdom, they can be easily charmed by agents who tell them this is what you ought to be writing, and they believe them. Agents don’t know what you should be writing, at all. At all. No one actually knows what anyone should be writing. The only thing they know is that when they read something exciting that’s awesome, they want it. Simple as that. Wisdom.

John: What I think we’re saying is all three of these, the mental aspects of DnD, do play very important roles. Intelligence, wisdom, and charisma are all factors there. You could maximize one of them and maybe have some success. People who have maximized their intelligence and are really good at writing that script can be great, but if they don’t have the wisdom to see what they should even be writing, that’s a problem. If they don’t have any social skills at all, that can hold them back to some degree. Trying to maximize for one of those stats is not great.

What I don’t see in this discourse is that, as we know in any adventuring party, it’s good to complement each other’s strengths. That’s why sometimes you’ll see people who, our writing teams, where one person is a really fricking good writer, and the other person’s really good at chatting people up and doing that stuff, and together they are a real force of nature. That may be a situation where if you recognize that you are really not great at one aspect of this, that’s an opportunity for you to partner up with somebody.

Craig: Even if you are writing solo, a good agent is serving that role and a good producer is serving that role for you, usually. They can help. That’s why they are there. The original that kicked this all off was someone said, “The screenwriting advice that, quote, you just need a good sample, quote, to, quote, cut through the noise, quote, really isn’t true. At least half of the business is about relationships and it’s better to recognize that and plan accordingly. Lots of people have good samples.” Then David Iserson, a fine writer–

John: Who’s been on the show.

Craig: He has been on the show, and also a fellow graduate of Freehold High School system–

John: Nice.

Craig: Said, “With respect to the stranger on the internet, no. Write a great script. Everything else is secondary.” I agree with David Iserson. I think that is correct. I think everything else is secondary. I think that the notion that half of the business, or as this person said, at least half of the business about relationships, is not correct. I think when we start off, we don’t have any relationships. I didn’t. In fact, writing a good sample that cuts through the noise is true. It’s just incredibly rare. I know that what people want is to believe that if you have enough wisdom and charisma, you can make it. Intelligence is your key stat. Every class has one key stat.

The key stat for screenwriters is screenwriting talent. That is your key stat. Load as much of your upgrades into that as you can. The next two, which are secondary, but important, are wisdom and charisma. I would probably load as much into charisma if you can, because it does help. Wisdom you can accrue along the way. Hard to be pre-wise, although some people I suppose are. You will not go long and last without that key, which is being able to write a good script. That is the rarest thing there is in Hollywood, the ability to write a good script. Lots of people have good samples. Wrong. They do not. I wish that were true.

John: I stayed out of this discourse pretty much entirely, but I did see [unclear 00:24:03] tweeting along the way. I think Franklin Leonard was one who pointed out that people overestimate how many great samples there are out there, how many great scripts there really are. I think people see, oh, there’s The Black List, there must be a zillion good scripts. Those scripts never touched the light of day because of some other problem, because that screenwriter has some other deficiency. No, there’s actually fewer of those than you believe they are. They do get passed around when [unclear 00:24:28] is really good. I had that experience with Go. Go got passed around a lot because it was a good script. That helped make my career. Don’t think that you’ll write something that’s pretty good and then your charm will make it happen. That’s not been our experience.

Craig: No. What are you supposed to do about it anyway? You’re supposed to sit there and start making relationships or forcing this terrible calculated networking? Honestly, how many people on the internet giving advice about screenwriting are professional screenwriters? Of those, how many have actually been consistently produced and have lasted? I think you and me, and I don’t know, there are probably six others, maybe.

John: There are some others. There are some people who are genuinely trying to help, and there’s also producers who are weighing with their experience. That’s great. That’s fantastic.

Craig: There’s just a lot of people who, they just want something to be true, and they also just like the sound of themselves giving advice.

John: Let’s give some of our own advice to–

Craig: Segue them in.

John: Folks who have written in with their Three Page Challenges. For folks who are new to the podcast, welcome. Every once in a while we do a thing called a Three Page Challenge, which is where we take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts, sometimes their pilots, sometimes their spec screenplays. We offer our unfiltered advice on what they’ve written and what could be improved and what we’re loving and what maybe they should take another look at. These are all volunteers. These are folks who went to–

Craig: They wanted this.

John: They wanted this. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. They filled out a little form. They said it’s okay for us to talk about their scripts on the air.

Craig: We’re going to.

John: It’s all in the spirit of fun and sporting. These are brave folks who have written in. Megana, how many samples did we read this week, did you read this week? I’m sorry. As if I did any of this work.

Craig: No, we didn’t do any of it.

Megana: I read through about 150 submissions.

Craig: Good god. Whoa. 450 screenplay pages.

Megana: Correct.

Craig: That’s just too much.

John: That’s a lot. That’s a lot.

Craig: You could probably read through half of those but tell John you read through all of those. He doesn’t even know. In fact, that’s probably what you did. You read through five.

Megana: Yeah, I actually only read five.

Craig: You read 5, and you were like, “I’ll just tell him I read 900.” We won’t know.

John: She made a sampling of these. Remind us, Megana, what is your filtering mechanism? What are you looking for in things that you want to discuss on the air with us?

Megana: I’m looking at things that I personally would not be embarrassed if they were out there, so things without typos, things that I think are formatted correctly and promising. I’m reading through a lot of these submissions, and so things that I think are exciting and I’m into the premise, I’m into the world. Sometimes the pages aren’t quite doing it, but I feel like with a few fixes or advice from you guys, you might be able to really help improve the work.

John: Great.

Craig: Let’s see how we do.

John: We should remind everybody that if you would like to read these pages, we’ll have links to them in the show notes. Also, if you’re on an app listening to this podcast, you can probably just click through and get to the pdf. If you want to read through these with us, you’re welcome to. Megana, if you can give us a quick summary of this first one.

Megana: The Man Who Could Be Macbeth, by Daniel Bracy. We open on a call center in the middle of the workday, while Bill Wangley’s coworkers chat and answer phones around him. Bill is haunted by a witch. Bill seems to be the only one who can see or hear her. Bill’s about to confront the witch in the break room when he’s startled by his boss instead. Bill’s boss remarks that Bill’s after-work activities seem to be affecting his performance in the office, and advises Bill to cut back. On Bill’s drive that evening, he tries to play the radio in his car, but instead hears the witch’s voice again. We see a script for Macbeth open on the seat next to him, with Bill cast as the character Lennox.

John: Great. Anyone who’s [unclear 00:28:10] is going to quickly realize, oh, it’s like the witch from the start of Macbeth. That’s the witch that we’re hearing. It’s one of those haunting witches that’s setting up the premise of Macbeth. Here’s a plug for the new Macbeth with Denzel Washington, which I thought was terrific. That is not the script that we’re reading right now. Megana, there were more typos in this than I would normally expect. That said, there was something that was interesting, that I think it’s good for us to talk through, because I think there’s also examples of we hears and we sees that I would probably trim out. Craig, what is your first take on The Man Who Could Be Macbeth?

Craig: I really enjoyed the concept of this. This is an interesting concept. I think I know where it’s going. There were so many awkward descriptions where there could’ve been elegant, simple descriptions, that it was hard to get any rhythm as I read. I can walk through a few of these. Right off the bat, the very first words, “Heads of hair.”

John: I circled “of hair.” What is this?

Craig: What is a head of hair? Now, I understand where he was going. He said, “Heads of hair,” I stopped and went, what? “Stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Now, what he means is we see a bunch of office cubicles, an open office space, and we see all those little cubicles, and we see people’s heads sticking up. One of them is balding, but instead we get, “Heads of hair stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Asylum is not the right word. “One balding round head,” which I think we need a comma there, “One balding, round head stands out from the rest.” By the way, the odds that only one person is balding… Is two bald guys just a lot? “Phones ringing and light chatter is heard among the workers.” There’s this passive voice that happens, “is heard.”

John: Take out the “is heard” and it’s fine. That’s a case where I’m happy with a sentence fragment, “Phones ringing and light chatter.”

Craig: Then the next line is, “Over the cluster of office noise.” That’s not the right word again, cluster. Just, “Over the noise.” Then it says, “The deep gravelly.” That should be deep, comma, gravelly, “Voice of a woman is heard.” Again, passive.

John: “Of a woman,” not “a women.”

Craig: “Of a women is heard.” My brain fixed that typo before me. Well spotted. “The deep gravelly voice of a… “ Also, if you are describing the voice of a woman, and it’s deep and gravelly, you need that to come second. You say, “We hear,” and that would be a perfect thing, “We hear the voice of a woman. Oddly, it’s deep and gravelly,” or, “We hear the voice of a woman–“

John: “Oddly deep and gravelly.”

Craig: Yeah, just something that sets apart deep and gravelly as interesting, as opposed to the average deep and gravelly voice of a woman. Then we do have a formatting disaster here. You and I are pretty good about formatting disasters. Look, nothing is ever going to kill you, but “witch” and then in parentheticals below the character name is says “V.O.,” then it says the dialog. We just never do that.

John: No. V.O., continues, O.S., O.C., we stick this up with the character name, just because they’re not a true parenthetical.

Craig: Also, it’s V period O period. It’s not V period O. If V gets an abbreviation, so too does the O. Anyway, this goes on. There are comma issues. There’s a lot of just overwrought, clumsy action description here. Hard to see what was going on, and yet eventually I did see it, and this is a testament to the concept, because I wanted to keep figuring it out, because Daniel had me interested, which is the most important thing.

John: Here is the premise to me. It’s like what if Office Space but Macbeth, basically where this guy is cast as a minor role in Macbeth and wants the major role in Macbeth, and so he’s obsessed that there’s a witch haunting him throughout this. Sure, I get that. The office was too generic. I’m happy with the cubicle form. That’s great, but I need some specificity about what it is this company does that makes it not just Dunder Mifflin or whatever the business was in Office Space. I need something there, a little bit more. I was also frustrated that we never got a proper introduction to Bill. Bill’s our main guy. He never gets his name put out in upper case, so we can see this is Bill. What’s his deal?

Craig: He’s bald. That’s it.

John: He’s bald.

Craig: That’s all we know. He’s bald.

John: That’s all we know. Craig, you and I are identical, because we’re both–

Craig: We’re both bald.

John: Two bald white guys.

Craig: We don’t even know if he’s white.

John: That’s true.

Craig: All we know about him is that he’s bald. He could be 80 or 12.

John: It’d be fascinating if he was 12 years old.

Craig: I know. It’d be cool.

John: A 12-year-old bald guy working in an office.

Craig: Alopecia.

John: That would be specific.

Craig: Alopecia.

John: Alopecia. It’s a real thing.

Craig: Child labor law violations. Also, he’s in a call center. No one’s talking. There was no action in the call center. When it says light chatter is heard, the people are going to be like, “What should we say?”

John: Everyone, light chatter amongst yourselves. Both Bill and his boss, they need actual proper introductions and they need specificity, because right now the boss just appears in a line of dialog. These are all problems. The other thing which I would say is an overall thing for our writer to work on is recognizing run-on sentences and when to chop sentences into two bits or when to use the gerund to continue the idea. “He’s an older man with large-framed glasses, his eyes scan over his cubicle wall.” “His eyes scanning over his cubicle wall.” You can’t just stick two independent clauses together and join it by a comma.

Craig: Correct.

John: It reads weirdly. If we were to read this aloud, I think you would recognize, oh yeah, there’s something wrong there.

Craig: That was one of the common problems. I apologize, he is an older man, so he cannot be a 12-year-old boy. The boss is named Boss. That’s pretty bad. There’s a moment, a cool moment where the witch appears, but we see her, then we see her make a cool motion that makes her neck crack, and then it says, “Bill suddenly stands upright in response. A shiver rolls down his spine as his eyes widen, the witch still behind him.” Shouldn’t we flip that around? Also, “suddenly stands upright,” I think “stands upright in response” implies suddenly. It would be better for us to be with Bill, to hear a sound, for him to stand, for him to turn, for us to see the witch when he sees the witch. This is a little backwards. Boss, his first line is, “Hey Bill, how’s it going?!” What? Why is there, “How’s it going?!” What’s happening? Why?

John: It’s fun that Bill screams in response and drops his water. Great, but is that the out of the scene? Probably not. You need some beat to react to that. What does the boss do? What is that next moment?

Craig: He screams back.

John: Yeah, because then we’re going to stay in that break room, which is fine. We could stay in that break room. We’re jumping ahead in time. It’s just a weird out on that moment. The other thing I want to point out is, we see, we hear. Craig and I are big fans of we see and hear when the time’s appropriate.

Craig: That’s right.

John: At the top of page two, “We turn slowly to see, in the opposite corner of the room, a witch staring at Bill from behind a chair.” We turn slowly to reveal? I’m just a fan of more specific words than “see” when it’s helpful, and revealing is a good choice for this.

Craig: It is. Also, we don’t really turn. We can hear things. We can see things. We can notice things.

John: Slowly reveal.

Craig: Or pan slowly to see something like this. It’s very, very hard, by the way, as you guys walk through these things, to have a scene in a break room and then to cut to a scene in the break room later is extraordinarily difficult to do production-wise without looking bad. How do we know time passed? You need to very carefully describe something. Look back at the episode we did on transitions and think of one, because you’re going to need one. That’s hard enough to do that I try as much as I can to avoid it.

John: You try to avoid it. An example would be, if in that being startled, he drops his water and water goes everywhere, and then we cut to he’s on his hands and knees, cleaning up the water with paper towels. That’s an example. We jumped forward to time to do that. That can work. You got to be specific about what it is, because just staying in the same place and jumping forward in time is a real beast there. A lot here to work on. It was actually nice to start with one that actually had some stuff on the page that was a problem, because I feel like our next three, we’re not going to be so focused on mistakes on the page and we can really talk about what we’re getting out of them.

Craig: Take a look as you go through, Daniel, these sort of things that may not get through your spell check. Top of page three, “This isn’t the first time its.” Wrong, “it’s.” “Effected,” wrong. “Affected.”

John: “Affected.”

Craig: Also, Bill’s in his car and he’s listening to the radio. It appears to be FM. He’s pushing the buttons to the presets. What year is this?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: Megana wouldn’t even know what that is. She would not know what that is.

John: Not a bit.

Craig: Very end, below the title, is a list of the actors’ names. That should be “actors’,” S then apostrophe, as it is a possessive plural. Anyway, lots to do there. I think get simpler, get clearer. There’s certainly an interesting premise here, so well done.

John: I’m looking at the log line that was provided. It says, “Bill, an unsuccessful local theater actor working in a call center, is pushed by a mysterious Shakespearean presence into stealing the titular role in a production of Macbeth by whatever means necessary.” We did get the setup. We understood what the premise of the story was.

Craig: That’s really smart. Macbeth is a bad ambition. This makes sense. Hopefully he has a girlfriend who convinces him to stab someone. Anyway, so onwards we go to Pizza Boy written by Mick Jones.

John: Pizza Boy. Talk us through, Megana.

Megana: Dimitri and Clara flirt over dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant. Their banter slowly turns to dirty talk. Suddenly, Claire’s voice warps into a man’s voice, asking Dimitri to confirm. We cut to Dimitri’s car outside the restaurant, where Dimitri sits in the driver’s seat. He’s picking up a brown takeout bag of food. The waiter has interrupted his fantasy to confirm that Dimitri has picked up the order.

John: Great. This is an example of a surprise situation where it’s not a Stuart Special. What we just saw was a fantasy and now we’re coming to the reality of it all. Are we going to name this for Megana? Does Megana get to claim this trope?

Craig: We need something that implies… A Megana Mirage.

John: A Megana Mirage, of course. It’s all a Megana Mirage.

Craig: This was all a Megana Mirage.

John: Spoiler, we’re going to have another Megana Mirage in a future three-page challenge here, our next one. Let’s talk about what Mick Jones did here in Pizza Boy and where we’re at in the course of these three pages. The idea of a guy picking up food at a restaurant and fantasizing that he’s at the restaurant, sure, I get that. I was a little bit frustrated that I didn’t feel like his flirtation with Clara was being paid off really, because Clara’s not in our scene. Clara does not appear to be the waiter who he’s talking with or the person who’s coming to confirm the order. I just got a little frustrated by the end of page three, that everything I’d been through wasn’t… I didn’t have an immediate payoff. There didn’t seem to be a pattern that was being fulfilled here.

Craig: This is the danger of the Megana Mirage is that the mirage has to, in and of itself, fascinate you and interest you and work for you, without you knowing it’s a mirage, because if you know it’s a mirage, it’s boring and it doesn’t matter and the stakes are irrelevant. If you don’t know it’s a mirage, but it’s not working on its own, the reveal that it’s a mirage just makes you go, oh, okay, that’s why that was that way. That’s not what you want from people. You don’t want them going, “Oh, okay. Okay, I guess that makes sense now.” Making sense isn’t the same as good.

The issue here is that the flirtation between Dimitri and Clara, it’s very arch. It feels very written. You could argue, Dimitri is writing it in his mind, which is fine. When people have fantasies in this way, I tend to find that it’s most interesting when one of them seems very grounded and real, and the other one is exciting, smart, interesting. In this case they’re both doing this thing that it’s sort of like bad porn writing, where everyone’s clever and everything is a double entendre and all the answers are witty. There’s some difficult description that happens early on.

John: “Manner born.”

Craig: Manner born is correct.

John: It’d be M-A-N-O-R.

Craig: Actually, the first use was… Manner born, M-A-N-N-E-R, is how it started.

John: Oh, wow.

Craig: Yeah, in Shakespeare I think, but then manor born, it may have even been a pun. I was reading about this actually the other day. It’s the weirdest thing that the manner born thing happened in this thing. Manner born may have been a pun on manor born. I tend to use manor born. They are both fine.

John: Is that appropriate for a Beverly Hills crowd?

Craig: No, it’s not. If it were, you would still want a dash in there. You wouldn’t want “manner born crowd.” “Dimitri is aloof, feigning interest,” but he also grins and “never breaks eye contact with Clara.” Now, how do you do that? You never break eye contact, but you’re aloof and feigning interest. That’s just impossible. Basically, I was annoyed by the conversation. I didn’t like either of them, because I didn’t believe either of them. It all felt fake. She said that he’s funny. He hasn’t done anything funny. There’s an example of a good Megana Mirage in, I believe it’s the first… I think it was the pilot episode of Ozark, yeah, maybe the second episode, where we see Jason Bateman’s character having a Megana Mirage with a woman in his car and she’s saying all these things to him. You believe it. He’s a wreck, and she’s telling him these things that he needs to hear. It’s lovely and then you realize that she’s a prostitute and it’s not working like that. You need to believe in the scene itself. I think that was the biggest issue I had here with this particular, I’m just going to keep saying it, Megana Mirage.

John: A thing I noticed on the page here, on the bottom of page one, Clara says, “Why don’t you just imagine that I’m not?” The “imagine” is not underlined, but it has asterisks around it. Sure. In Highland or other apps, the asterisks would actually create an italic.

Craig: A markup thing.

John: A markup thing, yeah. That’s fine, but also people do speak with little asterisks around them, so it didn’t bug me. It’s another way of creating a sensation of like there’s a spin on that word. Great, I’m happy to see that. I think English is constantly evolving, so using things like that is absolutely fine. The joke at the bottom of page two, which goes into page three, Dimitri says, “And what do you find attractive?” He says, “Confidence, red, curly hair, a beautiful smile.” She says, “Do you want to F me or Carrot Top?” Carrot Top, the visual works, but also Carrot Top is not a person you refer to in 2022. It felt like a clam.

Craig: It is a clam. Also, weirdly, there is that… I had no problem with the asterisks as well, but then suddenly he is emphasizing words not with asterisks, but with italics and underlines at the same time, which is a very strong emphasis. I think a simple italic there would be fine. I tend to find those underlines seem a bit yelly to me, whereas italics feel like stress. I think, “What do you find attractive?” just could’ve taken an italic, and simply later then when it says, “Then I’m going to pull your panties off with my teeth.” Oh, Dimitri. Which actually just is awkward. No need for the underline there.

Here’s my advice. Let’s be positive and constructive for a minute here, Mick. I think my advice is this. Clara can be this person. She can be tricky and she can be mean and negging him and she can be beautiful and she can suddenly be seductive. She can be all these things, as long as Dimitri is as confused and low power status as I am when I’m reading it. Do you know what I mean? She scares me and I want him to be scared and I want him to be confused and I want him to not be able to follow her. Then I want her to take a little pity on him or decide that he’s adorable enough for her to take home. That’s what I want. I want something that feels real and will help me learn something about Dimitri, since he’s our character.

John: Let’s take a look at the log line that Mick provided, which is, “To pursue his dreams of becoming a comedian, a young man must endure untold humiliation as a delivery driver in Los Angeles.” We got delivery driver in Los Angeles in these first three pages. That’s great. I wouldn’t have known that he’s a comedian. I think there’s an opportunity for this. If we see him trying jokes in this, I think there’s… I could imagine a version of this scene where we see that he’s trying to make her laugh and he’s trying material on her. There’s something you could do in this that would get us to that he’s actually a comedian, because I think that’s important information for us to get out in these first three pages, and I don’t see that happening.

Craig: No. The first few pages tell us what’s important to somebody. I think we’re starting with our I want song, in a way. What this tells me is that he wants a girlfriend.

John: Clara, yeah.

Craig: He wants a girlfriend. He wants to be a Romeo. He wants to be that guy that all the women want to date. What it’s not telling me is that he wants to be a comedian. If you did the same exact concept and it was a party and we’re in a backyard of this beautiful mansion and Dimitri is the center of a group of people, he’s telling a really funny story and he’s really good at telling it. He’s confident, and everyone’s laughing. Then you cut to or reveal that he’s actually standing there on the edge watching somebody else doing this who’s an actual comedian.

John: He’s going to hand the bag of food to take somewhere else.

Craig: He’s just there to deliver something for the party. That guy is the guy whose life he wants. Then I would understand what this movie is. I would get it.

John: Let’s go to our next Three Page Challenge. Can you talk us through Evergreen by Heather Kennedy?

Megana: Great. Frank Harrell, 80s, white, swims in the pool of the Evergreen Estate, a 1950s Bel Air mansion. A member of the staff, Joel Garner, 50s, Black, reminds Frank that he’s not supposed to swim alone. A woman’s cry calls him inside, where they find Margaret, 80s, white, has just discovered the dead body of Joe Johnson. Joel calls the police and tells them a guest has been shot dead. We pull back from the estate as an ambulance appears, revealing that we’re actually in modern Los Angeles.

John: That’s the Megana Mirage. We thought we were in a period movie, but it’s actually modern day Los Angeles.

Craig: I don’t know if that’s a mirage. This could be something else, because it’s not a fantasy where the bubble gets burst.

John: It’s a Rao Reveal is what it is.

Craig: It could be a Rao Reveal. That’s exactly right. This could be a Rao Reveal.

John: A Raoveal.

Craig: A Raoveal. This may have been a Raoveal. Just a quick disclosure, I’m friends with Heather.

John: Oh, nice.

Craig: She and I are both puzzle solvers.

John: You’re puzzlers.

Craig: We’re solvers, John.

John: When you’re putting pieces together.

Craig: She lives in Austin.

John: Shaking that puzzle dust out of that little box.

Craig: Never. We’ve done some escape rooms and we frequently talk to each other about puzzles. Lovely person. There’s something that could be excellent here. There’s a Pleasantville possibility I think is what’s going on. We have trouble in these first two lines. This is where I think so much could be solved, because I’m not sure what I’m actually seeing. Okay, some possibilities. One, that when these people are walking around, they’re delusional and they think they’re in a 1950s black-and-white movie, because they’re old.

John: Some sort of memory care thing.

Craig: Yeah, or this is a weird bubble of reality, where once you cross the line you are in 1950s black-and-white Hollywood, or this is just a funny opening to introduce us to what will be a story about a regular old age home. I’m not sure. I would love to know better somehow. The first few lines say, “As the first light flickers onto the screen, we discover this is an old Hollywood black-and-white film.” There’s not much discovery there. You could just say, “This is a black-and-white film.” Black-and-white. Or you could just say, “Black-and-white.”

There is an interesting tonal issue that occurs, because on the second page we meet Margaret. “Margaret speaks in that mid-century, mid-Atlantic movie accent prevalent at the time. Oh Joel, it’s awful, just awful.” She’s great. She also says, “Oh Gwennie. Please. You mustn’t,” which made me laugh out loud, because that’s just so funny.

In the prior page, which is in the same black-and-white universe, Frank, who is floating in a pool, says, “I can’t be blamed if Joe didn’t see fit to join me this morning. Asshole’s afraid he’ll lose.” No one said “asshole” in these 1950s black-and-white movies. That was just simply not available to them, and it wouldn’t fit.

Also, he says, “Did I ever tell you that Johnny Weissmuller taught me how to swim?” “Yes, sir, once or twice.” Now, that makes me think, okay, so that was a long time ago, but Johnny Weissmuller was… “Johnny Weissmuller’s teaching me how to swim,” might help, because then I would think, okay, I’m in that… It was hard to pin down exactly what the concept was here. I know what I want the concept to be here. I just don’t know if it is.

John: Like you, I enjoyed the things that felt like ‘50s period and I enjoyed the mid-Atlantic accent. I enjoyed that kind of voice of it all and recognizing that race was a factor here as well. Starting as a black-and-white movie just felt kind of like cheating. Am I watching The Artist? I just didn’t know what I was actually experiencing and how seriously to take it. I didn’t know when I was going to transition to full color to show that we are in present-day time. Just remember, Sunset Boulevard, which you’re also referencing here at the very start, you don’t need to shoot things black-and-white to make them look old. You could actually just shoot them in present-day things and if the production design feels like 1950s, we’re going to believe it’s 1950s until you break that illusion. That’s going to be a better solution for you for most things.

Craig: I couldn’t agree more. To me, costume and hair and makeup and speech patterns, dialog patterns, furniture, all these things can absolutely convince me that I’m in period Los Angeles. The reveal is not from black-and-white to color. The reveal is period Los Angeles to 2022 Los Angeles, which is not at all like that. Once you get past the gates of this place, you realize, oh, we’re in the middle of now. Again, the question will remain, is this just a memory care type facility, where people just think it’s in the ‘50s, or is this some weird time bubble? It’s hard to say.

I love the fact that there’s a murder mystery in the offing here, because those are always wonderful. I thought things were fairly well described. I could see things. I saw, for instance, the bottom of page one, “A woman’s scream startles them. They pick up their speed.” That’s great. That’s a nice transition. “Interior Evergreen Estate. Joel and Frank follow the commotion.” I thought, okay, I’m going to go to the next page, but what is this living room, and boom, there it is, the interior of the mansion. She lets you know. Then there’s a very funny line. Then I could see exactly the body. I could see what the body looked like. I could see how he was shot. I love that there were feathers everywhere from the pillow. All that stuff felt great. It’s just conceptually we need to know what we’re supposed to understand, because kind of don’t.

John: It gets back to our confusion versus misdirection, and I just got a little confused. Don’t name a character Joel and a character Joe. We’re going to get those names confused.

Craig: I wouldn’t even name a character Joe and a character John. We got to watch that. Also, there is an errant I-T-apostrophe-S when we should have an I-T-S at the bottom of page three. I know that Heather will be kicking herself at that. I know her well enough.

John: As a puzzler.

Craig: Yes, solver.

John: Fortunately, we do have an answer about whether this is a time-space bubble. Her log line that she submitted says, “When LAPD homicide detective Keiko Sanjiko [ph] discovers the bigoted elderly residents in a home for the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age won’t answer her questions, she hires the spitting image son of their beloved TV private investigator to be her proxy. The two uncover a decades-old feud and love affairs, but will that help them solve this locked-room mystery with a surprising emotional twist?”

Craig: That’s a really fun concept. I think that concept is terribly served by beginning this in black-and-white. In no way, shape, or form should that be what you do there. You just start it, we think we’re in the ‘50s, and then we realize, oh, these people, it’s just a memory care thing. I think there’s an opportunity to actually have a secondary reveal, which is Interior Evergreen Estate Office Day. This is Joel, who’s looking after them. “He walks into his office, closes the door behind him. Now that he is alone, he is visibly shaken.” He would be visibly shaken also seeing a dead body prior. He’s not an actor. “He walks to a nearby desk and dials 911 on the rotary phone. Someone on the other end answers. Yes, I’m… My resident, a resident has been shot. He’s dead.” To me, if he walked into that office and we were like, “Oh, whoa, this office has a computer,” that’s [cross-talk 00:53:15].

John: He’s pulling out his iPhone, yeah.

Craig: Then he just picks up the phone, dials it, and he’s like, “Yeah,” and he just speaks without any kind of mannering and 1950s nature. He’s a more interesting reveal than the city. Then you can show the city, which is perfectly fine. A human and his mundane things. He could pull out his iPhone. He doesn’t need a rotary phone.

John: Exactly.

Craig: He could be like, “I’m going to go get you your tonic.”

John: Bloop bloop bloop.

Craig: He goes to the room and goes into another room, and in that second room he unlocks the door and that goes into just a regular office and he pulls out his iPhone and dials 911. I think that would be more interesting.

John: I agree with you there. Let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. Megana, will you talk us through Scavenger.

Megana: Great. Scavenger by Phil Saunders. A boyfriend records his girlfriend opening her birthday present from him, when the entire building is suddenly rocked by an earthquake. The footage cuts to black as we hear the room collapse. The handheld footage picks back up with quick shots of the couple running through the Santa Monica Pier as the earthquake wreaks havoc. The Ferris wheel falls and crushes the girlfriend. An office tower collapses. We pull back to reveal Edgar Corman in his 50s in a private jet watching the footage under the caption “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.” He video chats with Thania Redrick. They’re surprised that the footage was recovered. Thania tells him a scavenger found it. We cut to Fin Lorca in her 20s diving through underwater ruins. She swims past a barrier and discovers a sunken carousel.

John: Great. Craig, a thing I like about these pages is that it can be so hard to show a bunch of chaos happening. A bunch of chaos happens, and people just basically track what’s going on. I see this is all found footage. I’m getting a sense from these glimpses about what this must be. I felt like it was live and present in ways that did make me want to… It kept me actually reading through the stuff. Even if I didn’t have to read exactly, I didn’t need to look at each bit of time code, I got a sense of what was happening. That can be tricky to do on the page. I did like that about how these pages started.

Craig: It’s an interesting thing. I really enjoy the first page. I really enjoy the third page. I struggled mightily with the second.

John: I did as well. Let’s talk about why, because it’s when we get to this reveal, like, oh, here’s the person on the private plane watching, it’s like, wait, I don’t get why this footage is so important here. I just wanted that scene to go away and get ride to my scavenger having found a thing or jumping ahead to this is what the sunken city of Los Angeles is like.

Craig: I agree. There’s something very smart and very poetic about the way Phil has laid out his first page here. A young woman wakes up, stretches like a cat. 23, bedhead and bleary eyes.” Thank you. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. “Smiles at us as we get closer. The mirror behind her catches her boyfriend’s reflection.” I can see this. He says, “Happy birthday, lazybones,” capturing it on his phone. It’s “Corrupted like a bad copy.” I know something’s going on already. I like that it’s corrupted like a bad copy. “His hand reaches out with a wrapped gift. The size and shape scream jewelry. Lazybones, tired smile, wakes up.” That was really interesting, because he decided to name her Lazybones, even though her name is Young Woman, which I think is correct. It’s smart.

There’s this little banter back and forth with them that is very mild but believable, didn’t bore me. She says something that feels like the kind of thing people say. It’s not too clever. It’s not too boring. It’s just fine. The way the disaster happens is really interesting. It felt real. Then I had no idea what the hell was going on. To start with, it says, “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” It took me a while to understand that this was a private jet. It doesn’t say private jet. It just says, “The jet’s only passenger.” I’m assuming that he’s in a 747 when I see “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” The first action line is, “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.”

John: Where am I seeing that line?

Craig: Then it says underneath, “A tabloid website streaming on a screen in the hands of… “ When we say screen, do we mean tablet? What is that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: Tabloid websites streaming? What does streaming mean? Do you just mean that that’s the headline of a tabloid website? What tabloid website? Then we have this guy, who we’ve heard prior. There’s this prelap of people talking. By the way, it’s not V.O. In that case it’s probably something else, off screen. I don’t know if it’s V.O. Voiceover is when people are narrating things.

John: People are talking directly to the audience.

Craig: I think this is something else. Also, he has to figure out what to do here, because one of them is talking in a scene and the other one, her voice is coming over this feed. I have no idea what is going on. I don’t know what any of this means. I know I’ll find out later. Sometimes jargon as mystery makes me crazy, like, “You had to pull me out for this.” Pull you out, what does that mean, pull you out?

Then, “Someone made it in. How far? Far enough to recover that footage. Christ, this could save us. Who?” No one says, “Christ, this could save us.” No one, ever. I don’t know what they’re talking about, but John, if you and I know that if we had something that could save us, and we watched a video, and it seemed that somebody might have that thing, I would go, “Oh my god. They might have it.” I wouldn’t say, “John, that is the very thing that we have discussed a thousand times that could save us.”

John: “Christ.”

Craig: “Christ.”

John: “That could save us.”

Craig: “Goddammit.” No. I completely agree that I want to be in the next page. I just want to skip page two. I just want to go from this crazy moment of Los Angeles being destroyed to underwater, and then seeing this woman come through and having her scavenging. We get it. It’s many years later, because everyone’s a skeleton now.

John: Yeah, so cool. There’s something in this footage that is the McGuffin. There’s something that they are seeing in this footage that is important. I would say maybe spend that top of page two focusing in on that thing that is important, and that let us as an audience know that that thing is important. We don’t need to go to the guy to say that thing is important, because you’ve told us as an audience that thing is important. Great, we’ll be getting back to that. As long as you held on that, we’ll know there’s a reason why we held on that.

Craig: When we meet Aleta, who is scavenge diving, there’s all this really cool imagery and stuff. She’s looking at a driver’s license. “She pulls a driver’s license from a rotted walls, compares the faded image of a woman to a skeleton, as if trying to imagine it in life.” That’s wonderful. Such a great visual. “It’s one of many littering the ruins.” I can see it now. “Aleta traces a cross over the corpse and begins to rob it.” What a great sentence. Love that sentence. Then there’s this science-fiction thing happening. “A liquid electric fence known as the Barrier stretches sea floor to surface between high-tech pylons, emitting a deep bass thrum you can feel in your gut. It sparks and flashes warnings, restricted, keep out.”

Now I know it’s not actually saying those things, and I know that there’s no way for us to know it’s called the Barrier, but I get it, because I know when I watch it, that will be clear. A fish swims through it and dies. She sees something on the other side and takes the pain of reaching through that thing to reveal that there’s a carousel horse buried there, and that means something to her. In fact, it means so much that she forgets her arm is in this thing and she pays for it with some burns. She’s found something. She goes up to the surface. She’s going to tell somebody she’s found something.

This is all good mystery. It’s very beautiful and it’s visual and no one’s talking to each other with this stuff. I’m nervous, Phil. I’m nervous, because I think you’re a good writer. I’m just worried about your dialog, which is its own kind of writing, because the dialog was not strong here.

John: That’s a thing he could work on.

Craig: That is a thing that he can work on. It may be that his dialog is fine. It’s just that he’s trying too hard with these guys to be clever, mysterious, provocative, confusing. If you want to keep it this way, Phil, I would suggest making it clearer and just doing a little bit less. Do less here.

John: Actually, the dialog on the first page was appropriately less. I believe those moments as authentic. Here’s the log line we got sent for this. “In the sunken ruins of post-quake Los Angeles, a cursed salvage diver finds redemption when she goes up against a military epidemiologist to save her refugee community from a deadly outbreak.”

Craig: Whoa, that is a lot of stuff.

John: That’s a lot of stuff.

Craig: That’s a lot.

John: Deadly outbreak is a surprise to me. I like the universe that we’re playing in. I would certainly have kept reading to see what was going to happen next, because we haven’t heard Fin speak yet.

Craig: We haven’t. I think no matter how this turns out, Phil clearly has a way with words. He can do this. He can make pictures with words. That’s a huge part of this. He also understands the interesting contrasts of things. I’m hopeful.

John: I’m hopeful too. Thank you to everyone who submitted, all 150 people who submitted, especially these four who we talked about on the air today. Three out of four of these were written in Courier Prime, which is why the italics look so nice. Thank you for using some Courier Prime. This was a good exercise. Thank you, Megana, for going through all of these entries.

Craig: Thank you, Megana.

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The One, which was built as the most expensive house in the United States. I do not recommend anybody buy this house. It was originally sold for $295 million. I will recommend that people take a look at this video of the touring of it, because it’s a half-hour long, and I’ve never seen such an impressive building that I wanted to live in less. It is essentially, at a certain point you build what is like a museum, that is not an actual house. The primary bedroom is bigger than any normal person’s house would ever want to be. It looks so uncomfortable to live in this space. After you watch this video, I’d also recommend, I think this is a previous One Cool Thing, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles.

Craig: So good.

John: Is so amazing. It’s about this woman’s quest to build this giant house in Florida. You see her current already giant house and how hard it is to live in a giant house and how her husband just wants to live in this one little small room, because big spaces are not comfortable. I just wish people would understand that no one wants that kind of space and rooms of that scale. It was so fascinating and so uncomfortable to watch.

Craig: Obviously, John, if you do buy the house for 295 million, you know you’re going to spend another 30 or 40 million just fixing up the little things.

John: The small things, yeah, because I’ll be honest, the little golf course on the roof, it’s fine. It could be better.

Craig: Obviously.

John: The indoor saltwater pool, it’s fine.

Craig: It’s fine.

John: It’s not the best.

Craig: Because it’s Los Angeles, if you do buy it, and then you bring an interior designer or architect over, they will just explain to you why it’s all wrong and needs to be redone. Doesn’t matter what you buy, all wrong.

John: There’s four bowling lanes, but really, you’re going to have to split lanes, you’re going to have to share. Come on.

Craig: Just do it right or don’t do it at all.

John: I see what you have here and I have the same recommendation.

Craig: I can’t even get it out. My One Cool Thing this week is Elden Ring.

John: After we ranted about it last week. I switched classes and you switched classes. I think we made the right choice to do that.

Craig: Yeah, we did. I was really struggling, obviously. We could hear it last week. I was just so confused.

John: It is confusing.

Craig: It’s outrageous how they just don’t care about you in this game. It is undeniably gorgeous and massive. I was just feeling like, oh my god, everyone’s just saying it does get better. I did a little research, because mostly, I understand that even though the game requires dying, I don’t like dying. I am a coward. I’ve always been more of a ranged fighter than an up-close guy. I did a little research and finally understood that if you are a ranged fighter, there’s one class. There’s really one class to take, and it is curiously the best caster. Even though you could be a bandit and shoot arrows, not as powerful or as good as the astrologer, which is their name for wizard, essentially.

John: A wizard, a spell caster. I also switched and made myself an astrologer character.

Craig: So much better.

John: It’s so much easier to fire equivalent of [unclear 01:06:02] fireballs from a distance. You eventually run out of mana, whatever that mana is, but it’s just easier.

Craig: Some recommendations if you’re starting, choose the astrologer. The next screen will come up. You get to pick a name. There’s also a little starting gift you can have. Always pick golden seed. Always, because that gives you an extra jar of mana restoration.

John: Yeah, a little extra flask. Then you can set your flask so you regenerate two mana flasks and two life flasks [cross-talk 01:06:32].

Craig: I would actually go for three and one. I don’t think you need health much, because you’re not going to get close to anybody. Battles that were incredibly difficult for me became trivialized. I did even, in my first try at the big first boss, Margit the Fell, I did kill Margit the first try.

John: Congratulations. I’ve not tried to do that yet. I think it is the right overall approach. You’re spamming from a distance, but that’s fine too.

Craig: Look, I’m not playing this game to be humiliated, because mostly, here’s the thing. I am a story mode guy. I like the stories, which granted in this thing I don’t think are going to be particularly compelling, but still fine. I mostly like discovery. I like to go to new places and see new things. It’s hard to do that when you can get one-shotted by almost anything. It’s become way more enjoyable. I can tell I’m going to be into it. Astrologer. Take a little bit of time to level up.

John: [Cross-talk 01:07:35].

Craig: Get your intelligence to 20 as fast as you can. Get your mind to 20 as fast as you can. Intelligence increases the damage you do with your staff, and mind increases the amount of mana you have to cast, so you just cast and cast and cast.

John: The other recommendation I’ve seen is that dexterity is also helpful too, because that helps you just avoid getting hit. That could be another [cross-talk 01:07:55].

Craig: You hopefully aren’t so close that you’re getting hit. Once you get Torrent the horse, you can ride around to really avoid getting hit. Dexterity does impact how fast you can cast. After you hit, you send one glint, pebble, shard, whatever it is, how quickly can you send another one. Even with your dexterity being fairly low to start, you can cast pretty quickly. Vigor will help boost your HP a bit, which is nice, keeps you from dying too quickly. Again, you don’t want to get near anybody. You want to stay far away and just blast from a distance. Astrologer in Elden Ring if you are a baby like me or John.

John: In Elden Ring we are recommending that you maximize your intelligence, your dexterity, and perhaps your vigor. As a screenwriter we recommend that you maximize your intelligence, your wisdom, and your charisma.

Craig: Yeah, intelligence first.

John: Intelligence first.

Craig: Just like the astrologer.

John: Astrologer.

Craig: Then for screenwriting, you’re going to want to then go for charisma and then wisdom.

John: Wisdom, yeah. We love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Joe Palen. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. I will not get involved in the screenwriter discourse, but Craig might. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies that are wonderful. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re supposed to record about composers. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, that was an example of music being composed really unspecced, just for fun, by Joe Palen in that circumstance. I want to point you to an article that’s talking through the way in which film and TV music is written, because so often you’ll see this is the named composer, but there’s actually a whole stable of sub-composers who are working for that person who are doing the actual work of coming up with all the cues. Is this something you’re familiar with coming into this conversation?

Craig: Yes. The composer can’t do everything. Some composers also are not particularly good, for instance, at taking the music that they’re composing, which they often do on one instrument, and transposing it, or I’m sorry, I should say transcribing it into notation for an orchestra, nor are they expert in arranging it for an orchestra. Arrangement and instrumentalization and notation is a huge part of this.

Hildur Guðnadóttir, for instance, who did our score for Chernobyl and did the score for Joker, her husband is a guy named Sam Slater. He’s also a composer and a producer. He is very much this kind of partner for her to help take the musical thoughts and ideas and themes and then help her practically create tracks out of them and build them into larger things as need be and engineer them and produce them.

There are teams, certainly, of people. When you look at how much work some composers are doing, it would be impossible for them to be doing it all on their own. I could argue that if you’re John Williams and you come up with (singing), then you’ve done it. If you hummed the theme for ET or Star Wars or Jurassic Park and then told people to just spool it out for me and then listen to it and then you change some things, you’ve done the hard part. That is the genius part.

John: This article we’ll link to by Mark Rozzo from Vanity Fair, weirdly John Williams is apparently the person who actually does do all the stuff himself.

Craig: There you go.

John: He’s the exception. Hans Zimmer is the person who’s most known for it. It sounds like over the years Zimmer’s been better at crediting and acknowledging all of the people who work for him and who are doing some of that real work in terms of putting those keys together, because you’re right, these people are sometimes working on four projects at once. They’re like those artists who become factories, that just do all the stuff. He might be coming up with the main theme, but everyone else is building out that stuff.

Where it’s become a crisis though, is that classically, the work that was done for a movie or for a premium cable show, there could be a reporting of that. There could be royalties. The other people who are credited there could get a percentage of that stuff. In the streaming age, those royalties are becoming harder and harder to access. People are really struggling. Folks who are getting some portion of that money down the road are not finding that same money in a Spotify universe.

Craig: This is not something that you or I tend to have any experience with. When you’re a writer, you are writing. If you’re running a room full of writers, then they’re all writing as well. On a television show, most of them almost certainly will get some kind of credit on a script, an episode. There will be residuals. There will be an acknowledgement. For this area there does seem like there’s a gray zone. One would hope that composers, particularly the most successful and well-known, would be compensating their partners fairly, treating them fairly, and if they are working significantly and adding a lot creatively, that they should be rewarded for that on an ongoing basis, not just as a buyout, which I suspect may be the case.

John: We as screenwriters and television writers, we are represented by a union. Composers and lyricists are not represented by a union, so they don’t have the same kind of workplace protections and workplace standards and minimums that you and I benefit from. I think we’ve talked about, with Rachel Bloom, I think on the show before, is that there’s also this weird thing where she could be hired on to write a song for an episode or for a movie, and she’s creating literary material, she’s creating story for that. She’s creating a moment. She’s creating that scene in which that thing happens. She doesn’t have the Writers Guild protection over that work. She’s not considered a credited writer for having written something that could be a really significant portion of what’s happening there in that dramatic work.

Craig: I think it’s a great thing for us to draw attention to, not only to acknowledge that other people are doing this work and to help people understand the way things are. There’s no shame in this. This isn’t a secret or anything. Nobody’s pretending that those people aren’t there. Hopefully they are being taken care of. I haven’t noticed any major lawsuits or things, so one would hope that everyone is being taken care of and treated appropriately. That said, wish in one hand, poop in another, and see which one fills up first.

John: You and I both know of a screenwriter who is notorious for having had a room of writers who were apparently doing the work for him.

Craig: Who knows?

John: I think the fact that you and I are both thinking about the same person probably means that it is really exceptional.

Craig: It’s rare. It’s really rare.

John: It just doesn’t happen.

Craig: It’s a very rare thing. It’s not endemic to what we do.

John: Agreed. Craig, thanks.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Follow alone with our Three Page Challenge selections The Man Who Could be Macbeth by Daniel Brace, Pizza Boy by Mick Jones, Evergreen by Heather Kennedy, Scavenger by Phil Saunders.
• WGA East Settles Five-Day Strike Against G/O Media
• RSVP for the Animation Guild Rally Sunday 3/20 at 2pm in Burbank, CA
• ‘Copshop’ Screenwriter Sues Zero Gravity Management For Breach of Contract
• ScreenSkills To Fund Accessibility Co-Ordinators For British TV
• Behind the Tweets: “Rewrite Map” by Jeffrey Lieber on WGAW Connect
• Scriptnotes Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne
• David Iserson’s Tweet on Great Scripts
• Touring the MOST EXPENSIVE HOUSE in the United States! on Youtube and The Queen of Versailles
• The Astrologer on Elden Ring
• “The Minions Do the Actual Writing”: The Ugly Truth of How Movie Scores Are Made by Mark Rozzo for Vanity Fair
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Joe Palen (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 542 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig, I thought I trusted you, I believed in you, and now for you to do this.

Craig: You got what you deserved, my friend.

John: Today we’re discussing betrayals, back stabs, and double crosses as they occur in film and TV, and real life to some degree.

We also have lots of follow-up and listener questions. Plus, Craig, what should I do about my keyboard? We’re going to talk a little bit about keyboards, which is a fundamental piece of hardware technology we don’t discuss nearly enough on the show.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we didn’t come here to make friends, we came here to win. I want to discuss which reality competition shows you and me and Megana would enter and what our strategies would be, because I would say you’re probably not a big Survivor-y kind of fan, but I could see you on a cooking show, for example, and you would kill it.

Craig: The question is, what kind of cooking show? There are so many.

John: We’ll get into all of them, but only for our Premium Members. First, there’s some stuff that happened in the news. Obviously, Disney’s handling of the Florida Don’t Say Gay bill was a big topic in discussion this last week.

I was at a premiere for Better Nate Than Ever, which was a Disney Plus movie, directed by Tim Federle, a former guest, which was delightful. Tim was asked on the red carpet, “How are you feeling about Disney’s response to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill?” He said that “good representation does not cancel out bad legislation,” which I just loved. I liked that he found a way to rhyme that and actually make the point that you can do everything you can do, like in Tim’s movie, which has incredibly important gay representing, but it doesn’t actually change the facts on the ground of people living under bad laws.

Craig: This is one of those spaces where the corporation is so far away from the content they make. It’s now run by a new guy. It was Bob Iger, and now it’s Mr. Chapek. What’s his first name, Bob?

John: I think it’s Bob Chapek.

Craig: Another Bob. There you go, just by not knowing my first name, I’ve put myself on some sort of blacklist. You have people that make these things and they care about these things and put all of their love into these things. I know that one of the producers of that was Adam Siegel, who’s a wonderful guy and a lovely friend of mine and just a good human being. They are putting all their love in this, and it means something to them. They mean what they say when they say that good representation isn’t going to cancel out bad legislation. That’s absolutely a great point. The boardroom is 4 million miles away. The boardroom might as well be on another planet. The question is, what will the boardroom actually do about this.

It is a very tricky thing for Disney, because I think they all know that this law is terrible. If this law were somewhere else, I think they would have a strong corporate response, especially Disney, which has always been, I think, the gayest of studios, just in terms of who’s been running it and who’s been there and who works on their movies. It’s just been a very gay-friendly studio, at least for employment. Disneyland has always had Gay Day, and yet their biggest investment in park is in Florida. What do they do? How many people do you think they employ in Florida? God.

John: I saw it was a huge number.

Craig: It’s insane.

John: I want to say it’s 30,000. They’re one of the biggest employers in Florida.

Craig: It’s like a city of employees. On the one hand, they do have to make sure that they take care of those employees and keep them working and all the rest of it, but on the other hand, what do they do? This is actually quite fascinating, because they have an oversized influence on Florida, but it seems like Florida’s leadership right now, under Governor Dipshit, doesn’t care. They just like being mean. I don’t know what’s going to happen here. Do you have any prediction?

John: I don’t have a great prediction. I think it’s [unclear 00:03:55] the folks who spend so much on Disney, which great to put pressure there, but also we need to remind everybody that Disney didn’t do this, it was Florida that did this. It was those terrible people. There are other companies that are working there who could also be pressured to do things. I’m thinking back to at the NBA making choices about when to pull games out of places because of things. This is just a bad law that will hurt people. It’s just a performative law, so not a thing that’s designed to actually have any measurable impact on people’s lives. It’s just going to do terrible things for kids who are in danger.

Craig: That’s a great point.

John: That’s the frustration is that it’s not even a thing where–

Craig: It’s not even a real law. They’re just posing, for their stupid core.

John: Sometimes what’s even more dangerous than a draconian law is a vaguely written law anybody could choose to sue over. It’s a horrible mess.

Craig: It’s so stupid. It’s so stupid. You got to know at least a bunch of the people that were sponsoring that are very secretly and quietly gay, because that always happens.

John: Yeah, or they’re going to have gay and trans family members, because that’s life.

Craig: I hope they all hear from all of them. You make an interesting point, which is we sometimes focus all of our fire on the friends who aren’t doing enough, and not on the enemy. I think it’s important to hold our companies to task and to make them be responsible. I think it’s important to remind them of their responsibility. First things first, let’s get rid of that governor, change the way the government works in Florida, because it’s just horrendous.

John: We also need to find some way to change the incentives to just make the most performatively stupid things possible, so basically that everyone has to keep running further and further to the right in order to avoid the challenges.

Craig: That’s easy. Just get rid of Facebook. Just get rid of Meta, and that’ll take away Insta. Then get rid of Twitter, and you’re on your way to a society that is mildly functioning.

John: On our way. Also, this past week, MGM officially was acquired by Amazon Prime Studios. There was a question of whether that would go through or it would face regulatory hurdles. It did not. It was approved for sale. MGM of course is the legendary lion-led studio behind the 007 movies and a huge back-history. As we’ve said before on the podcast, their catalog is really complicated because it’s been sold off in bits and pieces to various places, but it is a big acquisition. I will say that even over the past couple weeks, I’ve been out with a pitch, and I pitched Amazon and I pitched MGM, and they were two completely separate companies. They were at pains to describe themselves as two different companies. MGM could not buy this project for streaming, because they did not have any relationship with a streamer.

Craig: Wow.

John: Now, of course, they do. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the theatrical side of MGM, the degree to which Amazon uses MGM as a theatrical distribution mechanism for the things that they make that should have a theatrical release. We’ll see what happens.

Craig: It made me sad, and not because I hate Amazon or anything. It just made me sad that… Then I thought, oh my god, this upstart internet company has purchased this 100-year-old studio. I’m like, actually, Amazon’s been around for a long time.

John: It has.

Craig: Actually now, they’re kind of an old company. My daughter has never existed in a world without Amazon.

John: If TikTok were to have bought MGM, I think we’d be a little more concerned.

Craig: I would’ve jumped. You’re absolutely right. The MGM catalog is bizarre and fragmented. You could argue that what they really bought was James Bond. That maybe is what they really bought, because that is all that MGM has been doing for a while. It’s pretty much a guaranteed hit, assuming that you pour the resources in that are generally required. Obviously, it’s a big turning point, because James Bond is about to get a new James Bond. What it means ultimately is one less buyer, not that MGM was really a buyer. They were. They were pretty minor. What’s going to happen to those two sets of people, some of those people are getting fired. I think that’s probably what’s going to happen. It’s the same thing when Disney bought Fox. It just happens.

John: It does, which is a bummer. I will already remind people that I don’t think that deal should’ve gone through. In a different administration, that deal would not have gone through, because I think it was just too big of a merger.

Craig: I don’t disagree.

John: Megana, we have some follow-up. Do you want to get us started?

Megana: Yes. Malgosia writes, with genuine love, “In Episode 540, Baggage asked for packing advice, and to my shock and horror, Craig said something to the tune of, ‘Don’t worry about bringing a hat and such. The lovely folks at the costume department will hook you up.’ No. Please don’t. We are not your mom. We all wear clothes every day, and therefore we at the costume department are often taken for granted as an extension of your closet. We’re absolutely not though, just the same as set deck is not there to help you decorate your hotel room, and hair and makeup are not there to brush your teeth. Baggage and Craig, please bring your own hat. If something happens and a nervous PA spills coffee on your shirt, we sure as hell will help. Just don’t treat us like your extra suitcase that you decided not to bring. Bring that extra suitcase. Production will cover it.”

Craig: Jeez, Malgosia, you’re tough. Maybe because I’m the showrunner.

John: I was going to say, Craig. I think there’s a little privilege there that may be coming in.

Craig: Yeah, which I’ve earned. They’re always so nice. They’re like, “Do you need a hat?” I would say that’s probably fair. That’s true. They’re not your mom. I can’t imagine that the occasional polite request would be met with quite this much horror and shock, or shock and horror. Shock and horror seems strong, Malgosia. It just really does.

John: It sounds like an invasion technique.

Craig: I know you’ve got a room with 100 hats. “Can I borrow one?” doesn’t seem like it would… Of course, no one’s relying on the costume department. I’m just saying if you forgot something, if you were like, “Oh my god, I don’t have a raincoat and it’s pouring,” it’s okay. Unless you’re working on a show where Malgosia’s got her arms crossed in front of that wardrobe truck, generally speaking, people are actually quite nice. I recognize that I’m the boss, so it’s probably why they’re nicer.

John: This is reminding me of a conversation I had way back when shooting Go, my very first movie. On that film, video taps were relatively new on cameras, because it was a film camera, but it had a video tap so you could see what was happening on screen.

More importantly, we also had a wireless video tap, which weren’t even I think technically even allowed at that point. It was just broadcasting on a UHF channel. We all had little TVs that we had, little handheld TVs, basically Game Boy size, so we could watch the shot if we weren’t right at set. It was incredibly handy, but those things just ate batteries. Inevitably, we’d run through our batteries, and we’d go to the sound department and say, “Hey, can I get some AA batteries?” At some point the sound department said, “Yes, but also, you’ve blown through our entire battery budget for the show.” We were counting on the sound department to always have batteries. Really we should’ve made some other arrangement for where are we going to get this or just acknowledge to the sound department, “Yeah, I know we’re eating all your batteries. Let’s talk to the line producer or somebody else, so it’s clear that this is what’s happening here.”

Craig: You only need one hat. If I came every day and was like, “Where’s my new hat?”

John: “Where’s my new hat?”

Craig: “Where’s my new hat?”

John: I burned this hat.

Craig: “Where’s my new hat?” Point taken. Assess your position and your need and act accordingly.

John: Sounds good. More follow-up, Megana?

Megana: Meedo wrote in, “On Craig’s question about meet cutely, yes, though not grammatically correct, cute could function adverbially in the same way hard does in die hard. On the subject of bad grammar, what are some instances of titles or catchphrases where such a distortion of the language has worked to great effect, and when does it not work? Instances of the former that come to mind are Gone Girl, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Never Say Never Again.”

John: Basically the question is, meet cute feels like bad grammar, but you can argue that it’s functioning adverbially.

Craig: You could try.

John: In titles we often do strangle some grammar there for effect. Gone Girl is the girl who’s gone, you get it. The Me and You and Everyone We Know, that feels actually pretty natural. I guess in titles we do get away with some weird grammar because we just accept it.

Craig: I just Googled a little bit here just to find some good ones, and there’s actually quite a few of them that are fun. You Got Served. No, you were served. You were served. Two Weeks Notice is missing a possessive apostrophe.

John: It is, yeah.

Craig: The Ladies Man, that was spelled the ladies, ladies plural, and the man. That just makes no sense. They’re titles, so you can do whatever the hell you want. Doesn’t matter. I remember I did a paper in college on Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song by Melvin Van Peebles. There are so many A’s and E’s. I had to learn, because I had to type it so many times, how many, because the spelling was obviously whatever it wanted to be. Get away with Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Honey, I’ve shrunk the kids. I think you can get away with anything, Meeto.

John: Honey, I shrank the kids. Honey, I shrunk the kids. Oh yeah, it’s honey, I shrank the kids.

Craig: Yeah, or honey, I’ve shrunk.

John: Also that’s one of those words that’s… Shrink. You could almost get to shrinked. It’s one of those words that’s going to be a transition going back to the more normal -ed things rather than switching vowels. [Cross-talk 00:13:35].

Craig: I think you can do whatever you want in a title.

John: You really can.

Craig: Titles are fine.

John: Later on in the show we’re going to be discussing BlacKkKlansman or mentioning BlacKkKlansman. As I’d try to type it into the Workflowy, I just could never remember how they spelled that.

Craig: That’s another good example.

John: Multiple K’s. Finally, some follow-up in Intelligence versus Charisma. Let’s start us out with that.

Craig: Em wrote in, “I think what’s missing in this conversation, and really missing in the Twitter fracas, is the connection between writing a great sample and figuring out what a great sample is in the context of the industry, which is something that’s largely learned via social connections with peers, which in turn is largely a function of charisma or at least social intelligence. A great sample in 2014 might not be a great sample in 2022, at least in TV, since the spectrum of what’s on the air has changed so much.

The best way to learn about that is talking to other writers and executives, usually in nonprofessional social context. It’s much harder I think to break in with low charisma, even if you’re a great writer, because you’ll have fewer friends, not because those connections are what will give you that first break, but because those connections are what might attune you to the industry so you can figure out what you should be writing.”

John: I think Em makes a really good point, but Craig is going to disagree.

Craig: Look, if you want to find out what the industry is doing, you can just watch TV. Also, if you’re in that spot where because of your high charisma you are now plugged into what’s being made, you may be in danger of agenting yourself, where you think, “Ah, I know what they want now. I will chase that.” It’s possible that that might help you a little bit, but not as much as something that’s fresh and original. I think now more than ever, actually, there is space for stuff that is different, because of television and the way television has functioned. Yeah, of course you could always do things that other people are doing. I’m not sure you’re going to need a lot of charisma for that.

John: Here’s my defense of what Em is saying, is that we talked on the previous episode about how there’s intelligence and charisma and wisdom, and wisdom is that knowing what to write, recognizing patterns, recognizing trends. Some of that also just comes with experience. Your wisdom stats will go up with some time. I think what Em is describing in terms of just getting a sense of the chatter and what people are actually talking about, because you can watch TV and see, oh, this is what’s on TV, but that’s what was purchased two years ahead of time and where the trend was. Getting a sense of where the puck is headed is a function of talking with people and being I that chatter. Yes, there’s a danger of overdoing that and chasing too hard the next trend, but it’s appropriate to be thinking about that in terms of not writing something that no one is going to pick up because of other things.

Right now I will tell our listeners, it’s really, really hard to set up a musical, I can tell you this from firsthand experience, because everyone’s afraid of musicals because so many musicals have failed recently. That’s just a thing I can tell you because you’re my friend and you’re listening to this on a podcast. If you didn’t have a friend who was listening to this, you might say, “Oh, I’m going to go set up a musical.” It’s going to be really hard to do it this week or this month. That’s just the reality. I think some charisma would be the way of being out there in the space, chatting with people at bars, doing that sort of stuff that happens, where you get the sense of what people are working on and what people are excited about. Some charisma there is helpful.

Craig: Look, I suppose also if you were just a careful reader for the 4 billion articles get fire hosed at us about everything, so if you Google Dear Evan Hansen, I think a thousand talk pieces will appear, and you’ll probably get a sense of why there is a trend right now. It’s understandable. I never want to come across as somebody who’s suggesting that social skills don’t help. I think I have pretty decent social skills, and they help. I don’t want to say wisdom doesn’t help, because I think I have some of that too. Of all your stats, really the one that is so outlandishly more important than the other is your intelligence here or–

John: Your writing intelligence.

Craig: What we call talent.

John: Obviously, this conversation was all about starting out a career. I will say that as my career has progressed, I reached a mid-level tier, where my writing was important, but my ability to be in a room with heavy hitters and survive was probably more important in terms of being able to keep that job and keep the project going. The words I was writing were very important. It was my ability to be present in a room and keeping up with the conversation and recognizing the psychological aspects of these difficult people in a room was more key to my success than actually the words, for some projects and some points in their production.

Craig: I agree with that. I think we talked about the whole concept of the screenwriter plus. Especially in features, that makes absolute sense. If you’re going to break through to the next level in feature writing, and we’re talking about you’ve got a career, you’ve had a credit or two, things are going well, you’re getting work steadily, the next level up, if you’re trying to get to the famous A-list, is you now need to have quite a bit of charisma and quite a bit of wisdom, because you are now going to be more than a screenwriter. You’re also going to be an interlocutor, you’re going to be a producer of a kind, you’re going to be a therapist, you’re going to be a conflict manager, and you’re going to be a de-escalator and a hostage negotiator. You’re going to be a lot of different things, and you need to know how to do that well. If you can’t, you will not be that person. You will still be somebody they might hire for a week or two, because you’re wonderful.

I don’t think anybody that hires Charlie Kaufman for a week or two is looking for a therapist, screenwriter plus producer. They’re looking for somebody to come in and be Charlie Kaufman for two weeks and to get that stuff. Guys like him have removed themselves from any need of being on any list. He’s just his own list. Yes, I completely agree, as you go on in your career, once the talent has been established, that other stuff makes a huge difference.

John: We should also acknowledge our screenwriting bias here, our feature bias, and that if you’re a person who’s working in television, you’re going to be working with groups of people a lot, so other writers in a room often, but then on a set you’re going to be doing lot of other work where you’re going to be interfacing with people and not just doing your writing skill. You’re going to be doing other persuasion skills and ability to communicate, and that does come down to charisma at some levels. It is important, especially in television.

Craig: Agreed.

John: On this show, over the history of this show, we’ve talked some about keyboards. I’ve definitely blogged about my keyboard travails over the years. I noticed I think the last time I think we were doing DnD or something, I saw your keyboard. You are not using any traditional keyboard right now either, are you?

Craig: No. I have not used a traditional keyboard in forever.

John: Great. Let’s talk about that, because I started using a split keyboard. It’s basically the one where the keyboard is divided in half and a little bit at an angle, some sort of Microsoft keyboard, ergonomic keyboard, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, because it was helpful because I was having some issues. That keyboard alone was not enough to stop some really serious carpal tunnel problems I was having, and so I had to escalate to bigger, more serious, weirder, stranger keyboards. The one that I’ve been using for the past 15 years is a recommendation from Dana Fox. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Craig, you can see it also in the Workflowy. This is my SafeType keyboard. Craig, could you describe for our listeners at home what this keyboard looks like?

Craig: If you imagine a regular keyboard and then you keep the middle where it… The middle would be your number pad and stuff like that, which normally wouldn’t be in the middle. Then the other two sides, the left and the right side, you take and tilt up 90 degrees. If you’re a touch typer, you know you have your left-hand letters and you have your right-hand letters. All the left-hand letters and the right-hand letters are now on an upright thing. Instead of typing with your fingers pointing down, you are typing with your fingers pointing toward each other. I guess your hands are now perpendicular to the desk.

John: This is the keyboard I’ve been typing on for a very long time. It’s weird to learn how to do it. In the photo that we’ll include in the show notes, you can see that it has little rearview mirrors that fold out so you can see the function keys. No one ever uses the mirrors. I’ve tucked the mirrors away for all these years. It works for me. Because I’m a touch typist, I can type at a good normal clip on it. I’ve been happy with it enough that I got a backup keyboard just in case this one breaks, although this past week I was featured on this little blog post called Writes With, which is basically what different tools writers use. I linked to the SafeType keyboard. The guy who does the blog said, “Oh, that link doesn’t work anymore.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” It turned out that SafeType has not actually existed as a company for at least three years.

Craig: John, they’ve been dead for 100 years.

John: I’m typing on a dead keyboard. I’m typing on a keyboard that is–

Craig: Wow.

John: Who knows, maybe it’s going to last me 20 years and I don’t need to think about anything else. This keyboard may not be around forever. In fact, the keyboard I’m using, it’s not even USB. It’s an ADB thing that has a little USB connector.

Craig: Oh my god, ADB. Oh, jeez. Wow.

John: It’s sketchy.

Craig: Megana has never seen that. Megana has never seen that in the wild, I don’t think.

John: Apple Desktop Bus, or it’s whatever the PC equivalent to that, but it’s not a USB connection, which is strange. Because it’s also hard for this keyboard to do keyboard command shortcuts, like command X, command C, command A, I have those mapped out to an external gaming keyboard.

Craig: Oh god.

John: Which I absolutely love. It’s just the Razer Tartarus Pro. Unfortunately, they stopped making drivers for it for Mac, so I need to have this Frankenstein combination of other things that don’t reliably work. I’ve been in frustration anyway. I’m now considering switching keyboards. I wanted to talk with you about this and see where you’re at but also have a discussion about why keyboards are so crucial but why they are so problematic, often for writers.

Craig: As long as I can double up. The new keyboard I have is my One Cool Thing. I’m going to double up. As long as I get credit for that.

John: You get credit for an early One Cool Thing.

Craig: I had, same as you, a lot of wrist issues. I’m a touch typist, as you are. The old keyboards were just horrendous. The new keyboard that, for instance the No-Frills Apple keyboard, I don’t know what they call it, Magic Keyboard, whatever they call it, it’s terrible.

John: Nice and straight.

Craig: Horrible. The reason it’s horrible is because ultimately your wrists have to pronate. Your hands are going in. It’s an unnatural position for your elbows and your wrists. Ergonomically, it messes you up. I found a little cushiony thing that I was using for a while. It helped a little bit, but not a lot.

Then eventually I did find my way to split keyboards. A standard split keyboard, unlike what John uses, which is essentially an affront to God, a normal split keyboard just takes the keyboard and separates the left and right slightly. Imagine putting a triangle between them. Instead of your hands pronating in, they can just relax in a natural place. It does take a little bit of getting used to, but not much. I can go back and forth between a split keyboard and a regular keyboard without any fuss at all. I can’t remember what the original one I was using was, but eventually it did break, and so then I switched over to Microsoft, of all people, for a long time.

John: They had some good ones.

Craig: That’s what I’ve been using for a long time. It was Microsoft. I think the first one was called the Sculpt Keyboard. It’s still called the Sculpt Keyboard. Essentially it just became their Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, which if you look it up, you can see a picture of it, you can see exactly what I’m talking about. It’s curvy and it’s got a built-in hand rest and it’s lovely. Here’s the issue with this and a lot of them. Most keyboards now want to be wireless. These third-party ones use Bluetooth, but they require dongles. This is enraging to me, but I guess there’s no way around it. If you lose the dongle, at least for Microsoft, you have to buy a whole new keyboard. They don’t sell the dongle.

In looking for a better option, because there were certain things I just… The way the command keys and things mapped I didn’t really enjoy, even though I could remap them. I did just recently switch to a new keyboard, and that is the Logitech Ergo K860 wireless split keyboard, also with dongle, but connects much easier and quicker. It’s more comfortable. The key action is nicer, I think. It does everything I need it to do. It worked instantly with Mac, no drivers required.

John: The keyboard, for folks who are listening at home, like most split keyboards, it’s divided in the middle and then rotated slightly out. Also, it has a hump in the middle so that the middle part of the keyboard is higher than the outside part of the keyboard. That is so your wrists are turned slightly at an angle. They’re not completely flat, which is better for your wrists and is a very natural typing form too. People don’t react to that poorly. I think this will not be enough for me. I think I would probably still have the problems I would have on a keyboard like this, which is why I’m trying out as a backup keyboard, this thing which I will also put in the show notes, if you want to look at the Workflowy here. This thing looks insane. This is the Kinesis Advantage 2.

Craig: I saw this one when I was researching.

John: This is a much more ambitious rethinking of what a keyboard should be. You still have the keyboard split in half, but those two halves are set far apart from each other and inside little wells, and so that you are still on your home keys, but those home keys are set down into little bowls, and all the other keys are facing into them. Your muscle memory can still do its thing and still hit the letters, but it’s a very different experience. Your space bar is–

Craig: Where is that?

John: Your space bar is your right thumb. Backspace is your left thumb. Return is next to the space. It’s one reach over from where the space bar is.

Craig: Oh, no, no no no.

John: It’s a strange thing.

Craig: The one thing that I can’t deal with is, return should be to the right of the apostrophe, which so the right of the L. That’s where it goes.

John: I get that.

Craig: Anybody that moves it is a criminal.

John: That is a natural feeling. I think the logic behind this is that your pinky is by far your weakest finger, and your thumb is by far your strongest finger, and so therefore, putting those things you hit all the time on your thumb saves your hand. It saves your pinky from doing that work, which is a large part of the problem with repetitive stress.

Craig: I could see that. I do enjoy slamming the space bar. People have commented to me that I am a very loud typer.

John: I can imagine that.

Craig: I type fast, but I type furious. It’s just ba ta ta ta ta ta ba ba ta ta ta ta ta ba ba ba! It’s just my thing. I’m just a furious typer.

John: I always say I always envy the people who like, “Oh, I’ve been making a custom keyboard. I’m replacing all my letters with these things and I have these mechanical switches.” That’s wonderful for you. I’m trying to find the keyboard that will make my arms not go dead at night, where I would literally have zombie arms at night, where I would wake up and I could not move my arms, until I replaced my keyboard with this one and also replaced my mouse with a vertical mouse, which was much better.

Craig: Sorry, the way you said that, for a moment it sounded like you had zombie arms and you kept having zombie arms that night, until you reached over and dialed something with your nose and then got a new keyboard to come in.

John: At night. When I say zombie arms, literally both my arms would be dead. I would have to physically flop my body over to get out of bed. I couldn’t even use my arms to push myself out of bed.

Craig: It’s so funny. I wish it still happened.

John: It’s hilarious.

Craig: You’re like a Muppet basically where the–

John: I’m a Muppet. I’m a Muppet who’s lost the little sticks to the puppeteer. I think our conclusion here is that if you’re experiencing pain after typing, you should do something about it, because it will not just magically get better by itself. You just need to look for solutions. Some of those solutions are a new keyboard, a new mouse, but honestly, just changing your work setup could also be helpful. So often I think people try to type on a surface that’s too high or too low. Just look for those proper angles. For me, I need arm rests on a chair that can support me as I’m typing. For other people, that’s a bad solution. Do what works for you and do what’s going to not make your arms hurt, because you will not be a productive writer if you cannot write productively.

Craig: You’re going to spend a lot of time typing.

John: Got it.

Craig: Side note, learn how to type.

John: Learn how to type. People who don’t learn how to type, learn how to type.

Craig: Learn how to type.

John: Just take one of those online little classes if you need to. I learned how to type, and it was just an absolute godsend.

Craig: In fact, all this talk about charisma, wisdom, intelligence, sometimes there’s this weird little stat that you forget about. Typing, let’s put that under dexterity.

John: It is what dexterity is.

Craig: There’s a minimum dex. Believe it or not, typing will make you a better writer. If it happens faster between your brain and the page–

John: Less friction, yeah.

Craig: Less friction will make you better. Actually, you do need to bump that dex up to a minimum number for typing.

John: You know who’s a very fast typist?

Craig: Who?

John: Andrew Lippa.

Craig: What’s his number?

John: It’s well in the hundreds.

Craig: Wow.

John: He’s a pianist. He has incredibly strong fingers and just can brrrrt.

Craig: I’m about 100.

John: That’s great. I’m nowhere near that.

Craig: When you talk about people that are 150 and 160, it’s terrifying to watch them go. Even for me, it’s weird. The 100 is when I’m transcribing something. I’m looking at something and I’m typing it, and my mind turns off and my fingers are just going. At some point it even weirds me out how it works. 150, or whatever, 175, that’s steno tool stuff from the ’60s. I’m impressed.

John: My fastest typing is I had to do not even really a pitch, but get ready for a meeting, and so I just had an open Highland document and with just brain dumping. Brain dumping is incredibly quick for me. It’s just a great way of just getting all that out. I don’t know how many words per minute it is, but I can just very quickly plow through stuff. I find that very liberating.

Craig: It’s fine. It’s fine. Megana, do you type?

John: Weirdly, Megana doesn’t know how to type at all. You would think that between Harvard and Google, she would learn how to type, but no, it never came up.

Megana: I made it this far. I had to Google what touch typing was though, because–

Craig: Wow.

Megana: They just called it typing. I don’t know, I just think of it as typing.

John: You probably had a keyboarding class in school at some point.

Craig: Keyboarding.

Megana: They called it technology. I used to fall asleep in that class a lot, and then my output was just where my head had fallen asleep on the keyboard. I learned to type because I grew up during AOL Instant Messenger and so I was just constantly chatting with people on the internet. I became a quick typer that way.

Craig: Did anything bad ever happen? “I was a 10-year-old girl constantly chatting on the internet.”

John: With strangers. AOL.

Craig: Yes, the perverts’ playground. Megana, I think you need to bump the dex up. It’s just something to think about, and it actually goes faster than you think. Learning how to type properly goes faster than you think.

Megana: I think I did learn how to type properly, but I didn’t practice well until I started internet chatting.

Craig: It’s gone?

Megana: No, it’s there.

Craig: Oh, you do type.

Megana: I do type.

John: She does type. I’m kidding. I was kidding.

Craig: Oh, I just took John at his word–

John: Sorry, I’m never joking again.

Craig: Because I trust John. You have nothing. Your dex is fine?

Megana: Yeah. It’s strong.

Craig: It’s strong. You have strong dex.

Megana: Across the board I’m really everything that we’re measuring here.

Craig: You mean you’re a well-rounded bard.

John: That’s what she is. She’s really a performer.

Craig: You know what? That’s important. You need a jack of all trades.

John: We love it. Let’s get to our marquee topic, which is betrayals and back stabs and double crossing. This was prompted by, two weeks ago in Interesting we were talking about these topics and some good examples from different films or TV shows or the nature of what betrayals look like in film and television. While we’ve talked about lying on the show before and how important lying is, we’ve never really gotten to betrayals, which I think are important, because we have cases where obviously the villain betrays the hero, or someone who’s supposed to be a friend betrays our hero and that becomes a big thing. We also have situations where our main character has to make moral and ethical choices which do result in a betrayal.

A very obvious example from Jurassic Park is the notion that one of the employees was actually working behind the scenes to steal the material and sell it off to another thing. That betrayal became an important plot point, and once it was revealed, put other characters in danger. Also leading up to this discussion of The Departed and the betrayals and deceptions within The Departed and how that comes out and comes across.

There’s so many movies you can think of, movies in different genres. It’s not just the con men genre. It’s not just heist movies. In a lot of our science fiction and a lot of our other films, you have characters who seem like they’re working together, and then one will turn on the other. Let’s just talk about how that functions and how we should think about that as a writer, both so that it’s as rewarding as possible within the film, but so that a character being betrayed doesn’t feel like the audience being betrayed.

Craig: It’s an incredibly useful technique, because you can create plot through a simple need. In Jurassic Park they could’ve had our bad guy just need money because his grandma was sick. He’s like, “I’m desperate. I know this is wrong, but I need to do this for money.” That’s perfectly fine, because that character isn’t somebody we’re probably going to be emotionally invested in. The wonderful part about double crossing and backstabbing is that it creates an emotional response in us from a character that probably isn’t essential or is secondary. This can happen all the time. It’s exciting. It means that we haven’t figured out exactly what’s going on yet.

The movies that I think about all the time for backstabbing and double crossing are the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It’s baked into everything. What was wonderful about those films and what Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio did was have main characters backstabbing and double crossing each other, so that whenever you got a little too sentimental about the characters, whenever you bought in a little too much to kumbaya, they reminded you that they were pirates, agents of chaos, who would absolutely betray each other. We have an ability to keep the audience on their toes. When they get fooled, they don’t get angry at you, the writer. They get angry at the character for doing it, which is great.

John: Other great examples, Aliens is of course one of my all-time favorite movies. Paul Reiser’s character and his betrayal in that is crucial. We’ve mentioned BlacKkKlansman before in terms of who is he really working for. Parasite. In the first Charlie’s Angels, the relationship between Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore is about that. It’s about a deception and really the question of he’s revealing his true identity at the moment it’s going to hurt her most, not even for the most useful moment in plot, that he actually is a bad person for what he’s doing there. The Social Network is basically a betrayal of when did you decide that this company was worth more than our friendship, when did you know you were going to screw me over. There’s lots of genres in which this can take place.

Maybe we should define our terms a little bit first, because let’s think about what a betrayal actually really means and why it has this moral valence to it. Betrayal is you’re breaking an oath. There’s a trust between two characters or an expectation of trust that has been broken in a way that causes harm to one of the people. It’s not just like you disappointed me. A disappointment is not a betrayal. There’s some lasting harm you’ve done because of this betrayal. Betrayal I think can really only be a conscious choice. You can’t accidentally betray somebody. You can betray your principles. You can betray your inner promise that you’ve made to yourself. A betrayal’s often also a revelation of something, a revelation of some secret or some nature that you didn’t want to get out there.

Craig: Good betrayals I think have an interesting perversion of power dynamics. A lot of times the people that are doing the betraying are not people in power. People that have the upper hand often don’t need to betray the people beneath them. When there is a slight power imbalance, it doesn’t always work like this, but when there is, the betrayals can be particularly delicious, because the powerful person didn’t see it coming. If they’re a villain, you get very excited. if they’re a good person, it just really affects us.

This goes back to the Gospel. Jesus is betrayed. The person who betrays him does not have the power that Jesus has, but he gets him in the back. In the movie 300 there’s something just brutal about the way the lowliest person is the one that betrays the Spartans and so they all die. I do remember as a kid watching the, I think it was CBS, (singing), the animated special of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Do you remember that one, John?

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: When Aslan, Jesus, is captured, and because he’s betrayed by Edward, and they shave his mane, aka putting the crown of thorns on him, I felt something terrible in me. It affected me deeply, because it seemed so brutally unjust, this violation not only of trust between people, it’s a violation of what we understand about justice and how people ought to be. That’s why being stabbed in the back is the ultimate expression of betrayal, because no one can defend against it. The highborn, the lowborn, no one.

John: The reason why a back stab works is because a false friend is doing it. You did not defend your flank because you didn’t think you had to. You were vulnerable to that person because you let them get close to you and they can stab you in the back. I would say every back stab is a betrayal, but not every betrayal is a back stab, because there’s many ways to betray something that’s not a back stab.

Craig: That’s right.

John: The other thing to talk to, which I didn’t know the whole history of, is a double cross.

Craig: Double cross.

John: The first apparent reference to it is 1834. It’s from the Thieves Slang. To cross is to refer to something dishonest, which is the opposite of be square or straight with something. If you have a crook that’s going back on his partners, that would be crossing the crossers, which would be a double cross. In this case you’ve agreed on a plan with somebody and then you were deliberately doing the opposite. You had a second plan that they did not know about.

Craig: When you watch Casino or Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese is so good at portraying these petty double crossings. As you’re watching you’re like, “Oh my god, just don’t do that.” Then you realize, that’s what criminals do. They’re criminals. If they’re the sort of person in the first place that’s willing to break all of society’s codes and morays for selfish purposes, they’ll probably also do that to you. No honor among thieves.

John: The crucial thing about all of these betrayals is to remember that you can’t betray somebody if you never trusted them in the first place. There has to be some relationship between the two of you in order for betrayal to actually make sense. There has to be some, doesn’t have to be friendship, but it has to be some relationship, some assumption of mutual benefit between the two of you for this betrayal to actually work in there.

As we’re looking at setting up our characters and where they’re headed and what they are expecting, it does come back to what characters want. Obviously, our approach is from what our hero wants and what their goals are and what they’re trying to do and how they’re trying to do it, but looking at those characters around them, what do they want, and at what point are the things that they want that are in contrast to our hero is enough to motivate them to actually do this thing. We’re going to want to make choices about did they come into this relationship with the intention of betraying them? Was it all a setup from the start or did the circumstances on the ground change and therefore they are making the best choice for themselves at the moment?

Craig: I think a small peripheral character can just be defined as betrayer. In Jurassic Park, his name is Nedry. Nedry is a scumbag. He’s a scumbag. They always make him sweaty. He’s shifty and sweaty and he’s disgruntled and he’s a scumbag. When they figure out it’s his betrayal, I don’t even think anyone’s like, “What?”

John: “Never saw that coming.”

Craig: They’re like, “That’s about right, that shifty, beady-eyed sweaty guy who was grumpy all the time did us bad.” Side characters, you can do a classic, typical betraying side character. Die Hard has a wonderful moment like that with Hart Bochner. If you want your main character to be betraying, if you want the betrayal to be something that’s carrying you through, as opposed to just being a little kickoff incident, then I think it’s important that you do show the choice. If there’s this pointless or blithe betrayal, we will not care as much about it. It won’t make us as angry. We need to see the choice.

John: Always remember that just seeing your characters have relationships with each other, you as the writer have a relationship with your audience and making sure that the betrayal that you’re portraying doesn’t feel like a betrayal of the audience. There are notable examples of movies that did pull a sudden switcheroo at the very end, and you’re like, “Oh, that worked great, and I was surprised, but I’m delighted, because I could see it all make sense.” The Sixth Sense is a case where that turned out really well. No Way Out is an example of that, where information is being held from the audience, that when it was revealed is like, oh, I get what was happening there, and that feels great. Those are the notable exceptions.

In general, if we get to a place in the movie where you’ve pulled the rug out from underneath us and, okay, that was just not even cool. I thought we had a deal here. You’ve broken that social contract between us. That’s going to be a problem.

Craig: Twist endings are dangerous things. You have to get them right. As you’re writing these characters, and one of the issues with the twist ending is, at some point, like we say, we need to understand the double cross. It can’t just be ha ha! There has to be some sort of sadness to it. There has to be a humanity to it.

Again, thinking about 300, I think his name is Ephialtes. I think it was Ephialtes. He was deformed. He was physically deformed. He was supposed to die, because the fascists in Sparta would get rid of any slightly imperfect, quote unquote, children. He’s disabled. He cannot physically be a Spartan soldier, even though he desperately wants to be. King Leonidas in a kind way just says, “You aren’t able to do the things physically we require.” He’s very angry, and he sells them out, because he wants something for himself. He wants honor for him. He wants dignity. He is denied it. He lashes out. In the end, he regrets. I understand why he does what he does. In fact, it’s Xerxes as portrayed as a weird demigod who basically plays on all that stuff, so we understand. It’s similar in The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe. There’s temptation.

If you think about all the things that can feed into betrayal, you start to realize how juicy it could be for you and how exciting it could be, particularly if as you’re writing you start to feel like everyone can see what’s coming next. Then it may be time to think about betrayal.

John: Let’s get to our listener questions. Megana, do you want to start us off?

Megana: Imposter from New Jersey wrote in asked, “I’ve been listening to the back-episodes, and from the very beginning of the podcast, you’ve been warning listeners about supposed screenwriting gurus. A bit of context, I graduated film school about seven years ago and have worked in various jobs in the industry, UPM work, AD-ing, a bit of acting. Though professional screenwriting is my aspiration, I’ve never made much money at it. I’ve written a few small shorts, and I’ve been hired to do rewrites of independent features, but my credits are meager. To pay my mortgage, I’ve started teaching. Through a local nonprofit, I teach beginner screenwriting to teens and adults. When I say beginner, I mean ground zero, what a slug line is, why you shouldn’t use Google Docs to write a script, how to format dialog. Though the classes are through a nonprofit, students still pay to enroll.

“I’ve always felt a bit ethically icky about teaching these classes. Who am I to give instructions on the right way to write a script when I have so few credits to my name? Why should anyone take my advice? Have I become the most repugnant of all specialists, a screenwriting guru, or is this just another imposter syndrome flareup? Should I step aside and wait until I have more produced credits before I try to teach others how to write scripts?”

Craig: Imposter from New Jersey, that’s my name.

John: Let’s think about this. Imposter from New Jersey is concerned ethically whether it’s reasonable for him to be teaching screenwriting since he’s not had much success as a screenwriter himself.

Craig: I get that. I think the best news here is that he’s thinking that way, because the people that I despise never think that way. They think the opposite way. They think they have something special to offer the world and they’re going to charge them quite a bit. Here are all the positives here, Imposter. You are working for a nonprofit. Let’s just start right there. It’s a nonprofit. The gurus that I love teeing off on are very much for-profit people. They are charging people hundreds of dollars to get notes on their screenplay or master class sessions when they are themselves nowhere near master or even apprentice.

You’re working at a nonprofit. As you point out, you’re teaching beginner screenwriting, ground zero, fundamentals. They pay to enroll. They are not paying you directly. They are paying a nonprofit. I presume the nonprofit pays you. I suspect because it’s a nonprofit they’re not paying a whole lot. The fact that you have always felt a bit ethically icky means you’re okay. You’re right up against the guardrail of what you think you ought to be doing. If you went further, I think your own decent self would say, I cannot justify presenting myself as somebody that should do the following.

Where you are right now, I suspect you’re doing a fine job, teaching them what a slug line is, why you shouldn’t use Google Docs, and how to format dialog. I think that’s okay. Under no circumstances would it seem to me that anybody showing up in your class at a local nonprofit would describe you as a screenwriting guru. I don’t think you’re presenting yourself as one. I think you have a very healthy conscience. As far as I can tell, you’re doing just fine.

John: A couple scenarios here to talk through. I remember in junior high or high school, I went to this creative writing program that was done through our school district that was once a week. The guy who taught it was nice, well-meaning, had maybe had some short stories published, but had never actually done a full book. Would they learn as much as they possibly could? Was he an expert in the subject of creative writing? No, but it got me a structured situation in which I could be writing for this class, turning in stuff, getting feedback, working with other writers. It was incredibly valuable to me. If that is what Imposter is doing is providing a situation where he is teaching some very fundamental basics to these students who can also be in a group and learn from each other and learn some stuff about screenwriting and have conversations about screenwriting, I see that as only a win. If Imposter were teaching a Spanish class but did not actually speak Spanish, that would be a problem.

Craig: That would be a problem.

John: Where he actually has no business doing that thing, that would be not just ethically icky, that would be actually bad. That would be not acceptable to do. In this case, he is teaching what he knows, which is these fundamental things. He’s not teaching, “This is how Hollywood works,” because Imposter doesn’t know that. He is doing some fundamental Lord’s work in terms of getting those basics about how screenwriting works out there to these students. Go for it.

Craig: I agree. I think you’re fine. I think you’re a good guy. That’s what I think.

John: Cool. Next question, Megana.

Megana: Bruce asks, “I’m not a professional screenwriter, but I am a professional scientist, certified with a PhD, a bunch of papers, patents, etc. Over a number of podcasts, you fielded questions on people’s skill level and feelings. Sometimes your advice requires the person to take an honest look at themselves and ask, do I actually have it? This self-assessment is a critical aspect of life. It’s a reality, that unfortunately gets pushed aside for a general ‘you can do anything you put your mind to’ approach. In corporate America, the HR policies tend to coddle people. For example, in a managerial training on giving constructive criticism, I asked, ‘This is great and all, but what do you do when someone just doesn’t get it? Can I say we have a problem and the problem is you?’ ‘No,’ HR responded, ‘Please stick to the talking points and hope they get it.'”

Craig: That’s so great.

Megana: “Do you have the same issue in film and television production? What is the role of constructive criticism? Can you be honest when someone just isn’t cut out for what they’re trying to do?”

John: Wow.

Craig: Wow. Great question, Bruce. I love this. These are two great questions. Couldn’t agree with you more, by the way, Bruce, that “you can do anything you put your mind to” is utter horseshit.

John: It’s a trap.

Craig: You cannot. In fact, you can do almost nothing you put your mind to. That’s the God’s honest truth. There’s only so many things we can do. It just doesn’t work that way. Follow your dreams? I don’t even know what dreams. You’re putting your finger on something important, that is to say that some people, their talent stat is just not high enough to do the job they’re doing. They’re are underpowered in an over-leveled area of Elden Ring. What do we do with folks like this? Do we say, “We have a problem, and the problem is you.” You could. It’s unnecessary, I think.

If I were your HR advisor, I’d say, look, I understand exactly what that is like. It doesn’t help much to say it like that, because it makes you potentially seem like somebody who also doesn’t get it, because what if they have a problem and their problem is you? What happens in Hollywood and film and television production is expectations are placed. If at some point it just seems like that person just doesn’t get it, then the production parts ways with them. They just say, “You know what? It’s just not a good fit. Hopefully you can do a two-week transition while we bring somebody else on, and then that’ll be your time with us.”

John: What I like about this question is it’s not specifically talking about screenwriting, because we’ve talked so much about screenwriting and how it’s hard to get a clear metric on whether a person has talent or doesn’t have talent. It’s challenging. If you think about it, film and TV production, or if you think about a set or post in an editorial situation, yes, you could say, this assistant editor, we’re going to let them try to cut a scene, try to cut another scene. At a certain point editors can say, “Oh, this person just doesn’t get it. Editorial choices are not their strong suit.” It becomes tough to say, “Oh, I think you should not be doing this. I think you should try to find some other career in the business.” That’s just really hard to do.

I think one of the weird luxuries we have in film and television is because it’s all gig work and you’re just going from job to job to job, the next time the person is up for a job and they call the previous boss and say, “Hey, is this person good?” you can say, “Honestly, no, they’re not very good.” I do worry that we’re never on the hook to give the honest feedback about someone’s not up to snuff in this thing, that they’re spinning their wheels and should try something else. Again, one of the luxuries of film and TV production is because it’s gig to gig to gig, you can just not deal with some of those problems, but it’s certainly not helping those people who are never getting the honest feedback they should be getting.

Craig: I completely agree. Great question. We should talk about this stuff more. We should. I think it’s important. By the way, we never talk about HR.

John: HR exists in certain capacities within our business, but it’s invisible in other parts.

Craig: Now that I’m–

John: You’re a boss.

Craig: Yeah, A, and B, there’s just more HR than has ever been before. Just the presence of HR and what HR does and how much they have to deal with has gone up dramatically. Maybe we’ll have an HR person on to talk about this.

John: We should have an HR person on the show. Your experience doing a longer project like an HBO series is going to be different than a person on an independent film who won’t have an HR department at all, and yet some of the same things will still come up, these same issues, harassment at work hours and other problems will come up, and so much of what we’ve been dealing with from Pay Up Hollywood to Me Too are HR functions, just incredibly strained because of the weird way we work.

Craig: HR, boy, it’s a hard job to do, because they get a lot of stuff that comes in. I think my guess is that quite a bit of it feels eyerolly a little bit. The case gets opened, the case gets closed rather quickly. Then there are these real things that come through where HR makes an enormous difference in someone’s life, probably in a number of people’s lives in terms of the people who are perpetrating bad deeds, but also, more importantly, the people upon whom bad deeds are visited. HR matters. It’s a huge part of what goes on now in the world, more than it… When we started out, HR, they were just the people that were like, “Here’s what you get paid. Here’s the sick days. Here’s your parking spot. This is what the medical is.” No one ever said, “I’m going to HR.” You’d be like, “Why? You mean the people that tell us what the raises are?”

John: All that being said, one needs to remember that HR is fundamentally there to defend the company and to defend the company from horrible things such as employee lawsuits. That’s reasons why with certain kind of complaints, you need to be going into HR with somebody else and not be going in there by yourself. That’s why we have gills and other people there who can intercede, because there are occasions where HR is just there to protect the company.

Craig: HR, they work for the company. There is an interesting synergy where part of protecting the company is making sure that somebody doesn’t sue them because they’ve done that person bad. That’s where it aligns. I think that good HR people really do have humans in mind, even though human resources is the most Orwellian term possible. They do have resources that are I think independent. I believe that HR departments, the big ones do have independent therapists and people that are not responsible to the company and keep patient-client privilege and all that, I think, but I could be wrong about that.

John: When it comes to legal challenges, there’s reasons why, and there’s all sorts of issues about what things can actually go to court and what things cannot and have to go to private arbitration. It’s a challenging thing, which I agree, we should get back into, but if we have an HR person on, I think we should also have someone who’s critical of our HR system to also be a counterpoint there.

Craig: Who’s that?

John: We’ll find somebody. There are some good examples of people out there who have some–

Craig: Dear Twitter, who does not like HR?

John: Who doesn’t like HR? Come on our show. That’ll be a fun one. Let’s do some One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a show I’ve enjoyed on Netflix, it’s just six episodes, called Murderville. It stars Will Arnett, developed by Krister Johnson. It’s based on this British showed called Murder in Successville. The central premise of Murderville is Will Arnett plays this homicide detective in some unnamed city, and he has a dead partner and all these tropey things about this. It’s a scripted show. Things are happening. They’re going to solve a case. There’s going to be a murder every week, and a murder’s going to be solved. Every week he gets a new celebrity partner, who is just some random actor who’s being brought in. That person is not given the script and has no idea what’s actually happening. Therefore, they have to improv, again, what’s going on. It works, I think, surprisingly well. My two favorite episodes of the six are Kumail Nanjiani’s episode and Annie Murphy’s episode. They’re all good. There is some serialization that happens between episodes, so you probably shouldn’t watch them out of order.

I just really dug it. It’s a good, fun, light watch if you’re in the mood for something goofy. It reminded me a bit of Children’s Hospital, the David Wain show, and David Wain actually shows up in an episode.

Craig: I think Krister worked on that. I’m pretty sure. He’s a great guy. This has been on my list of stuff. When we stop shooting in 15 years, I’m going to sit down and just start watching stuff. It’s going to be a joy.

John: So many good things to watch.

Craig: I’m going to go find a hotel somewhere, hole up, and just watch.

John: You’re going to be away from your wife and your family in Los Angeles even longer, just so you can watch the TV, catch up on the really important things.

Craig: Oh no, I’m bringing the wife. Not the kids. My One Cool Thing is, as ibid, Logitech Ergo K860 wireless split keyboard. It is not super cheap. Here’s the thing about these keyboards. It’s $150 is what their retail list is. Keyboards, especially the ones these days, should last forever. Keyboards seem to be made out of the same material that PlayStation controllers are made out of. They should build anything important out of that material. PlayStation controllers I think have been tested within god knows what tolerances, because they presume that gamers are going to be smashing them on the ground in frustration, particularly while playing Elden Ring, and they never break. This very sturdy material should last for a long time.

Excellent key feel, connects instantly with a Mac, and unfortunately does require the dongle, which comes with it. Boy, if they sold the dongle itself… I don’t know, that’s a great question. If they sold the dongle itself, it’s a no-brainer.

John: Love it. We’ll put links in the show notes to also the keyboards we talked about, the other ones, for choices. I really do recommend a vertical mouse if you’re having any problems, because the one I am using is great and helpful for that.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies that are delightful. We have a non-zip-up hoodie available in all our different patterns. Is it the 10th anniversary one, green one, which I quite liked a lot. I wore it for St. Patrick’s Day. Check that out and get your hoodies.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on reality television and competition shows. Stick around for that. Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Megana, this was your suggestion, so set us up.

Megana: I had a question. If you guys could be on any reality competition television show, which one would you pick and what would be your strategy?

John: Let’s define reality competition shows, because Megana and I were discussing it in the office, it would be tremendously fun if Craig’s wife were cast on Real Housewives of Hancock Park, and that Craig would be that husband who’s interviewed every once in a while, like the Kelsey Grammer who shows up. That’s not really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about some show in which there’s a winner and a loser and each week someone gets sent home. That’s what we’re thinking about. Anything from a Survivor to Big Brother, but also Project Runway, Great British Baking Show. Craig, what are you thinking in terms of your reality competition show?

Craig: It would almost certainly be the Great British Baking Show, because it doesn’t seem like winning is important to anyone. Everyone is trying to just do something that is not going to embarrass them, which is basically how I approach everything, what can I do to not shame myself and my name. Then if it works out, they’re just stunned and delighted. If you’re picked, you’re like, “Oh. Oh, my. I was just hoping to not be eliminated.” On all the American racing and surviving shows, it’s like, “I’m going to win this thing and I’m going to destroy you.” I don’t want to destroy anybody. I love baking. It’s fun. If I mess up, you know what? I think everyone’s going to be like, “Oh. Oh, didn’t quite come together, did it?” I’ll say, “No. No, it didn’t.” They’ll be like, “Quite a shame really.” I’ll be like, “I know. I’m so sorry.”

John: Craig, how did your crème brûlées come together? As we were playing DnD this last week, you were working on your crème brûlées in your oven that was not heated properly.

Craig: I really struggled. I dumped that batch and made a second batch in Jaq Lesko’s oven, because she’s in the building next to me and her oven’s just better than mine. I’m suspicious of this batch as well, to be honest with you. I’m a bit terrified, because there’s a dinner party this evening. I’m going to be giving people the crème brûlée. If it’s not quite right, I’m just going to be embarrassed and ashamed. You know what? I think what I’m going to say is, “Look, this is a bit British Baking Show. If it doesn’t work, I think you should all just say, honestly, ‘Didn’t quite come together, did it?’ and then I’ll say, ‘No, afraid no. Oh, pity really. Did try. Not sure what went wrong.’” Then I’ll go home. I think that’s the way I would do best.

John: I like the Great British Baking Show a lot. I agree with the criticism of it, that the middle segment where they’re given this blind instructions for things can sometimes be a little absurd. You’re trying to make this thing. I have never heard of this thing. The instructions are so absurd. Yet that also feels like a puzzle situation that Craig might enjoy.

Craig: Yeah, it’s scary. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re baking, it’s terrifying. To be honest with you, I’m a recipe baker. My daughter, she can actually just take things from the pantry and make something, and it’s good. Just wizardry. I’m a directions follower. I like the science of cooking. What about you, John? I assume you’d be on some sort of brutal… You’re going to want to be on Survivor, right? You’re going to want to [unclear 01:05:32]?

John: A younger me would want to be on Survivor. Mike White, another screenwriter–

Craig: He was on The Amazing Race.

John: He was on The Amazing Race and on Survivor. He’s been on both of those shows.

Craig: Jesus.

John: There’s been a precedent for pale gay screenwriter on these shows already. I can certainly survive it.

Craig: Do you think they would notice the difference? “Oh, Mike White’s back.”

John: “Mike White’s back.” I don’t have the blond eyelashes.

Craig: That is true. He’s very, very pale.

John: Very, very blond. That much sun freaks me out. That’s the thing that would scare me most about being on a Survivor kind of show. I think we’ve established on the show, I’m actually remarkably good at making fire. I can make fire [cross-talk 01:06:15].

Craig: You were an Eagle Scout.

John: I was an Eagle Scout, yeah, so I’m good at that. I can make it with a magnifying glass. I know how to do that stuff.

Craig: Wow.

John: That doesn’t scare me. I just don’t want to be out there in the sand for 30 days. I think instead I would probably, if I had to choose one, it would either be Big Brother, because you’re indoors a lot. I like being indoors. I can get along with people well. I would definitely the hide the fact that I was a screenwriter and that I had some success. I’d just make up some other career, I was a teacher in something. You just make a consistent story about that. Or Amazing Race, which is a fun show that takes you around the world. My husband and I, we do travel a lot. We could theoretically be good on that show. I just refuse to fight with him on national television. I’ve made a rule that we’re not going to fight on national television, because that’s what we would do, and it would not be fun.

Craig: I’m so not interested in winning. All these people want to win. I think that’s fun for them. Mike White, he also wanted to win. I don’t. That’s why I need to go on a show that’s not about winning.

John: Lowest stakes possible.

Craig: Yeah, just the most gentle, calm… Even the person who wins doesn’t really win. Then there’s a winner at the end, but it’s fine.

John: You get a glass plate.

Craig: It’s all really about just spending a nice time under a lovely tent in an area that’s reminiscent of the shire in Lord of the Rings.

John: That’s lovely. I would say, if I could invent a reality show for me to compete upon, it would be a gift wrapping show, because I’m really good at wrapping gifts. I would greatly enjoy the craft of wrapping gifts.

Craig: Literally just talking about this yesterday, because Bo’s birthday is coming up.

John: I know. It’s a national holiday.

Craig: Of course.

John: It’s here on the calendar.

Craig: It’s huge. It’s Bo day. I bought her a present. If she listens to this, she’ll know that I bought her a present. I was talking about this with Jaq last night in fact, because I was like, “Normally, I would have Bo wrap this, but I can’t have her wrap her own gift.” I’m just going to give it to–

John: Craig, can’t you take it to wardrobe and have them wrap it for you, because they help you out of all other binds.

Craig: That’s actually not a bad idea. They probably would know how to wrap it. “Can you guys just put this in a shirt?”

John: Megana, what would be your competition show? What would you compete on?

Megana: I don’t know if this counts. I think I would do the Bachelor.

John: The Bachelor totally counts. There’s a winner.

Megana: There is a winner.

Craig: Is there?

John: We’re all losers on the Bachelor. Tell us about your strategy on the Bachelor. What do you want to do? How much are you interacting with the other women who are competing, or are you the Bachelorette? It’s your show, so tell us how it’s going to work.

Megana: In order to become the Bachelorette, I would have to compete on the Bachelor. I think you brought up an interesting question, which is you can take one of two strategies, and one is to become a personality within the franchise, and the second one is to win. The prize of winning is being with a super milk toast man who’s never interacted with a woman.

Craig: Wait. Really? That’s who they put on the Bachelor?

Megana: Yeah, they always cast these guys who have the same talking points where they’re like, “Thank you so much for sharing that,” or like, “I appreciate you opening up to me,” but they don’t have an interesting point of view, or I don’t know, they’re just bad at dealing with conflict.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Your strategy is I’m the iconic personality that they’re going to want to bring back, right?

Megana: Exactly. I think it’s an interesting social situation, because nobody has phones. I am always here to make friends, but I would really try to adopt the “I’m not here to make friends” strategy and pull some shenanigans, and I would be totally unchecked, because nobody has the internet.

Craig: Interesting, so you want to be the villain.

Megana: Absolutely.

John: Wow. This is surprising, but exciting. I think your mom is disappointed.

Megana: Do you think she would be disappointed? I think my mom would thrive on this.

John: I have played board games with your mom, and your mom, you said, cheats. Your mom is a known cheater at board games.

Megana: Absolutely.

Craig: Also, does your mom have any investment in you getting married?

John: A little bit.

Craig: I think that she would be totally into this. She’s like, “I don’t really care what you do. Get married.”

Megana: Absolutely.

Craig: “I want a wedding.” Oh my god.

John: They’ve tried, there’s been various efforts to do a gay version of the Bachelor, and it doesn’t work, because everyone could just like, “Oh we don’t need this guy. We can just hook up with whatever.” It doesn’t actually pay off to the same degree. I would not be opposed to have been in my single life to be on one of those dating shows, because I feel like, why not? It could be fun.

Craig: Wait. I don’t understand. Why? I would actually prefer to watch gay Bachelor, because I would learn something new.

John: You would learn something new, but why are all those guys competing for the one guy, when all those guys who are also hot could just be hooking up with each other?

Craig: I see.

John: That’s the problem.

Craig: I see. I see.

Megana: That’s still great television though.

John: Still great television.

Craig: Yeah, but I get it. It’s like if you’re the Bachelor, you’re like, “Wait, where is everyone?”

John: Now, Megana, you’ve watched enough Bachelor. There’s been situations where women have hooked up on The Bachelor too, right?

Megana: Not that I can recall. I don’t think so. Not in the American Bachelor franchise.

John: I may be thinking of Too Hot To Handle or one of the other–

Craig: Love Island?

John: Love Island. I think it’s Love Island is maybe what I’m thinking of.

Craig: Love Island, just the name alone implies that everyone is hooking up with everybody. Everyone is pansexual, like Youngbloods.

John: Like Youngbloods. It all comes back to Youngblood, in the pre-show conversation. At some point we’ll start recording the pre-show stuff and we’ll get the real dirt on all this stuff.

Craig: So much better than the show.

John: Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Megana.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Megana: Thanks, guys.

John: Bye.

Links:

• ‘Better Nate Than Ever’ Filmmaker on Disney’s Handling of “Don’t Say Gay” Bill: “Good Representation Does Not Cancel Out Bad Legislation”
• MGM joins Amazon Prime Studios
• Kinesis Ergo Keyboard
• John’s Old Keyboard set up with SafeType
• Subscribe to the Inneresting Newsletter and read our issue on betrayals here!
• Murderville on Netflix
• Logitech ERGO K860 Wireless Split Keyboard
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.