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Scriptnotes Transcript

Scriptnotes, Episode 598: The One with Vince Gilligan, Transcript

May 30, 2023 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 598 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Now Craig, off and on this program, we make fun of screenwriting competitions, but I’m wondering if maybe we’re wrong, because today on the show, we welcome the winner of the 1989 Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award.

This is a writer who’s gone on to a prolific career in film and in television, including his work on The X-Files and creating the legendary series Breaking Bad and co-creating its sister series, Better Call Saul. I think we were wrong about screenwriting competitions, because welcome Vince Gilligan.

Vince Gilligan: I love that. Thank you, John. Thank you, Craig. Yes, you were completely wrong about that.

Craig: I don’t know, I guess we have to look back at the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award and really run through the other winners. Something’s telling me that maybe they just got lucky, blind squirrel and all that.

John: Correlation but not causation.

Craig: I will say that in 1989 they nailed it, because as I have often said on this podcast and in other places, Vince Gilligan is pretty much the best that’s ever been, the best that’s ever done this job of writing television. It’s great to know you, but it’s also great to have you on our show to talk, because people need to know what’s going on inside your noggin. It’s a pretty special place.

Vince: Oh, man. Jesus, I’m glad this is not on video, because I’m just glowing bright red now. That was very, very kind. I will say, I’m sure you guys have said you shouldn’t pay to enter screenwriting contests, and I agree with that wholeheartedly.

Craig: Excellent.

Vince: The Virginia screenwriting competition was free to enter.

John: That’s what we like.

Craig: Music to my ears.

John: Vince, I think I’ve shaken your hand once at the Austin Film Festival. I don’t know if you remember the only time I think we’ve ever had a long conversation was back in spring of 2007, because I was coming on to work on a project, a feature that you were leaving. You very graciously talked me through what you’d done on the script and where the bodies were buried. It was incredibly helpful for me as I was coming onto that project.

You said you couldn’t do any more work on the project, because you were going to go off and direct this pilot you’d written about this chemistry teacher who starts making drugs. I just wanted to know, whatever happened to that?

Vince: I’m so glad you brought that up, John, because I have to tell you, you were such a stand-up guy. I’m embarrassed to tell this story, but I’m going to tell it anyway, even though it does not make me look great.

You came in after me. I had just taken that script as far as I knew how to do, so many, many drafts. What was so wonderful about the way you handled that is that you called me out of the blue. This was probably before we shook hands in Austin.

John: Definitely.

Vince: You called me up, and you introduced yourself. You were very kind and very professional and just wanted to say, “I’m coming in behind you here on this thing.” This is the part I’m embarrassed about. I didn’t do that for the originating writer of that project.

When you called me, I thought, “This is such a cool thing this guy’s doing, this guy I don’t know.” Then I thought, “I never did that for the last guy.” It’s not like I thought about it and said no. It’s just I never even thought about it. It was very thoughtless of me. Then you came in behind me, and you were a real class act the way you handled that.

John: Thank you. We were moving into an Airbnb in Hawaii. I was there for a wedding. It was great to actually hear all the work that you had done. There were so many incredibly talented, powerful people on the project. It was so helpful for you to be there talking me through where the landmines were. Thank you again for that.

Vince: You’re very welcome. The pleasure is mine.

John: Craig, you are making TV shows, and so I thought maybe you could lead our discussion into the television of this all. I’m really curious to know from Vince about working your way up in TV staff and writing a TV show. What are you going to ask him about?

Craig: Everything, but I think mostly I really want to dig into what makes him special. He’s going to get all glowy and blushy, and that’s fine. I want to get into some of the things that make him who he is, because there aren’t a lot of writers who are consistently excellent, and Vince is. That’s where I’m going to dig in.

John: Great. I was thinking for our bonus segment for premium members, Vince, you had done a remake of Kolchak, The Night Stalker, and I was thinking, what other shows would the three of us want to remake or reboot, because it feels like there’s so many great old shows. Are there any things out there that we’d love to see brought up to a 2023-2024 season? Maybe in our bonus segment for premium members, we can talk about that at the end of the show.

Cool. Craig, we have a bit of follow-up. In our last episode, we were talking about the old prospector archetype.

Craig: Just so you catch up on this, Vince, if we say the old gold prospector, what do you imagine in your mind?

Vince: If people didn’t come up to me about once every two weeks or so and say, “I saw you on that episode of Community,” I wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about just now.

John: Wait, did you play a gold prospector on Community?

Craig: I haven’t seen this.

Vince: There was an episode of Community where they had a VHS. You remember these things? They found an old VHS game.

John: I remember this.

Vince: I was the guy on the VHS prospector.

Craig: I love this.

Vince: I think I was a gold prospector. I was a Wild West guy.

Craig: Perfect.

Vince: I meant what I said a minute ago. I got all these kids coming up to me lately saying, “Oh man, I loved you in Community.” I’m like, “Okay, great.”

Craig: What a strange confluence of things, because weirdly, last week, we were just talking about just the concept of the old gold prospector. I had remarked that there’s this consistent thing where if you think about the old gold prospector, you think about this kooky guy with a white beard doing a weird jig and dancing around about his gold.

Vince: That’s me.

Craig: You’ve already done this. You’ve actually been this guy.

John: This feels like a glitch in the matrix that you just happen to be the person who played that.

Craig: This is so weird. We were just trying to figure out, as we often do, why, where does this come from. There has to be some kind of origination of this, like the Wilhelm scream of gold prospectors. It looks like-

John: We got an answer here.

Craig: Our listeners have given us an answer.

John: Drew, do you want to read us… Apparently, a bunch of people wrote in, but this guy was first?

Drew: Yeah, we had a lot of people write in. Duncan Brantley was the first one, who said, “In Episode 597 you were wondering about the origin of the old-timey gold miner’s happy dance when he strikes the mother lode. One source is definitely Walter Huston’s amazing boot-stomping jig in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

John: We’ll put a link to this YouTube video. Vince, were you aware of that? Did you know that that was where this all started?

Vince: I certainly have seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and love it. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say with authority that that’s where it came from. The fellow who wrote in might well be right, yeah.

John: It’s a film directed by John Huston, but that’s Walter Huston, his father, playing the old prospector. It looks like the original thing. You can imagine that performance, and you get the animated version of it, and it gets more and more cartoony in our memory. That was probably where it all started.

Craig: He slaps his knee as he does the dance. Everything seems to have flown from there. It seems like my old buddy Ash Brannon has written in.

John: Drew, tell us what Ash Brannon said.

Drew: Ash says, “I can fill you in on the prospector character in Toy Story 2, as I was on the film as the co-director, story co-creator, and character designer. When Pete Docter, Jeff Pidgeon, and I started breaking the story in a big empty room, we were given a premise, Woody is stolen by a toy collector, but not much beyond that. My first question was, what would make Woody valuable to a toy collector? That led us to concocting the Howdy Doody style series circa 1950s.

“Running with the Western theme, we built a tropey cast around Sheriff Woody, and a prospector sidekick just felt right. Jessie started as a talking cactus, by the way, more proof that bad ideas can lead to good ones. Character-wise, Jessie and Bullseye are very much like their TV counterparts, but with the prospector we deliberately went 180 degrees from the TV series bumbling idiot. Being the lead antagonist, he needed to be smart and manipulative, so we found this perfect opportunity to create a sophisticated intellectual who’s forever trapped in the body of a bumbling idiot.”

John: Aha. Once again, we have the greatest listeners on earth, because not only did they give us the oor [ph] text for the prospector, we actually have a writer-director from Toy Story 2 there to answer our questions.

Craig: That makes total sense that Kelsey Grammer would be forced to act like this goofy idiot. Then it’s a little bit like Alan Rickman in-

Vince: Galaxy Quest.

Craig: Yeah, exactly, in Galaxy Quest, this guy that’s used to performing Shakespeare on stage in England being forced to wear this crap and say these dumb lines like, “By Grabthar’s hammer.” Yet as I’ve often pointed out, I don’t think anything has made me cry harder in a science-fiction movie than Alan Rickman saying to a dying alien, “By Grabthar’s hammer, I will avenge thee.”

Vince: Great moment.

John: So good. Vince Gilligan, how can we best fast-forward from you winning the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Competition to being the television titan that you are today? What are some of those early steps? This is Virginia. Obviously, you’re there for school. When did you come to Los Angeles? When did you start coming to your work in film and television? What was that transition for you?

Vince: It was basically win the contest and then have an interstitial title that says, “And then a bunch of lucky stuff happened.” There was an awful lot of good luck involved. Before that, there was five years or thereabouts of me living in my home state of Virginia.

This was after winning that contest, 1989. Winning that contest put me in touch with Mark Johnson, who I’ve been working with really ever since, for the last, gosh, what is it now, 35 years, 36 years, whatever it is. Mark Johnson, he was a producer on the movie Rain Man, which had won the Oscar just months before I met him, when he shook my hand as one of the judges of the screenwriting contest in 1989. He contacted me after the contest and said, “Do you have any other scripts?” I sent him what I had. I had a couple other movie scripts I had written in the meantime.

Always good advice, which I’m sure you guys have given many times before, is don’t just write that one script and then rest on your laurels. Write that one and put it aside and then start writing a second one. Back then I had that kind of self-starting self-discipline. I don’t really possess that anymore, but I had it then, and so I had a couple of other scripts to show Mark Johnson after he had expressed interest in my first one.

Then basically five years of living in Virginia, trying to be a movie writer and trying to do it from a distance. John, my hat is off to you, because I was not cut out for the movie business. It’s a tough business. The emotional rollercoaster you’re on as a movie writer, at least in my experience.

If TV hadn’t come along to save me in about 1994, I know you guys wouldn’t be interviewing me now. I’m not sure where I’d be. I’d be writing for the PennySaver or something. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, for folks who do that. I don’t know what I’d be doing, but I wouldn’t be-

Craig: I don’t think there’s a lot of editorial work at the PennySaver.

Vince: I would’ve changed that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: [Crosstalk 00:12:24].

Craig: This one PennySaver is full of fantastic writing. Maybe it is that your mind is more creatively speaking, that you feel like you’re more suited for television, or is it just that the business of features was enough to grind you down, whereas the business of television fits your speed a little bit better?

Vince: I think writing is writing. I think there’s wonderful movie scripts being written, wonderful TV scripts being written, and then everything along the spectrum all the way to bad. I think writing is writing. In TV, the writer is the boss. In movies, they are the polar opposite of the boss. That’s the problem. Unless you get to a point you’re like a John August where people pay attention to you as a movie writer in the various meetings that you go to around Los Angeles, New York, and whatnot.

The experience I had, if someone had designed some sort of fiendish mental torture, they couldn’t have done a better job than the process of you write a script, whoever you’re in that particular meeting says, “Oh my god. We love it. We love it. Oh, we love it. Sit and wait by your phone. Be around tomorrow. Do not leave the house.” This is back in the day before cellphones. I can’t tell you how many times I was told by various producers, by various studio executives, “Wait by your phone, because we’re going to be calling you tomorrow with further instructions. This is a go project.” Then you literally cut to the phone has cobwebs on it. It hasn’t rang. It was torture.

The movie business was torture. The TV business can absolutely… Every business has its torturous moments. In the TV business, until somebody fucks it up… Can I curse on this, by the way?

Craig: You can.

John: You absolutely can. You’re required to.

Craig: You fucking can.

Vince: Until we take what works about the TV business and take all the wrong lessons from the movie business… I say this as a member of the Directors Guild as well, but there is a push currently to make… I don’t even know if this comes from the DGA as much as it’s coming from executives at various streamers and various studios and whatnot, networks. “The writers are okay, but directors, now that’s who you want running a TV show.” Then you cut to some superstar director directing the first 48 minutes of a TV show and then shuffling off to Buffalo. Then who’s running it after that? It’s the writer. It’s the showrunner, who is another way of saying the head writer, and his or her staff of wonderful other writers. There seems to be a push now to change that. If that happens, then you’re going to have a TV business that’s more like what’s happening in the movie business.

Craig: I won’t stick around for that business if that happens, as a refugee from features to television. You mentioned directors. I don’t know how many episodes of television you’ve made. You probably have lost count yourself. Across all those, but particularly across the ones where you’ve been the showrunner, you’ve worked with a lot of directors. I’m curious, from your point of view, what do you think makes a good episodic TV director versus a not so good one. Maybe think about that from the point of view of both the quality of the work they do but also the experience of working with them.

Vince: Great question. I think there’s a lot of overlap about what makes a great TV director versus what makes a great movie director. I think like writing is writing, directing is directing. I hope everything I just said a minute ago does not denigrate the process of directing for TV. It’s a crucial job. Directors, especially the great ones, and I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of great ones, the value they add to the process is immeasurable.

I think a great director, and I’ll say this movie or TV, a great director looks at the script, looks at the story, and says, “This is the story we’re telling.” Then they look to do everything in their power, with every decision they make, with the wardrobe, the props, the locations, certainly the casting. They’re looking at telling one story that everyone agrees is the story. It’s really the same skill set in either version. Television directors typically have to listen to the input of the writer, of the showrunner, more than they do in movies. I can’t tell you how many times I was not even allowed to be on the set.

Craig: I was going to say, that’s quite an understatement.

Vince: I think a smart director, whether they have to, quote unquote, have to listen or not, I think a smart director, just like a smart anybody in these mediums, listens to these people around them. By the way, this absolutely goes for showrunners too, writer-showrunners in TV. If you stop listening to your directors, conversely, if you stop listening to the people around you, you’re just bound to fail. Both these mediums are the ultimate in collaborative mediums, movies and TV.

You get this vibe that movies are not so collaborative, that it’s all about the directors and their vision. Anyone who forgets that either one of these lines of endeavor is a collaborative medium forgets it at their own peril. You have to surround yourself with smart people. You don’t have to do anything, but I think you’re foolish to not surround yourself with smart people and then not listen to them. That’s just the height of arrogance and egotism and ultimately self-destructiveness.

John: Craig, you’ve had your own experiences with The Last of Us, the first time you were working with a series of different directors. Did you learn a lot?

Craig: I did. It’s interesting. For Chernobyl we had one director, a director that worked on Breaking Bad, in fact, Johan Renck, who directed a couple great episodes of Breaking Bad. I had a fantastic relationship with Johan. It was easy to learn one person’s rhythm and language and their quirks, because it’s an interesting relationship.

I try to be the kind of person that I always wished the feature directors I worked with had been, which is to say yes, I do get the final vote, yes, I am in charge, however let’s work to agree, and let’s treat each other with as much respect as possible and let’s let everybody else know around us that we are both integral and just as important as each other, which really doesn’t happen much in features.

Vince: It does not.

Craig: Working with multiple directors, it’s a little bit like new actors coming in. You just have to get very flexible very quickly, because everyone’s different. You have to learn their rhythms and their quirks afresh. Hopefully, they understand that they are stepping into rushing water, because there’s been a lot of stuff that’s happened before they showed up, and there’s going to be a lot of stuff that happens after they leave.

The other thing that I think is important hopefully to find with directors is directors that understand that ultimately you as the showrunner are going to be responsible for the edit. I don’t know about how you go about these things, Vince, but there are times where you just feel like you need something. You have to almost negotiate a little bit with your own directors to make sure you get the things that you think you’ll need, even if ultimately it turns out you didn’t need it.

Vince: You described it very well just now, Craig. The buck stops with you as a showrunner just like the buck stops with the director on a movie set. Wherever the buck stops, it is good advice to that person, to that decider, listen to people around you. Ultimately, yeah, you gotta make a decision, but be as collaborative as you can be.

Communication is nine tenths of it, I feel like. If you need certain things in the finished footage, you need to communicate that. The time to do that is in pre-production. Pre-production is ultimately probably more important than production. You would have these epic tone meetings. I guess you do them in movies too.

Craig: Not really. I wish we would.

John: We really don’t. It’d be better if we did.

Vince: You’re right. You’re right.

Craig: It’s a shame.

Vince: I was trying to be magnanimous toward the movie business.

Craig: Don’t be.

Vince: I think directors certainly could do them in movies. In just focusing on television, the tone meeting is where the writer of the episode, and usually the showrunner as well, and sometimes that’s the same person, very often the producers will sit with the director for hours. We’ve had tone meetings that have gone 9, 10 hours. We’ll break them up. Sometimes we’ll break them up over two days or whatever. We’re not trying to numb everybody’s butts into submission by sitting there talking for nine hours or whatnot.

We’re basically going through the script from Page 1 to where it says the end. We’re going through and talking through. This is after the bulk of the pre-production is figured out, after the locations have been picked, the guest actors have been cast, all that kind of thing. It’s the final opportunity for the director and the writer/showrunner to get on the same page.

It works best when it flows both ways. If it’s just the showrunner dictating to the director, “This is what I want. I don’t want any Dutch angles. I want this. I want that. I want a 70-foot Technocrane,” you can do it that way if you want, but it works best when it goes both ways, when the director asks the showrunner just as many questions.

You want someone who’s a collaborative artist, just as you and your best version of yourself want to be a collaborative artist, but you also want someone who has a point of view. The best directors are not the ones who just roll over and say, “Tell me how to do it, boss.” The best directors are going to give you things you’ve never even conceived of. The best directors I’ve worked with and the ones I work with over and over again don’t just roll over and say, “Tell me what to do.” They say, “Here’s what I’m thinking here.”

We had a wonderful director on Better Call Saul, Larysa Kondracki. We always have these big teasers. There was a teaser in an episode she directed. We had a scene at the US-Mexican border. At this moment I’m drawing a blank what happens in the damn scene, but I know it was epic. We had it in our heads, it’s going to be dozens of shots and dozens of setups. She said, “I want to do this whole thing as a oner.”

Craig: I remember this. I remember this one.

Vince: She explained it to us way in advance. She said, “When I read this, I pictured it as one shot.” I remember hearing this and thinking, “That’s nuts. You can’t do this as one shot.” Damned if she didn’t. She talked us into it. It wasn’t that hard for her to talk us into it, because she basically pitched it to us. “Picture this. You’re here, and you’re on this thing. You go up the row of vehicles,” and blah blah blah.

It was just brilliant the way she did it. That was not the intention of the folks in the writers’ room when we came up with it. We just figured standard. It was great. It was much more memorable than it would’ve been the way we had in mind. That’s what you’re looking for.

She communicated that to us as soon as she had the idea, basically. She talked us into it, which as I say, was not hard, because it was so cool. Then every department worked with that image, with that idea in mind, worked through the process of making it, because we had to build a US-Mexican border at Double Eagle Airport just to the west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Everything then going forward in the pre-production was designed to make it work as well as possible for that oner. That to me is when it’s working best. It starts with communication, clearly.

Craig: One of the things that you’re digging into here is how much planning is involved in things. Just taking a step back from production and just going back to the act of creation and planning out the stories that you want to tell, one of the hallmarks I think of what you do is this constant balance between surprise and planning.

The example that I want to use is the floating teddy bear in the pool, the opening episode in Season 2 of Breaking Bad. There is something that is so weird about it and surprising and confusing, and yet when all is said and done and you arrive at the end of that season, you understand exactly what’s going on. It all has led to this inevitable concept that is harrowing and way more upsetting than you ever thought it was going to be.

I’m just curious, as you go about thinking about story and how to divide story up across episodes and fill out a season, how do you find the weirdness and then balance it across the structure of things? That was so weird, and yet also so structured.

Vince: I wish I had an answer that always applied, but it really is a case-by-case thing. The storytelling I think is best is organic storytelling, which is where you start with a character. The character revealing themself to you, the writer, precipitates the plot. That’s to me organic, starting with character, working out from that.

Sometimes you’re just restless in the writers’ room, and you get real inorganic from time to time. That is probably a good example of inorganic storytelling where, to the best of my recollection… I’m not being coy or vague as to who said what. Honestly, I forget who said what, which I think the writers’ room is chugging along best when you forget who gets credit for what idea. I think in that case, my vague memory of it now all these years later is I was just thinking, “This is a visual medium,” and I’m always saying that, “I want something really cool to look at here, opening up this season.” Season 2 I think is what it was.

I don’t know who came up with it. It’s a group effort as always, but just, “I want something weird and random.” That was as inorganic as it gets, because it was the idea of the pool in Walter White’s backyard, which by the way, this is, again, such a collaborative medium.

The only time I ever worked on that show by myself was coming up with the pilot. When I was coming up with the pilot, and that’s for my money the least successful episode, my least favorite episode, the one I basically came up with on my own.

Craig: We might have to quibble a little bit there with you on that one. Possibly the greatest pilot of all time, but okay, go ahead.

Vince: I love all the subsequent episodes so much more, and I think in part because I wasn’t alone in the wilderness anymore. I’m getting in the weeds here. Let me try to keep on subject.

The pool in the backyard of Walter White’s house, I don’t think it was important to me. I don’t even think I thought he would necessarily have a pool. I probably thought he wouldn’t have a pool, because the guy’s hurting for money. It seems like a status symbol to have a pool.

This house that we picked, you wind up driving around in a van with all these folks, and you see this house, and you say, “I think this is the house. Something about this feels right. Oh, it’s got a pool in the backyard. For a guy who’s hurting for money, that seems… What the hell? Let’s go with the pool.” Then the pool became a touchstone for this guy. Now we have Season 1, and he’s sitting by the pool from the pilot on. The pool feels important on some weird, symbolic level, although I can’t explain what this symbolism adds up to.

Then we’re sitting around in the writers’ room in the early days of Season 2, and it’s, “What if something’s floating in the pool? What would it be? I don’t know, what if it’s a teddy bear? How did that teddy bear get there? Who the fuck knows?”

Craig: That’s interesting, because I was going to ask what comes first. Spoiler alert, by the time you get to the end of the season, someone has died from drugs. That person’s father works as an air traffic controller. The air traffic controller is distracted and distraught and makes an error that leads to a plane crash.

Vince: Exactly.

Craig: The plane crash results in debris being scattered over Albuquerque, including this scorched teddy bear that belonged obviously to some now-dead child, that lands in Walter White’s pool. The question was, what comes first, the bear or the crash? It sounds like the bear comes first. Then you go, “How did that get there?” That leads you to the airplane. Wow.

Vince: I think so, to the best of my memory. I do not recommend. Listen, by the way. If it takes standing on your head until the blood rushes to your head and you pass out, if that’s what it takes to get to where you ultimately want to be, so be it. Short of doing yourself physical harm or certainly anyone else, whatever it takes is whatever it takes.

The best kind of storytelling, to repeat the thought, is from character outward. Every now and then you cheat. Every now and then you get bored. You try to jumpstart the process. I think in that case, it was from some crazy image outward.

It’s a little bit of schmuck bait I guess you could say. We’re trying to mystify the audience at the beginning of Season 2. There’s a burnt teddy bear floating in this pool. Its plastic eyeballs come out in a skimmer. There must’ve been violence done at the Walter White house. There must’ve been a shoot-out. Except we’re looking at the house, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any signs of an explosion or a fire at the house.

Craig: People gather some of it with an evidence bag, which makes you-

Vince: Exactly.

Craig: … think even further there was some sort of crime.

Vince: Exactly. Exactly. Even in that, we were careful not to schmuck bait it too much. We showed the house right from the opening images. You see the house. The windows are still intact. The house is not burned down, that kind of thing. You see a body bag. It’s a partially full body bag, which I guess is the way it would be after a plane blew up mid-air. It’s just little pieces of people. Then you work outward. We thought, “We’re going to make the audience think there was some terrible violence here,” but then the idea of a plane crash came fairly quickly.

The one thing that was crucial was, it can’t be just some random happenstance thing. It has to be because Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, put the wheels into motion that led to debris raining down on his house. The one thing we knew for sure we were dead set on is it can’t just be a random thing. It has to relate back to Walter White’s actions. His actions have to have these terrible karmic effects upon the world. He has that kind of power over this particular fictional universe, whether he knows it or not. It’s not even a sure thing that he understood that he was responsible. He wouldn’t take responsibility in any way. He’s not that kind of guy.

Craig: He would figure out how to avoid moral responsibility.

Vince: Exactly.

John: Vince, I hear you talking about the origin of this idea, this image. You’re using we the whole time through. This is all a thing that’s coming out of the writers’ room as you’re trying to put together Season 2. You don’t even quite know whose idea it was to come up with the teddy bear, but it was not just one brain. It’s a bunch of brains working together and working in sync.

How did you assemble your writers’ room? How did you pick the writers you wanted to be in that room with you? How did you manage that? That’s such a different skill than being a writer working alone is figuring out how to harness the power of a bunch of writers. You obviously had staffed on X-Files coming up, but what was it like to be the showrunner with a bunch of writers working for you?

Vince: I didn’t think I’d like it. I could spend a whole podcast talking about how lucky I was to be on The X-Files, what it taught me, what working for Chris Carter and those other writers taught me, because I had never been in a room before with other writers. Having said that, X-Files was so episodic that we writers worked in a collaborative way, helping each other out, but it was an informal way. We didn’t really have a writers’ room per se on The X-Files.

John: Because it doesn’t build from episode to episode.

Vince: Exactly. Exactly.

Craig: It’s not serialized.

Vince: Exactly. When it’s a serialized show and you have a writers’ room, at least the way we’ve been doing it for 15 years, it has to be all hands on deck, plugging away. On The X-Files, I’d be in my office working on an episode about thus and so, and Frank Spotnitz would be in his office and doing another episode. John Shiban would be in another office banging away on yet again another episode. We were helpful to each other as far as banging ideas off each other, but it was a different kind of beast.

Before that even, before I had that experience, I was just working by myself. I didn’t know I’d like it working in a writers’ room. I didn’t know that I’d fit in well. I thought there’s a real chance I might be a real square peg in a round hole there. I might not fit in. I might hate it. Secretly, I want to do it all myself, because I’ve got that vanity of wanting to write it all myself. I thought I would feel that way. A writers’ room is a great adventure.

How did I get the writers for Breaking Bad? Ironically, I had the priceless help of a non-writer, my producer, Melissa Bernstein, who is a genius producer and a really excellent director as well at this point. When Breaking Bad was starting off, she and I both were starting off. She was the assistant to Mark Johnson. She was basically sitting on his desk, as we say in Hollywood. She was the one sitting on the desk outside his office and answering his phones.

When Breaking Bad started, Mark said, “You’re going to need a day-to-day producer. How about Melissa?” Just smart as a whip, but had never done that job before. Grew into it beautifully. Now she’s off running I think House of the Dragon in London as we record this. They’re lucky to have her.

John: Melissa’s fantastic. She was involved with Arlo Finch. She’s great.

Vince: She is fantastic. How I found the writers, she found them for me. This was back in the days before everything was set digitally and read on an iPad. I saw it in her office. She had a seven-foot-tall pile of printed paper scripts. She read through them all and winnowed them down to a pile that was, I don’t know, maybe less than a foot tall. Then I read those. Every writer I hired for that first season was in that pile, including Peter Gould, who wound up running-

Craig: Better Call Saul.

Vince: Yeah, co-creating Better Call Saul with me and then running it, running it brilliantly. I didn’t know him from Adam before I read his script in that short pile of scripts that Melissa had winnowed down. That’s how I came to find these folks. They just turned out to be a murderous row of writers in that first season and beyond.

Listen, again, to reiterate, once you get this job, do it any damn way you please. Just try to be kind to people. You’re not curing cancer. It’s just a TV show. There’s no excuse to be nasty to people.

If you get this job and you can write every episode by yourself, more power to you, but the way it works best for me is being in a room, getting everyone emotionally invested in the story at hand and the characters at hand and the story you’re telling, and then not keeping score as to who said what, really.

There’s that old expression, I didn’t make it up, but to paraphrase it, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re not keeping score, when you’re not accounting for who said what. I really hew to that. Every now and then I remember who said what in the room, when it was some highlight moment that made us all erupt into laughter or whatever.

As an example, we had an episode where we’ve got the actor Danny Trejo plays a character who gets his head chopped off with a machete. We came up with this moment where, “What happened to this guy?”

Craig: So great.

Vince: This guy’s severed head is on a giant desert tortoise. They painted on the tortoise “Hola DEA.” We came up with that. That was a group effort. We came up with that. I was so tickled by that image and so excited about putting it into an episode of Breaking Bad that I basically said, “We should just call it a day right there. We should take an early lunch, because I think we’ve done all the work we need to do for the day.”

George Mastras, one of our wonderful writers, the show, he had been quiet. He had been pitching in on this thing, but he was quiet for a minute. He said, “Yeah, but then what happens?” I said, “What do you mean? You got a head on a tortoise. What else do you need?” He says, “I think the head should blow up.” Everyone said, “What?” I said, “George, man, let’s take the win here. That’s like gilding the lily.”

John: Hat on a hat.

Vince: A hat on a hat. God, we love that expression. We use that one all the time.

Craig: It wasn’t.

Vince: It wasn’t. Literally, I kind of scoffed and said, “George, we don’t need to do that. We don’t need that.” He shrugged and said, “Seems like it’s… ” I thought about it, and I said, “Oh shit, you’re right.” That’s how the scene ends. It would’ve been an okay scene, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as, I love the expression Kubrick used, non-submergible. It would not have been a true non-submergible scene if the head hadn’t blown up. That was George.

You’re working together in this room. What I’m trying to achieve is have one brain almost instead of six or seven or eight brains. It’s worked well for us. Again, like I say, do it any way you want when it’s your show.

John: I don’t have a good sense of both of these shows. Are the writers figuring out the season. How many scripts are you ahead before we start production. Are those writers still around as you’re in production?

Vince: You were as ahead as many as you could possibly be. We had all kinds of different experiences. We had experiences where we were only maybe four or five ahead. Was it the final season of Better Call Saul or the one before it? It’s amazing what I can’t remember. We’ve had experiences toward the end of the run of Better Call Saul where we had every episode broken. Oh, man, is that the dream. That is the dream.

People say, “That’s not every episode written.” The writing is the easy part. The breaking is the hard part. You put that many people in a room together for 9, 10 hours a day for 5 days a week, months on end, and having the whole thing figured out with index cards on a corkboard. That’s the hard part.

The theory that we apply to it is, once that episode is broken, in other words, once every story is hammered out and put on these index cards, then any one of us, whoever’s responsible for that episode, or if they drop dead that week, anyone else could just jump write in and write it themselves. Everybody knows that everybody had an equal hand in coming up with it. One writer writes the draft and gets credit for it, and that’s not nothing. That’s important. There’s invention to be had writing the draft.

You have as many ahead as you can possibly have, because then selfishly, as the showrunner, or as the co-showrunner in the case of Better Call Saul, then I get a chance to actually be on the set. Maybe I get a chance to direct more.

If you’re working one episode ahead, which is basically what we did on the first season of Breaking Bad, then you just feel like you just barely got your nose in the water, feel like you’re about to drown any second. You can’t really do all the other parts of the job that are the more fun things, the location scouting, picking props, picking costumes, blah blah blah. You just don’t have time for it all in that version.

Craig: One thing that occurs to me as I hear you talk about your room and the way, it makes sense, you’re trying to create this joint brain that all thinks aligned, the joint brain is, however, aligning itself ultimately to your brain if you are running the show. If I were in a room for one of your shows, I would certainly be desperate to make you happy.

I guess my question is, and this is going to be a hard one for you, because you are, and I’m sure people are picking up on this, just inherently decent and humble person, but what do you think is different about the way you think and work compared maybe to other people that work in television? Because you do seem to have this ability to come up with work that just people are obsessed with and I think is obviously quality work. What’s going on? Have you thought about what separates you or what makes you different? Because I think a lot of people listening would be inspired to perhaps be more like you if they knew exactly what it meant to be like you.

Vince: That’s very flattering. It probably tends to come across as somewhat falsely modest at some of these kind of situations, but it really is the truth. Also, you’re only a genius for as long as you’re a genius. Breaking Bad was lightning in a bottle. Better Call Saul, lightning strike twice for us. Then we were so lucky that it’s hit twice. This next thing I’m working on, it’s just as likely, if not more likely, that everyone will say, “Ugh.”

Craig: Listen. God knows I can identify with that. It does seem like lightning doesn’t really strike twice just randomly. There are things that you stress or that you emphasize, things that you go for, things that you try and do that set your shows apart. By the way, your shows are also traditional in that they are commercially interrupted, whereas all the highfalutin streaming shows aren’t. You’re still writing in this, what I would call the commercially interrupted format.

Vince: You’re right.

Craig: You are doing it at a level that I think puts so much of the so-called PTV streaming to shame. I guess I’ll rephrase to let you off the self-praise hook. What advice would you give to a creator who’s about to run a show? This is purely creative advice, not functional, not procedural, just creatively, advice on how to make something great as opposed to just good.

Vince: Starting with what you just said about commercially interrupted, it’s interesting. Before the strike started and we were in a writers’ room, we’re working on a new project for Apple. The sky’s the limit basically. This is the first time I’ve non-commercially-supported project.

When we created Breaking Bad, we created squarely for AFC. Then luckily, Netflix came along and was a wonderful second broadcaster or medium or whatever the proper terminology is. X-Files before that, these are created for ad-supported television, so we did what we had to do. Now I’ve really fallen in love with that art form.

Even now in this Apple show where we could do it however we choose to do it, we are still queueing to this teaser and four-act structure. We’re still using the same structure on this new show as we were using 30 years ago on The X-Files. What was created years before I ever got in the business, what was created out of necessity for an ad-supported business, I think actually has benefits, even now that we don’t have to hew to it.

I think there’s benefits. They are storytelling and structural benefits when you’re thinking in terms of, “We got a teaser, and then we’re going to do some sort of title sequence. Then we have Act 1. By the dramatic necessities of storytelling, this act has to end with some reason to keep watching.” I think that works whether you have commercials or not.

If you’re building toward these mini climaxes, and I like that, four mini climaxes, well, three and then one big climax at the end of the hour that makes you want to tune in next week, or in the case of streaming, not interrupt the thing when it immediately starts playing the next episode, I think there’s real benefit to that. I certainly didn’t invent that. It was thrust upon us on X-Files. I love it. I continue with it. I think that helps focus my thinking as a storyteller. There’s that.

These are just thoughts. Again, the beauty of this job is you can do it any damn way you want. I would say to folks getting that wonderful opportunity to do this, don’t necessarily throw away all the old ways of doing things, because there was good reasons for them sometimes. Hire the smartest people, both in front of and behind the camera, and then listen to them. Try to set your ego aside. It’s not false modesty or real modesty or whatever. It’s just plain old meat and potatoes kind of common sense.

We get so much credit for this job. Showrunners get so much credit. It’s turned into this sexy job. God knows how that happened. You’re never going to starve for credit. You’re going to get plenty if your show is doing well. When you don’t try to hog it all, the people who work with you are happier, and they give you even more of what you want from them, which is to say their best work. There are so many benefits.

My business manager always says he’s talking about money, not about credit. He always says the expression, “Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.” Try not to hog the spotlight too much, because you’re going to get pats on the head and pats on the back you don’t even deserve in the first place.

What happened with Breaking Bad and what I’m trying to do with this new thing is look around and see what everyone else is doing and try to zig a little bit if everyone else is zagging.

Craig: There you go. There you go. I’ve been waiting.

Vince: That’s to me, using Breaking Bad as an example. I looked around. I love television. I watch a lot of old TV and new stuff. I love the medium, period. I was looking around in the early 2000s, the mid-2000s, and I said, “What is everyone doing now?”

All the shows had a somewhat similar look to them in that everyone was framing for head and shoulders mostly. Every now and then you’d see a cowboy or from the waist up or from the thighs up, or every now and then you’d show somewhat full body, but the framing was tight in the early and mid-2000s.

Just looking around and observing what was going on, what everyone else was doing, what didn’t make sense to me then was that the framing wasn’t changing, even though we had the advent of big-screen TVs. We were going for more squarish, 3-by-4 tube TVs that were maybe maxed out at 34, 36, 32 inches probably. Suddenly there’s these plasma TVs and then later LCD and LED flat screens that were 16 by 9. If you had the money back then, you could have a giant screen that’s taking up most of your living room, and yet still people are framing super tight on people’s faces. What’s the point? You got this new tool now.

That was part of what I was looking for. That’s not story so much. That’s more from a directorial point of view. You look around at stuff like that, what are people doing. If you start with that, that can hold you instead.

Craig: That’s excellent advice. You’ve just put something in my brain that I had never considered, which is that the rise of so-called peak TV or the golden age of television that we’re living in corresponds very closely to the introduction of the 16-by-9 television format, that the format itself had led to a certain kind of constriction of TV, both visual and storytelling-wise. That’s fascinating. It never occurred to me. I’m sure a thousand people are going to write in now saying, “Hey, idiot, there have already been a hundred articles about that.”

John: Or if they’re not, they’re writing an article right now.

Craig: They’re writing right now. Some listicle is being generated as we speak. That’s a great observation. I think going the other way, as you said, zigging when people are zagging, it doesn’t necessarily lead you to an original idea or thought. What it does is set you up to look for one that you are not copying, you’re not sitting in the same groove as everyone else.

It’s hard sometimes because the television movie business is designed to urge you to copy, because that’s what makes people who don’t write things safe. It makes them feel safe, at least. Probably actually puts them in great danger. For us, I think making a virtue of doing something different, that’s excellent advice.

John: Agreed.

Vince: Thank you. I hope it is, but I don’t know how practical it is, ultimately, because the two scariest letters in the world right now, in this business at least, are AI, but a close second is IP.

Craig: I hear you.

Vince: The folks listening, I think it’s good advice. I don’t know if it’s good advice. I think it’s just good practice to try to do something original, try to come up with your best version of something that no one’s ever done before. Good luck with that.

I do believe there’s only so many stories in the world. That doesn’t keep me up at night, because I think there’s only a finite number of human emotions, so therefore there’s only a finite number of stories.

If you can do everything you can to make your work as original as possible, good on you, more power to you. Just know that you’re going to be swimming against the current when it comes to most of the decision makers in this business, both in TV and movies. They want IP. They want intellectual property. They want existing stories.

Craig: Even inside those, Vince, I think that there’s an opportunity. We’ve been talking about the Dungeons and Dragons movie, which is a delight. That’s the most IP IP-ish-ness that you can get, or the Lego movies.

Vince: True.

Craig: Best example that there are ways inside of IP to do the different thing, to do something that people aren’t expecting even inside of that.

Vince: Absolutely.

Craig: You are right, there are only so many stories. There are only so many human emotions. There’s only 12 keys on the piano keyboard really. There’s only six strings on a guitar, and people keep coming up with new songs. I don’t know how.

Vince: If we lived in a world that’s completely flipped on its head and no one wanted something from some other existing property turned into a TV show, for instance, we wouldn’t have The Last of Us. Thank god we have The Last of Us.

Craig: Thank god.

Vince: No, seriously. What a brilliant show.

Craig: Thank you.

Vince: You know what it is? It’s just about absolutism. It’s just as bad, like I say, if we lived in bizarro Hollywood where they said, “No. If it’s been done before, you can’t. God knows you can’t have another Star Wars. God forbid, because it’s already been done. We need nothing but originality,” that really would be bizarro Hollywood.

Craig: That would be a very strange Hollywood. You’re right. I think going too far in either direction is a mess. Hollywood’s always looked to books before there were… We’ll be discussing this on our bonus segment. Movies look to television. Television looks to movies. Everybody’s looking at each other. Now they’re looking at toys and video game narratives.

Ultimately, I think if you come at these things creatively, as if it’s original, you come at it with all the care that you would for something that is your own, which basically means instead of somebody calling you up and saying, “Hey, we got this thing. You want to do it?” and then you’re already probably in a rough spot, if you can find something and then take it somewhere and go, “I love this thing. I want to make a thing into a thing,” probably you’re off on a better foot there.

Vince: Absolutely. God, if you don’t have enthusiasm for… It’s so easy to fall prey to this. I wanted to have this job back before I even knew what the name of this job was. I wanted to have it so badly, I would’ve probably chopped off a pinky finger or something to get it.

At a certain point, it’s like, what are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to be a showrunner, or do you have a story to tell? It’s so seductive to do this. “Here, do this show. Go off and run this show.” When it’s that kind of scenario, when someone suggests, “Hey, why don’t you do this,” there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s perfectly a moral, valid thing to do.

If you have to manufacture, if you have to find the enthusiasm for something because you want the job, versus just coming off the street if you can manage to get through the door and say, “I don’t even know what you call that job, but I got this story I want to tell,” that’s a naïve way of looking at it, because it doesn’t really work like that, but I wish it did.

Craig: Same.

Vince: That’s the way I wish it worked always.

Craig: Fantastic. I wish I could talk to Vince all day. I really do.

Vince: Great for my ego.

Craig: Is no one else telling you this stuff? Is it just us?

Vince: My wife, Holly, is very careful to not let me-

Craig: Good.

Vince: … get too big for my britches as we say.

Craig: Our spouses do the same for us, no question.

Vince: They’re doing us all a great favor.

John: Our spouses too, for sure.

Craig: Indeed, indeed.

John: We wrap up every episode with our One Cool Things. I think we warned you about this. Something you would like to recommend to the audience. Do you have something you want to pass along?

Vince: I got a twofer. I’ll make it quick.

Craig: Great.

Vince: A TV show-

John: Please.

Vince: … that I’d be amazed if anyone listening to this has heard of. I may be wrong. I have a TV show I love so much right now. It’s called Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre. This is on a channel called Retro.

Craig: There’s a channel called Retro?

Vince: There’s a channel called Retro TV. It’s out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I think you can find their live feed on the internet. Other than that, it’s over the air or nothing.

John: Wow.

Vince: I use an over-the-air antenna I bought at Walmart. I watch a lot of over-the-air television.

Craig: God. Wow.

Vince: Retro TV is one thing I get if I adjust the antenna just right and the wind’s not blowing too hard.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: It’s a show these three or four guys do I think out of Chattanooga. Basically it’s Dracula, the vampire king. You turn on the episode every week, and he is in his castle in Transylvania, and he is sharing his bitching collection of VHS kung-fu movies with you, one movie a week.

Craig: Oh my god.

Vince: He’s got a werewolf in a cage. The werewolf hands him the tape of the week, and he puts the tape into a VHS tape player that’s sat on a cart with a tube TV. He does the intro every week. He tells you about that week’s kung-fu movie, some movie from the ’70s.

Craig: Oh my gosh.

Vince: Then literally, they cut to the tube TV, which plays the movie for two hours.

Craig: Oh, that’s awesome.

Vince: I love the show so damn much.

John: Amazing.

Vince: I can’t even tell you. I would recommend. I bought a T-shirt from them and everything. I’ve got a Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre T-shirt. I love these guys. They make this show for 29 cents.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: It doesn’t matter they have no money to spend. It is so fun, and it is so charming, and it is so witty, a lot of the banter. He’s just this really funny version of Dracula, and he loves kung-fu movies. That’s my first recommendation.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Vince: Then Alien Tape. Alien Tape. Probably no one listening to this watches over-the-air commercials anymore. Everyone is too smart. Everyone’s way smarter than me. They’re not sitting through the commercials. I watch a lot of over-the-air TV, and therefore I have to sit through the commercials, just like we did 40 years ago.

There’s this commercial for something called Alien Tape. I’m thinking this is bullshit. It’s this clear tape that’s made out of silicone. You can stick a brick to a wall with it. I buy some of this stuff, because I’m in CVS in LA, and they’ve got an aisle of as seen on TV. I see this stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh, brother.” I wind up buying it, because what the hell? This shit is for real. This stuff, I stuck up my over-the-air antenna on the wall with it, but at a certain point I had to move it. I could not get this thing loose. It is so strong.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: I finally pried it loose, and I thought, “Oh, man, I’ve messed up the paint on my bedroom wall here.” It came off completely clean. You can run it under running water and clean it up and reuse that same piece of tape. I love this stuff.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: It is awesome.

Craig: I’m going to get some of this.

John: Fantastic.

Vince: I’m big into adhesives. I love adhesives of all kinds. They’re really cool.

Craig: I would have never predicted.

John: This is content you can’t get on any other podcast. How many interviews have you done? No one’s ever gotten your love of adhesives out of you.

Craig: He doesn’t love them. He’s big into them.

Vince: I’m big into them.

Craig: He’s big into the entire adhesives product category.

John: Yeah, big into it.

Craig: Wow.

John: I love it.

Craig: My One Cool Thing today is… Oh, jeez, I hate to recommend anything on Twitter, because Elon just keeps getting dumber and dumber. There is an account, @todayyearsold, which comes from the old memey comment, “I was today years old when I found out.” Today Years Old is dedicated to doing nothing but just running videos of things that you should’ve known that you don’t know.

For instance, yesterday some guy’s like, “Did you know that you can use the back of a claw hammer to set a nail, and that’s your first stroke in is backwards with the nail? You don’t have to hold the nail and hit it and avoid hitting your thumbs. You just wedge it in there and go whack and then you turn your hammer around and finish the job.” I was like, “Oh my god.”

There are so many little things like that, all these little life hacks. Inevitably, they always come along with somebody who’s just utterly shocked and indeed was today years old when they found so, so @todayyearsold.

Vince: That’s a good one.

John: I love that. My One Cool Thing is a video I watched this past week. It is a robot puppet who’s singing A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton. You may remember back, Vanessa Carlton’s song A Thousand Miles. You may also remember the video, because in the video for it, she’s at a piano, but the piano’s being driven all over the city. She’s basically, a hidden seat belt, she’s on this piano just being moved all over the city.

This guy created a robot puppet to do the exact same video, basically. You’d think it would just be a parody of it, but it’s actually brilliant and charming. It’s a puppet version of Vanessa Carlton singing A Thousand Miles. It’s on one of those little robot drone cars. It’s just incredibly charming. If you’re having any darkness in your day, watch this video, and it will brighten it up.

Craig: What are the odds that any of us are having darkness in our days? No dark days. What for?

John: No, there’s no dark days.

Craig: How? Why?

John: Never. Never. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. 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 Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. It’s been so nice to see them out on the picket line. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen them out on the picket line, but it’s nice. The blue WGA T-shirts, they’re fine, but you can’t wear them five days in a row. Wear your Scriptnotes shirt.

Craig: I’m wearing mine right now, actually, my blue strike shirt. Strike shirt!

John: Strike shirt. It’s not as comfortable as the Cotton Bureau shirts. I think we [crosstalk 01:05:18].

Craig: Nothing is as comfortable. I gotta tell you, I don’t know, Vince, if you like an undershirt or just a nice T-shirt.

John: We have good ones.

Craig: You gotta go to this place, Cotton Bureau.

Vince: I don’t like wearing clothes in general, but if I have to, I will, yeah.

Craig: I’m with you, man. I’m with you.

John: He’s a nudist who’s into adhesives.

Craig: Oh, man. That’s such a painful combination. I don’t like wearing clothes either, but I have to. Mostly, I go by how annoying they are to wear. Cotton Bureau, you can get yourself… Just go for the, what is it, the tri-blend I think they call it.

John: Yeah, it’s the Stuart special.

Craig: They blended together cotton with two other things that probably cause cancer, but you know what? It’s soft.

John: So soft.

Craig: It’s so soft. They don’t cause cancer. It’s very, very soft. I only wear those. That is now all I wear. Just got a whole bunch of gray Cotton Bureau undershirts, and that’s all I wear.

Vince: I am writing this down, Cotton Bureau.

John: Cottonbureau.com.

Craig: Cotton Bureau and tri-blend or something like that.

John: That’s what you want.

Craig: So soft.

John: 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 with Vince Gilligan, talking about TV shows we’d like to remake. Vince Gilligan, an absolute pleasure talking with you. I can’t believe it took 597 episodes for us to do this. Let’s do it again.

Vince: I would love doing it. You guys are really smart and a lot of fun to talk to. I had a great time. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Bonus segment. Looking through your credits, I noticed Kolchak, the Night Stalker, which is a remake of an earlier TV series. It got me thinking, what other old series would we like to remake if the opportunity came about? I’ll start. I’ve always had a soft spot for Hart to Hart. Do you guys remember Hart to Hart?

Vince: Yeah.

Craig: Of course. Of course I do.

John: Oh my god, I loved it. Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. When they met it was murder. It’s this millionaire, they’d probably be billionaires, married couple, who their friends just keep getting murdered, and they just solve the murders, just because they’re bored. It’s not even their job to solve the murders. They just happen to be around, and they solve the murders. I loved it. I feel like it could be a fun show to do.

Vince: That’s a great show. That in and of itself I’m assuming was a riff on the Thin Man series of movies. Have you guys ever seen Jon Hamm and Adam Scott do the reboot of the Hart to Hart title sequence and Simon and Simon?

Craig: No, I haven’t seen that.

Vince: It’s great.

John: It’s really worth seeing.

Vince: It is.

John: Adam Scott has a series with John Hamm where it’s like the greatest remake ever made or the greatest film ever made. They basically will painstakingly recreate moments. One of the things is the Hart to Hart opening sequence.

Craig: That’s hysterical. Do you think these days it’s a little strange to think of Robert Wagner as a character who is constantly around people being murdered, because he was famously around when his wife, Natalie Wood, died.

John: Died in an accident.

Craig: Eh…

John: I don’t know. I do wonder how you’d do it now. I guess inspired by, we haven’t talked about Rian Johnson at all this episode, which is strange, but Rian Johnson’s-

Craig: That’s right.

John: His series with Natasha Lyonne, Poker Face, takes what we love so much about Columbo and finds a way to do it in modern times. I wonder what the 2023 update of Hart to Hart would be. I feel like it could be done. We still got rich people. We still have rich beautiful people.

Vince: That’s true.

Craig: Always.

Vince: We absolutely do.

Craig: Always.

John: Craig, any thoughts for a show you’d like to do if you reached back into the vault?

Craig: Sure. It’s famously impossible to do. I know this because I know the gentleman who made it. It was essentially impossible for them to keep up. The television show Police Squad, which was done by Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker. It was the forerunner of the Naked Gun movies.

It is incredible. It is one of my favorite childhood memories, because my father and I both were just howling at this thing, watching the television set, our square, tiny tube television set and just the two of us just absolutely rolling on the floor. It really defines so much of what I think of as funny.

Even though a lot of the references inside of it are rather old-fashioned, those guys have always loved to make fun of the old, old fashion, and really it was keying off of Dragnet, I suppose, in its style, more than anything else, which was before my time, I absolutely adored it.

It to this day features the single best joke I have ever heard in my life. This guy finds a man in his study who’s not supposed to be there. He says, “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” The man says, “I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith.” That is the single greatest joke ever on television.

Vince: That is so smart.

Craig: It’s just so perfect. It’s full of stuff like that, absolutely full of things like that, visual jokes, weird verbal jokes. I don’t even know where you… They must be available somewhere to stream. Ultimately, David Zucker told me it was important to keep it up. You couldn’t write a show where there was a joke every 10 seconds and do it every week, week after week after week. It’s just not possible, but man, I wish it were.

Vince: Oh, man.

John: Craig, did we ever talk about Angie Tribeca? Because that’s probably the closest there’s been to a remake of it.

Craig: Yes, and that is in the style. Listen. It’s hard to hit. I should know because I’ve tried it. It’s hard to hit the heights of what those guys were able to do. It has been tried before. Maybe it was just a product of its time. Since then we’re so soaked in parody and satire everywhere we look that it’s just hard to make it seem fresh week after week. It’s really an alternate universe where it just never stopped. It just was never canceled-

John: Was always there.

Craig: … immediately, the way Police Squad was.

Vince: God, it was such a good show, Police Squad. I guess it started, as you said, with Airplane. It was so smart of those guys to hire Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges. Those guys, kudos to them for getting it back when they were making Airplane, because none of those three guys were known for comedy at all.

Craig: No. In fact, I remember David telling me that when they said, “We want Leslie Nielsen to play the doctor,” they were like, “Leslie Nielsen? Leslie Nielsen’s the guy you go to when everyone else has said no. He’s not funny.” They were like, “No no no, you don’t understand. That’s the point.” In a weird way, it’s the opposite of what you do, because you take guys like Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk and Lavell Crawford and you put them into dramatic roles. The ZAZ guys were like, “Let’s go find guys that are known for being stiffs and make a virtue out of it.” It was so much fun.

Vince: They were so much ballsier than we are. It’s easy to say, “Gee, if someone could be funny, they could play it straight.”

Craig: I’m with you on that one.

Vince: The way they did it, those guys were brilliant, Peter Graves. Oh, and Robert Stack is in there.

Craig: Robert Stack.

Vince: It’s one thing for the ZAZ guys to come up with that. My hat will eternally be off to them. Those old-school guys like Leslie Nielsen, who had a certain image that they might feel like they needed to protect, that was really ballsy of them-

Craig: It was.

Vince: … and just really great.

Craig: It was. They just went with it.

Vince: It was great. Remember the side gag in… The one I always remember in Police Squad, there was one guy in the squad, in the bull pen, who was so tall, you never saw his face. I guess they literally got a guy who was over seven feet tall. You only saw him from the shoulders down.

Craig: So great.

Vince: He’s always got a file folder in his hand. He comes up, walks past Leslie Nielsen. Leslie Nielsen says, “Hey, Bill,” or whatever his name was, “You got something on the side of your mouth.” The guy reaches up, and he says, “No, other side.” Half a banana falls down.

Craig: Yeah, just drops down. It’s so great. Oh, god. Anything in that room where they’re like, “Let me show you the… “ The guy who would show them the lab stuff, because it was always like the tall guy would go by, and then the scientist would be like, “Here, let me show you something in my microscope.” Leslie Nielsen would bend down and say, “I don’t see anything.” “Use your open eye, Frank.”

Vince: I love that stuff.

Craig: It’s just so great.

Vince: I love it. It’s so good. Oh, man.

John: Vince, how about you? Any shows you’d want to get a shot at remaking?

Vince: Oh, man, it’s a toughie, because I love old TV. I was just thinking of how much I just was such a fan of WKRP in Cincinnati growing up. Then the trouble is so much of a show like that is chemistry of those original actors, so seeing it rebooted with different actors, I don’t know, that would be tricky.

A show that pops in mind… I only recently became aware of this, and thanks to my friend Gordon Smith. This is a guy who started off as my assistant on Breaking Bad, and he is now an executive producer. He was an executive producer of Better Call Saul. He’s an executive producer on this new thing I’m working on. He’s an Emmy-nominated writer. He’s this really smart, really tuned-in guy.

I thought I was the Western guy in our writers’ room. He told me about a show called The Westerner, which probably some people listening in have heard of it. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t heard of it. It was a one-season show. It lasted 13 episodes, half a season back in the old days. It was a show created by Sam Peckinpah.

John: Oh, wow.

Vince: It aired in 1961. It starred Brian Keith, who was a really underrated actor, really wonderful actor. He was the dad on Family Affair. After that, he was on Hardcastle and McCormick and stuff like that. Really, really talented, talented actor.

He stars in this show called The Westerner. He is a cowboy who roams around the West, basically looking to support himself. He’s a saddle tramp. He wanders around with his dog. His dog’s name is Brown. It was the same dog who played Old Yeller in that famous movie. He basically wanders around the West looking for a job. He is really not that heroic. He’ll run from a fight sometimes. He can be greedy. He can be kind of venal.

It really was ahead of its time. It was really smart. It was the same time that Gunsmoke and The Rifleman and Bonanza were on the air. Actually, I love those shows, but the morality of those shows felt dictated by Colgate-Palmolive or whoever or Philip Morris or whoever the sponsors were. This thing was so far ahead of its time, it got canceled after half a season. It wouldn’t shock now like it did then. A show like that, that’d be interesting to see that rebooted.

John: Nice.

Craig: I’m just looking at this. It says one of the issues was that it was programed against ratings powerhouse The Flintstones.

John: Oh my god.

Vince: The Flintstones killed it. I think it would’ve been canceled no matter what, because he is shockingly unheroic at times, and in a way that it’s like a breath of fresh air. I could watch The Rifleman all day. I love The Rifleman. It was a great show. You watch three or four episodes of The Rifleman, and Lucas McCain is always doing the right thing, and then you see an episode of this and it’s like a breath of fresh air. It’s like, this is more like a real human being and not a superhero.

John: Great. Some good ideas for shows that we will never realistically remake. I’d be remiss if I didn’t end the segment by getting back to, Aline Brosh McKenna and I have always promised that we were going to someday remake… It’s Episode 100 I think, we decided we were going to do a remake of The Winds of War, the Herman Wouk mini series. At some point, that time will come. It’s going to happen.

Vince: Nice.

Craig: One day. One day.

Vince: You know he only died a year or two ago, Herman Wouk?

Craig: What? Really?

Vince: Am I right about this? Herman Wouk also wrote The Caine Mutiny, right?

John: He did, yeah.

Craig: I believe so. Yeah, you’re right, he died four years ago.

Vince: Four years ago.

John: Four years ago. He was 103 years old. Wow. That’s a long life.

Craig: He was 103. You know what? I got no chance. I got no chance. I’m not getting there. No way.

John: I could live a good, long time.

Craig: You think so?

John: I think I’ll keep going. I’ll keep going. My family lives a good long time.

Vince: Good for you.

Craig: I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to play what you just said at your funeral.

John: Oh my god, that’s really cruel. You’re assuming I’m going to die before you?

Craig: That’s what I’m saying. I’m just saying, you’ve opened up the universe to strike you down.

John: That’s true, I did.

Craig: To strike you down.

John: I walked into that. It’s true.

Craig: By the way, how weird would that be if I did play that at your funeral? People are like, “Why would you play that?” I’m like, “I’m just saying he was wrong.”

John: “Because I promised I would. I’m a man of my word.”

Craig: Listen, I promised I would. You know what? You know who would’ve loved it? Not John.

John: Vince Gilligan would’ve, because Vince Gilligan was on the episode.

Craig: That’s right.

John: That notable episode where John foretold his death.

Craig: Vince Gilligan, also alive.

Vince: For the time being anyway.

Craig: Oh, man.

John: It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks, Vince.

Vince: Pleasure talking to you guys. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

  • Vince Gilligan on IMDb
  • Vince Gilligan plays a prospector on Community (S5 E9)
  • Walter Houston’s dance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
  • Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre
  • Alien Tape
  • Today Years Old on Twitter
  • Robot Puppet Sings “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton by Ben Howard on YouTube
  • Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
  • Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
  • Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
  • Craig Mazin on Instagram
  • John August on Twitter
  • John on Instagram
  • John on Mastodon
  • Outro by Matt Davis (send us yours!)
  • Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

Scriptnotes, Episode 597: Rollo Tomasi, Transcript

May 30, 2023 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 597 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, producer Drew Marquardt has assembled a vast number of listener questions, which we will tackle to the best of our ability. Craig and I have not looked at these questions at all. We are going in completely cold.

Craig: I love that.

John: Which can be good. It’ll be fun.

Craig: It’ll be fun. Hey, we’ve done it 596 times. If we can’t get this right, what good are we at this point?

John: Not so good. Craig, for a bonus topic I was thinking, this is top of my head, which fantasy guest, living or dead, we would love to have on the program. We’ll talk about that. Cool. Drew, I see you’re on the Workflowy. We have some follow-up. It looks like this was follow-up from people who are experts in things that we are not experts in, which is my favorite kind of follow-up.

Drew Marquardt: Ethan in Medford, Oregon writes, “I’m not a screenwriter, but I’ve been listening to the show since pre-pandemic, and listening to Episode 594, I feel seen. I happen to sell gold pans on the internet and have since 2006.”

Craig: Wow.

Drew: “John’s question is spot-on. Gold panning is practiced all over the world but is rarely seen on screen. Gold is the literal treasure sought in nearly every fantasy story, but the characters would rather fight a dragon than dip a pan in the water. Gold panning has been relegated to cartoons and cowboy movies, same with bindles, and that’s weird. Personally, I think the reason we don’t see more people panning for gold in the movies is down to a fundamental misunderstanding of panning. Panning is only part of the process. It means it’s a means of narrowing in on the original source.

“Placer gold, spelled like placer [PLAY-sr] but sounds like [PLA-sr], the stuff you pan for, is gold that that’s moved from its original source. If there’s gold in the stream, it came from a lode deposit somewhere upstream, and panning helps the prospector find where. Finding the lode is the eureka moment.”

Craig: That’s a eureka moment for me, because I don’t know about you, John, but I thought the whole point was like, “Oh my god, I found a nugget.”

John: You did find a nugget, but I think it was partly because our recollection of panning comes from the 1849ers, the miners up in the mountains. That was a time when we’d just started mining these places, so it would make sense that those streams had gold in them, because upstream was some place where there was veins of gold and they should build mines. It does make sense. Both that prospector did find some gold in that moment, which made him happy, but more importantly, it made the miners happy, because it means that there was some gold up there in the hills.

Craig: I like that Ethan is crafting and selling gold panners. I like that better than gold pans, even though they’re called gold pans, just because that could be just a super flex by a chef, like oh, gold pans, which obviously would-

John: Oh, those copper pans? I spit on your copper pans. These are gold pans.

Craig: These are gold pans. They will melt very quickly. They will scratch instantly. I just wonder, in my brain, when I imagine someone panning for gold and finding some, here’s what I imagine: a short, potbellied man wearing britches, a dirty shirt, and suspenders. He’s got a big beard. He’s got a floppy hat. When he sees the gold, he starts dancing by hopping back and forth on either foot and going, “I found gold. I found gold.” Why? What is that?

John: I have the exact same image in my head, so there must be some oor [ph] prospector image. What was that?

Craig: Where is that? Where is it from?

John: Is it Looney Tunes? It’s gotta be something like that.

Craig: It feels cartoony to me, but where? Is this a Mandela effect thing or did that happen?

John: No, it happened. There’s some original source. Because we have the best listeners on the planet, they may be able to point us to that source. It’s going to be like the tying someone to the railroad tracks. There was some place where this all started, where we got that image of who this prospector was. As you describe it, I see exactly the same person in my head.

Craig: You see it, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know that it must exist, because the folks at Pixar imagined the same thing, because that’s what they made the old prospector look like in Toy Story 2.

John: Exactly. I had that image well before that.

Craig: Exactly, as did they.

John: Maybe we need to track down the writers of Toy Story 2 and see if they can tell us where that came from. Drew, find those writers and ask them where it came from.

Craig: I think maybe Rita Hsiao. Rita Hsiao might be one of them. We know Rita.

John: We know Rita. Of course we know Rita.

Craig: We’ll check with Rita. Rita, what’s up with that?

John: That’s somewhere, so we’d have an answer to the question of what happened to gold panning, why do we not see gold panning in fantasy universes. I think what Ethan is telling us is that it would exist in those universes, but it would be helping to find where the sources of those minerals are. We should put it back in our fantasy movies, because it is appropriate.

Craig: I’m not going to do it.

John: You’re not going to do it?

Craig: No, I’m just saying right out, I’m not doing it.

John: You’re not doing it.

Craig: You’re not going to see that.

John: Here’s the thing. In The Last of Us, the golds aren’t even panned. No one needs the gold.

Craig: I don’t know. I don’t know. Gold actually has utility as a conductor. It’s a fantastic conductor. Gold plating and gold teeth and all sorts of interesting… Gold if still useful. I think if you have time to pan for gold, I don’t know where you are in our world. Plus, if you start digging around in The Last of Us, it’s going to go bad.

John: You could come across some bad things, some fungal things.

Craig: You’re going to hit a patch.

John: Yeah, patches.

Craig: I wouldn’t recommend it.

John: More follow-up from people who know more than we do.

Craig: Oh, good.

John: Help us out, Drew.

Drew: The next one is on estate planning. Attorney Brian in Texas writes, “After all these years of listening, I finally have some insight to offer. Like Drew’s mother, I’m an estate planning attorney, board certified in Texas. One of my law partners is Craig’s childhood friend, Keith Jaasma.”

Craig: Oh my word. Keith Jaasma as a… Just to insert here, Keith Jaasma, a friend of mine from high school who we called the tall kid, because he was tall, because you could tell from his last name he’s of Dutch extract, and the Dutch are the tallest people in the world, Keith was and is a fantastic guy. That’s a fun little connection.

John: He is apparently an attorney.

Craig: He’s allowed to be a good guy and an attorney.

Drew: “Unlike Drew’s mother, Brian is not retired, and probably won’t be for many years, so just follow-up comments I thought might be helpful. Number one, you can hire someone to do most of the administration and probate work after someone dies. This would typically be a trust company or the trust department of a bank. They are usually referred to as a corporate executor or corporate trustee. The obvious downside is that they do not work for free, but many of my wealthier clients or clients who want to spare their loved ones the burden of doing this work will name a bank or trust company to serve as executor or trustee in their will or trust.

“Number two, I may have misunderstood Craig, but I wanted to make it clear that heirs and beneficiaries are not generally liable for the debts of a decedent. Creditors are almost always limited to going after the estate assets and not the heirs or beneficiaries, for payment of debts.”

Craig: You know what? He didn’t misunderstand me. I just wasn’t clear. What I meant there was, let’s say you, Drew, are left a bunch of stuff. You’re the executor of an estate. You have to handle all of the claims and things and hand it out. What you’ve been left is a house. If the amount you have to put out is greater than the amount of cash that there is, my understanding is then yes, the creditors have to go after the estate, which means what’s left, the house, which means you are effectively paying for it, because that’s what was left to you. Now, that may also be wrong, but that was what I meant. Maybe Brian can give some follow-up on that.

John: Let me restate what you’re saying, Craig, because I think we’re all probably in agreement. They can’t go after Drew individually for things he doesn’t own. They can’t garnish Drew’s wages. If he inherited the house as part of the estate, that’s still part of the estate. The house could need to be sold or liquidated in order to pay off the debts of the estate.

Craig: Right, so then when all’s said and done, everybody gets what they’re supposed to get. Drew, simply by being the executor, gets nothing, even though he was meant to get something. That’s what I meant. Maybe Brian can give us a little follow-up, but not before he gives Keith Jaasma a solid punch in the arm. Brian, lie in wait. Don’t come up to him and be like, “I’ve got to do this.” No, I want you to nail him hard, boom, in the arm, out of nowhere. High school.

Drew: “Three, finally, when Craig mentioned that everyone should have a trust, it might be helpful for people to understand that he’s referring to a revocable trust, often referred to as a living trust. These are extremely common to avoid probate, since probate in certain states like California can be an expensive and time-consuming process to go through after someone dies. The revocable trust would be your main estate planning document. While it would often create irrevocable trusts for a surviving spouse, children, or other beneficiaries after your death, the revocable trust is the main document that most people need.”

John: That’s what you were describing there, Craig. I’m sure as you bought your house, that went into the trust, rather than going into you and your individual [crosstalk 00:09:30].

Craig: Yes. This is where I hope people weren’t listening to the podcast in their car, because a number of them have fallen asleep and crashed.

John: What I was fascinated by is Drew said revocable [ree-VOH-kuh-bl], but irrevocable [ih-REH-vuh-kuh-bl].

Craig: I think it might be revocable [REH-vuh-kuh-bl].

John: I think I would say revocable [REH-vuh-kuh-bl] for the first one too.

Craig: Let’s take a look. REH-vuh-kuh-bl. REH-vuh-kuh-bl. This is live, guys. It’s happening live. It is also rih-VOH-kuh-bl, but that is less common. The common version is REH-vuh-kuh-bl.

Drew: That totally makes sense.

John: Someone like Drew, who’s studied in Scotland of course, he’s going to say it differently because of his Scottish tradition.

Drew: That’s being very generous for me just not saying a word right.

John: Words in English.

Craig: What you just said is not correct.

Drew: Thank you.

John: Let’s do one last bit of follow-up here. We talked about Replika. This was during our How Would This Be a Movie. Replika was that service where people are falling in love with the chat bots.

Drew: Jane writes, “A note on Replika AI movie discussion from Episode 594. I’m 25, so when I was a kid, there was a Disney Channel original movie that came out in 1999 that was replayed all the time. It was called Smart House. Drew might remember it, actually. It fundamentally shaped my concept of AI, women’s roles in the home, the gendered division of labor, and what scholars call the second shift. It’s about a family that wins a smart house in a competition and basically the Alexa becomes an overbearing, controlling human mom in a family where the mom’s passed away. It’s a great movie and way ahead of its time and probably more profound than its kid viewers had capacity to digest.”

John: Drew, do you know Smart House, the movie?

Drew: I do know Smart House, because Megana Rao loves Smart House.

John: I thought I remembered her talking about Smart House.

Drew: In my first week working was like, “You have to watch Smart House.”

Craig: My goodness. Here’s what interesting. The writers are William Hudson and Stu Krieger. The director’s LeVar Burton.

John: This all makes sense. LeVar Burton, of course, Geordi on Star Trek, also great Jeopardy fill-in host.

Craig: Let us not fail to mention Roots, the greatest mini series of all time.

John: Stu Krieger is a friend of our own Stuart Friedel and also a professor, I think teaching screenwriting at USC, so lots of connections there.

Craig: You don’t say. How about that? Fascinating.

John: Craig, you have no recollection of Disney Channel original movies. I kind of remember after-school specials a little bit, but I basically missed the whole, this is a movie made for kids that shows on TV. That was never a thing for me.

Craig: Yeah, because we didn’t have that. It just wasn’t there. When did the Disney Channel even start?

John: Disney and Nickelodeon were earlier than you think. We didn’t have cable though for a long time, so I missed all that.

Craig: Same. I think maybe when we finally got cable, I was already in high school. Disney Channel was founded in 1983. That was when it was founded. “Since 1997, as just Disney Channel, its programming has shifted focus to target mainly children and adolescents.” What the hell were they targeting before then? Wait a second. What? Bizarre. Regardless, we were already in high school and not watching the Disney Channel.

John: That’s why we didn’t see that. Nickelodeon, I’m just looking it up, 1979.

Craig: Wow.

John: That’s really early.

Craig: We really didn’t have cable then.

John: No, definitely not. We didn’t really have TV. We just had a little box we stuck a candle in and watched the shadows dance around.

Craig: The first film released under the Disney Channel Premiere Films was something called Tiger Town in 1983. Oh my god, what kid wouldn’t want to watch this? “The film stars Roy Scheider as Billy Young, an aging baseball player for the Detroit Tigers.” That is not at all what children want to see out there winning one for the Detroit 9. I don’t think so. No.

John: Kids were different back then, Craig. It’s hard to remember. Children were fundamentally different. Kids loved baseball and retired players.

Craig: If you look at paintings from the 1700s, typically children are portrayed as just very small adults.

John: It’s the best.

Craig: That’s what this is. It’s like, what do kids like? They love aging baseball players.

Drew: Dames.

Craig: They like dames, and they Roy Scheider. We got Scheider. Let’s do it. Oh my god, this is incredible. In the show, there is a woman, a pop star comes to sing the National Anthem. This is 1983. What pop star do you think they got there? What current pop star did they trot out in 1983?

John: I’m stumped. Who would it be?

Craig: Of course, it’s Mary Wilson, a former Supreme.

John: That’s who you want.

Craig: The one that isn’t Diana Ross, let’s get her and trot her out there, because kids love the Supremes.

John: Did Roy Scheider and Mary Wilson have a romance in the film?

Craig: No. She just shows up to sing the National Anthem. They thought, “They’ll get it.” Also, the audio format, what do you think? Was this is Dolby, or what do you think?

John: I’m going to guess just stereo.

Drew: I’m going mono.

Craig: You’re right, it’s mono.

John: It is mono. Love it.

Craig: The thing is in mono.

John: Why would you put it in stereo when TVs only had one speaker?

Craig: I get it. 1983 TVs. Speaker is almost overstating what we had in televisions in 1983. It was like the thing in your phone, basically, this little, tiny thing. It’s even worse than your phone. They just did it in mono, like, “Screw it. Tiger Town. Let’s go. Kids will love it.” They’ve come a long way.

John: My dad built our TV. He built it out of a kit. The TV I grew up with, he could fix it because he built it himself.

Craig: I gotta say, the genetic connection there is strong.

John: I do feel a little spark there when I think of my dad, because it’s just like, yeah, that’s right.

Craig: That’s right.

John: The nerdiness came from there.

Craig: He was an engineer?

John: He was an engineer for Bell Labs.

Craig: Oh my gosh. Everything is coming together. Everything.

John: Everything.

Craig: Everything. Fun.

John: That was follow-up on previous things. Now there’s brand new stuff that we’ve not ever experienced before. Drew, help us out with some of these listener questions.

Drew: Sarah from Montreal writes, “I was reading an article in The Guardian, and I could use some decoding on what actually happens contractually when a star like Phoebe Waller-Bridge secures a deal that she doesn’t deliver on or delays in delivering? The article implies that she and other mega stars are being paid to do nothing, but is that really the case?”

Craig: No.

John: No.

Craig: Let me also just challenge the premise of the question here, which is that somebody like Phoebe Waller-Bridge secured a deal that she, quote, “doesn’t deliver on.” There are all sorts of ways to structure overall deals. Sometimes a company like Amazon, in their zeal to lock down certain people… I’m pretty sure that they gave her that deal just following Fleabag. Fleabag was on Amazon. It’s a huge hit for them. Season Two was a huge hit for them, and they wanted to keep her there.

When that happens, sometimes talent can successfully negotiate a deal that says basically, “Look, if you want to hold me here so that I am exclusive to you, I can’t work for anybody else, I can’t make TV for anybody else, then you have to pay me this much.” If you have a lot of leverage, you can also say, “You also can’t not pay me if I don’t come up with something.” What you have to do is work in good faith to figure out something that everybody wants to do.

What happened here, and I think it was rather unfair to Phoebe, is that during that time, the things that she wanted to do or the things they wanted her to do just didn’t match up, but not to the extent, by the way, that Amazon wasn’t very happy to just make another deal with her to continue to keep her there. No, they’re not being paid to do nothing at all.

I want to also say, when you are somebody like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, your exclusivity is valuable, very valuable. Overall deals traditionally have worked like this. I think modern ones do require, in many cases, something a little bit more, but they can’t really guarantee. My overall deal is connected to making The Last of Us. That’s how HBO tends to do things. They build overalls around shows. If you make an overall deal with somebody, you’re really saying, “I hope you come up with something that everybody wants to make in the next three years, but we can’t guarantee you will.” That’s priced in.

This whole brouhaha over this was, I thought, unfair. There have been scads of people, and I’d like to point out men, who have had overall deals, done nothing, and no one’s written an article like this about them. I am firmly in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge camp.

John: Late in the article they talk about JJ Abrams’s overall deal and like, oh, nothing’s come out of that, but a lot came out of that for a long time. Other shows came out of that. This is a person who had a track record creating shows and then movies that did really well for these places. Has he been doing nothing in this meantime? Absolutely not. He’s been developing other things. Some stuff goes to pilots. Some stuff doesn’t go to pilot. Things happen. Things don’t happen. He had a giant show that was on the starting line that didn’t go forward. That happens. That’s what’s you’re paying for. You’re paying for the exclusive right to make JJ Abrams’s next thing, and that’s worth a lot to people.

Craig: Exactly. If the company decides, and I think in that case it was maybe HBO Max, which now doesn’t exist, I think they just looked at the budget of what that was, “All things considered, we don’t want to spend this money for this show.” That happens all the time. That was their choice.

No, people are not being paid to do nothing. The companies clearly have the money to spend, and they are well aware that they are taking a risk. They make that gamble. Sometimes it pays off for them in exciting ways, and sometimes it doesn’t pay off for them in ways they wish it would. Sometimes they’re saying no to things that they ought to have said yes to. In alternate universes, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has seven shows on the air on Amazon. Who knows? That’s the thing. We just don’t know. No, Sarah from Montreal, Phoebe and other mega stars are not being paid to do nothing.

John: I agree. What do you got for us, Drew?

Drew: Tom in Warwickshire writes, “I’m writing a Christmas movie and want to know if I can have a character say the word Grinch. I know that the Dr. Seuss estate is pretty hard on its trademark, but am I safe to have a character refer to someone as a Grinch? It seems so present in our Christmas language that it feels like this should be fair use scenario, but I’m from the UK, and we don’t seem to have as strong of a fair use defense here as you do in the US. If there is going to be a cliché moment of newspaper clippings on a wall, that’s something that happened in the past, can I use the word in a headline? This is probably the most succinct language for the headline to get the point across but also probably the most testing in terms of copyright. Is there a good resource out there for finding things like these out?”

John: That good resource will be the legal affairs department of the studio that makes your feature when they decide this is a Christmas movie we have to make. Then they will have to prove artwork and clearances for things that go on the wall in this cliched newspaper headline moment. They may flag Grinch as a subject of concern. I think you’re absolutely clear. I think it’s ridiculous to try to trademark that out of existence in terms of showing up or a character saying that, but lawyers may disagree. I can tell you, Tom of Warwickshire, you are absolutely free to include that in your script, because it’s your script. No one’s going to come after your script at this point for using the word Grinch.

Craig: The last point maybe is the most salient, Tom. You yourself will never be liable here. You’re going to write a script, and you’re going to have somebody say the word Grinch. Then part of your contract with your studio, at least it ought to be, is that you are indemnified from lawsuits about things like that because the studio itself… As long as you write things without absolute knowledge that you are ripping somebody off, like plagiarism that they wouldn’t know about, the studio is responsible to clear these things.

The trademark stuff really turns on marketplace confusion and damages. I think it is unlikely that the way you’re using Grinch here would cause any marketplace confusion. It has become a bit of a generic word, like Xerox or Kleenex. I think the Dr. Seuss estate is probably more concerned about people selling shirts with the Grinch on Etsy than they are maybe about somebody using the word Grinch. I don’t think the word Grinch is copyrightable.

For instance, I know that in a script I can describe something as Mickey Mouse. I can refer to Mickey Mouse. I can say, “Oh, she loves Mickey Mouse,” or, “Look at this Mickey Mouse arrangement of so-and-so.” I can’t get sued by Disney. No.

John: Full agreement here. I think if you are going to title your movie Grinch or something or do something that would cause marketplace confusion with the Grinch, you are going to have all those people swarming over you. Referring to a Grinch, a character referring to a Grinch or something that passes by in a headline, I truly doubt you’re going to have a problem. I guarantee it is not a problem for it to be in your script at this point for the thing you’re trying to sell.

Craig: (singing)

John: Drew, what do you got for us?

Craig: Drew passed out.

Drew: Richard in the UK writes, “I wanted to ask you about something that I call a non sequitur character dump. I’ll give you an example. Character 2 says, ‘Why won’t you just sign the papers?’ And Character 1 gives Character 2 a long, searching look, and after a lengthy pause, Character 1 says, ‘My father used to make me come with him to the abattoir. He told me to look in the eyes of the animals, examine their panic,’ yada yada yada. I feel it’s cheating a little bit. The writer now has an infinite amount of anecdotes that they can arm their character with that perfectly justify his or her actions at that moment. What do you guys think? Is there a way to make these backstory monologues a little more camouflaged, or are they absolutely fine?”

John: It sounds like Richard’s not trying to go for the joke version of this. The joke version of this is like, you see, oh, suddenly now we’re going to just have a backstory with no motivation. This kind of moment, to me, Craig, you can disagree, I think it’ll work as long as you believe that the character might him or herself be thinking that the moment I carry them to that past recollection, they might say something.

There’s some work there, to get there, that they would actually be speaking aloud, this thing that they’re going to be saying for the next little bit to fill in this backstory here. Real-life people don’t do that a lot. Real-life people often have to be pressed to reveal those moments. What do you think?

Craig: Yeah, completely agree. The test here, Richard, is is there a reason for this person to say this story? There has to be a reason. The reason has to be so compelling that the character is willing to withstand the social awkwardness of starting to tell this weird, irrelevant story, because they know that when they get to the end of it, the other person will go, “Oh, actually that was a really helpful story for me. I understand something now.” The story has to be appropriate. The moment has to be appropriate.

Ideally, Character 1, who’s going to deliver the story, should be aware in their mind that Character 2 would find this odd. That is the biggest problem I have with scenes like that. When a character begins to monologue about their past in a weird moment and the other character just sits there listening like, “The hell is going on?” Character 1 is unaware that a human would have that reaction to this bizarre story.

Make your characters aware. Make sure the moment calls for the story. Most importantly, the story has to make you go, “Oh, okay, yeah, got it. That was a helpful story.”

John: Richard, you’re trying to do two things at once. You’ve picked this backstory moment because it makes narrative sense in your story, so that there’s a reason why it’s great for the audience to know this specific information at this point. It also has to make sense for it to be exposed in this moment, in this scene, with the reality of the space the characters are in, that if Character 1 and Character 2 would actually get to this moment.

That’s honestly 90% of what screenwriting is, is making sure that these moments that you as a writer need to happen really feel like they can happen right now in the space where the story has landed. Potentially it’s cliché. How you get through it is really finding ways for this speech, this monologue, this dialog to be present and to be the necessary thing for the character to be saying next.

Craig: In my mind, the one of these that’s burbling up, and I can’t remember it well enough, but I seem to recall that in LA Confidential, there is a story, and I don’t even remember which character says it to which character, about Rolo Tomasi and the idea that Rolo Tomasi was a name that I think his father came up with to describe an unknown perpetrator who gets away with murder. You’re always looking for this impossible Rolo Tomasi. That comes into play in terms of the plot later. In my mind, that’s what happens. I’ll have to go back and look. I seem to recall that it was a good example, perhaps, of this sort of thing.

John: Where a character is giving out a little bit more information than you suspect they would give in that moment, and yet you as an audience enjoy it because you just know that it’s going to be important later on? Is that what you’re feeling?

Craig: You know what? I’m about to search for it right now. Let me see if I can find it. It’s between Jack and Exley. Exley is questioning whether or not the correct three people are being blamed for killings at a diner. Jack walks away from Exley, and then Exley cryptically says Rolo Tomasi. Jack says, “Is there more to that, or do I have to guess?” which is important, because that means Jack is aware this is weird.

Then Exley says, “Rolo is a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty. He shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I made the name up to give him some personality.” Jack says, “What’s the point?” Exley says, “Rolo’s the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It was supposed to be about truth and justice and Rolo, but somewhere along the way, I forgot all that. How about you, Jack? Why’d you become a cop?”

The point is, he tells this story about who killed his dad and the fact that he made this name up to describe the person that gets away with it. This is a great example actually I think of what he’s talking about. The point is, it was motivated by the conversation they were having. The other person was like, “What?” which is the exact correct reaction. Then when you got to the end of it and literally to the point of challenging him, saying, “What’s the point?” Then Exley gets to the point, which is relevant to the argument they’re having, which is, “Did we or did we not get the right Rolo Tomasi?”

John: What’s crucial here is that that first character who says Rolo Tomasi, he knows the other character is going to… He’s betting on the other character’s going to ask the question. He’s setting the bait for him to ask. If the other person didn’t ask, it would just be a dead moment. The character wants to tell this moment to this other character and not just to the audience.

Craig: Rolo Tomasi.

John: Rolo Tomasi.

Craig: God, I love that movie.

John: I think we have the name for our episode. It’s Rolo Tomasi.

Craig: Maybe so. Brian Helgeland of course we must give credit to, the fantastic screenwriter who wrote that film.

John: Drew, what else you got for us?

Drew: Luke in New York City writes, “My writing partner and I are having our first meeting with a literary manager soon. We wrote a pilot script that we really like and were able to get it to a few different management companies through a connection that she had in the industry. My question is, what are the most important things we should try to get out of a preliminary meeting? Should it be sharing our career goals, showing that we’re aligned as writing partners, proving that we’re serious about writing? I don’t want to go into a meeting that should just be a casual meet and greet and come on too strongly. Any advice about how to prepare and how we should be aligned before our first meetings would be greatly appreciated.”

John: What’s your first instinct, Craig?

Craig: My first instinct, Luke, is to imagine that you are a literary manager, and you are stuck in a meeting with a couple of ding-dongs that haven’t earned a dime, and you have all sorts of people that want you to represent them, and every client you take on dilutes your time and energy and takes you away from the other things that matter to you and may never turn into anything at all, and that in fact, if you take these guys on, it’s going to be a lot of hard work.

What sort of meeting would that person like to have? My guess is they would like to be somewhat entertained. They would like to enjoy it. It shouldn’t feel forced. It shouldn’t feel like an act. It should just be a great conversation. I want to feel like these two kids are leaning forward, that they’re excited and enthusiastic and ambitious, that they’re not entitled, that they’re ready to write more, that they’re open to feedback, that they’re passionate, and that if send them into a meeting with somebody that trusts me, that trust won’t be damaged when that person calls me and says, “Why did you send those two weirdos to me?”

It’s really just about being likable and energetic and ambitious and open and ready to be go-getters and do what needs to be done on your end of things to make the manager’s leap of faith worth it.

John: Don’t be fake. Be yourself, but be the best versions of yourselves. Be the people you are when you’re at a hundred, so they can see, oh, these are people who I can send out to meet with producers, meet with other executives, and they’ll be able to work in that room the same way they’re working with me.

In terms of what you’re working on, they’ll have read something of yours, but make sure you’re talking about the other stuff you’re working on, what’s interesting to you, what you’ve seen that you like. Help them figure out how they can market you if they were going to sign you with a client, so they can think about, oh yeah, I can send them on this type of thing, these types of open writing assignments, these are things that would be good people for me to put you in front of. Just help them visualize you as a client, and you’ll see if that works.

The other thing I would want to say, Luke, is this manager is your first meeting, great. This may be a bad fit for you too. Make sure you’re also watching and listening and just getting a sense of would you want to get emails from this person, would you want to talk to this person on the phone, or do they give you a bad vibe? If they give you a bad vibe, don’t sign with them. Just keep looking for a different manager, because the first person who says yes to you isn’t necessarily the right person for you.

Craig: That is a great point to consider. The last thing I would add is, if you are interested as you’re going along or even if you’re not, just a good general practice for situations like this is at some point to present an interesting question that you guys have, you’re wondering should you do this or should you do this, even if you’re not necessarily wondering, and say, “We would love to ask your advice, because you would be helpful.”

People like to know that they’re needed, and they like to hear that their advice matters. These little things go so much further than you can imagine. You might think they’re established, they don’t need to feel good about themselves. Everybody needs to feel good about themselves, no matter who they are, at any level.

John: Something that’s generally good advice for anybody you’re trying to bring into your world, it could be a business manager or a lawyer or anybody, your best clients, what do they do that make them your best clients? What is it in your relationship that makes it work so well? Then they can talk about how they see that business relationship working.

Are they the kind of manager who wants to read every draft and give you lots of notes, or do they read it once and then they send it out? Both can work, but you’ll get a sense of what they’re looking for in their clients and how they envision this working relationship going. It’s a smart question to ask middle to end of the conversation, so you can both see, is this a thing that’s going to maybe click, or was it just a meeting.

Craig: Another thing that comes to mind, there are two of you. Luke, you have a partner. I don’t know if it’s a guy or a girl. Let’s just imagine it’s a lady. Let’s call Luke and Laura. Right, John? Luke and Laura.

John: Yeah, General Hospital.

Craig: Bingo. Drew’s like, “Huh? What?” Luke and Laura go in there. It is much better for you, Luke, at some point to talk about what Laura is great at and for Laura to talk about what you, Luke, are great at.

John: I love that.

Craig: Much better than you going on about yourselves or feeling like that the two of you are the same, there’s a Luke and a Luke 2. Who needs two Lukes? There’s something about this partnership that’s great, and if you complement each other, it’s also a sign of stability. It indicates to the manager that the two of you aren’t going to be beating the crap out of each other within three months, and then this whole thing falls apart, which happens all the time.

John: It does.

Craig: Praise each other. Be generous and humble, and that will also, I think, do quite a bit to impress.

John: That’s correct.

Drew: I have another manager question from An Extremely Anonymous Listener. They write, “I’m an emerging writer in Los Angeles with several years of experience as support staff and a staffing credit. I have a manager at one of the well-known management companies. For context, I don’t have an agent. I like my manager, but I have doubts about their work style. They’re extremely honest, and I appreciate that, but I feel like it verges on defeatism. Their most common response is, ‘That’s hard. Staffing is hard. Selling is hard. IP is hard at my level.’ Sometimes even asking for generals ‘is hard.’ I agree, but it would help to hear some optimism once in a while.

“This also led to a development relationship that I think is a bad fit. I feel my manager encouraged it because this producer was the only one to say yes. The producer is asking for a lot of free work before going out for pitches, and my manager is enabling them. I feel stuck, but I want to keep my manager and push them to be more proactive after the contract is resolved. Do you have any advice about how to communicate with them and get some more support? How can I manage my manager?”

John: Extremely Anonymous, their premise is that they don’t want to change managers, and yet we have to talk about the fact that they should probably change managers, because it’s not your job to make them more optimistic about the industry that they’ve chosen to work in.

Yes, it’s hard. It’s always hard. It’s always been hard. Some things are harder now than they’ve been before, but it’s their job to break through that hard stuff to get you in to meet the people you need to meet so you can get a job.

I’m concerned that you as an emerging writer are not going to be the person who can change them. You’re in a not-great relationship, and I don’t think you’re going to change that person.

Craig: There is another possibility. If we could have Extremely Anonymous’s manager on here, I wonder what their honest version of this would be, because sometimes the people that we think are defeatist are not constitutionally defeatist. They’re defeatist with us, because it is hard with us, and they’re having trouble explaining why.

Before I would leave this manager, I would consider sitting down with them and saying, “Listen, here’s what I hear a lot. I don’t know if it’s just that you focus on the hardness of things or if the work that I have, the way I’m doing meetings, my writing, whatever it is, is challenging for you. If that’s the case, let’s have a completely open and honest discussion about that, because I need to hear that, and I need to hear your opinion about it. After that, I may choose to agree or disagree.”

It’s important to know what’s underneath all of this defeatism. It is rare for people to start defeated. It is common for people to get defeatist when they’ve been defeated a lot. When they send your stuff out, if they’re getting a hundred nos is kind of hard. That’s hard. If you’re like, “Hey, can you send it to 10 more people? Don’t you think they’ll like it?” they might say, “That’s hard.” That’s the honest, difficult discussion I would have before hitting the fire button.

John: Wow, if Craig’s default response is not the fire one, then you should really listen.

Craig: Yeah, because normally I’m all about firing, but the truth is that they may be being polite rather than defeatist. Also, a little bit of a red flag here about this producer. You have a development relationship. “I feel my manager encouraged it because this producer was the only one to say yes.” Yeah, that’s kind of their job. Everyone said no. One person said yes. Do you want to try or not? Yes, of course they encouraged that.

This is the red flag. “The producer’s asking for a lot of free work before going out for pitches, and my manager’s enabling them.” No, that’s not free work. Here’s what free work is. We talk about free work all the time. Free work is when you are hired to write something and you are hired to write a draft, a script, and you do, and then the producer says, “Whoa, before you turn this in, to get your delivery money, do it again. Do it again. Do it again.”

You’re not in that position. You’re in a speculative position. You own the copyright. No one’s paid for it. No one owns it. The producer isn’t asking for a lot of free work. The producer is asking for you to work. If you feel like you’re done, then you could say, “I’m done. I don’t want to do any more work.”

This isn’t a situation where it’s free work. This is a situation where somebody’s saying to you, like anybody, a producer, a friend, your mom, “I don’t really think it’s good enough.” Now you have to make that decision. When you say, “My manager is enabling them,” maybe your manager agrees with them. This is what I’m concerned about.

I think that maybe it’s time for you and your manager to have a little bit of a couples therapy session to figure out what’s really going on. If after that couples therapy session you think, “Oh, what’s really going on is they actually are just defeatist, and they don’t know anybody other than this producer, and this producer doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing,” oh my god, then hit the eject button as hard as you can.

John: Going back to the question of whether what the producer is asking for is free work, here’s a situation where it could be free work. Let’s say this producer has some piece of IP, some obscure Japanese toy that they want you to come up with a pitch for, and then you guys are going to take it out to the town. I have seen situations where that producer is asking for draft after draft after draft of this pitch, and they’re always refining and they’re always redoing this thing, and they’re basically having you write up a bunch of shit to prepare for this pitch. That borders on free work in the sense of you should really be paying a person to do this kind of development work on a thing. We don’t know what this situation is.

Craig’s right though. If this is entirely your idea, you have this idea for this space opera, and this producer has partnered up with you, that’s actually genuinely collaboration. If it’s not good collaboration, then you need to move on. It should be considered collaboration, not free work. It’s when you don’t control these things. That’s where it can become abusive free work. You have to make decisions. Your instinct is right. Your manager should be on your side about doing enough to get this project set up, but not doing so much that you’re just spinning your wheels with this producer.

Craig: That’s an outstanding distinction, yes, because when there is anything that the producer owns, then everything that you do, Extremely Anonymous, is considered derivative of that copyright, which means you don’t own it, which means they can say to you at any point, “You know what? I don’t love the 20 drafts I made you do of Slinky the movie, so beat it. I’m going to hire somebody else to do Slinky the movie.” Then you’re like, “What about all the stuff I wrote?” They’ll say, “We won’t use any of it.” Then enjoy.

The point is, they’re in control. They own it. Therefore it is like work. In fact, really they should be hiring you. I could be wrong, but I’m presuming in this case, this is an original idea of yours, in which case the copyright is wholly owned by you, you control it completely, and therefore, as John says, this is a collaboration. The producer in fact is the one doing the free work. The producer is the one who is being speculative here more than you are.

John: Last thing, I want to come back to the manager himself. Yes, people have different communication styles. I think we should also be mindful of that. Some people just have that defeatist affect to their voice. It’s just how they frame things. I like that you say this manager is extremely honest. That’s a thing you want out of a manager. I wouldn’t dismiss them just for that. They could also be a good, honest manager but just not the manager for you, so allow yourself the opportunity to say, “This isn’t a bad person, but this is not what I need right now, because my career is not advancing.”

Craig: That’s right.

John: Maybe it is time to move on.

Craig: That’s right, all true. It’s up to you.

John: Drew, I think we have time for one more question. We leave it in your capable hands to decide which question that will be.

Drew: Oh my gosh.

Craig: Oh god. Sophie’s choice. Sophie’s choice.

Drew: Sophie’s choice. Let’s do this. Maria in Denver writes, “I’m part of a group of screenwriters in Denver at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and there are many of us who are serious about breaking into the industry. A good chunk of us are middle-aged or older. I’m in my 40s. I plan to move to LA in the next year or so, and my goal is to be in a writers’ room. We recently had a workshop event, and the panel was all young writers. A couple of them said, ‘I’ve anecdotally heard about older people being in writers’ rooms.’ I think it was meant to be encouraging. What is the ageism like in this industry really?”

John: It’s hard. I’ll be that manager.

Craig: The manager. It’s hard.

John: It’s hard. Is ageism a thing in this town? Yes. I’m sure I’ve told this story on this podcast before, so I apologize. I was out to lunch with a producer. She’s a talented producer who’s done a lot of amazing projects. She was describing this thing she was working on. I’m like, “Oh, wow, that sounds really great. I’d love to read more.” She’s like, “Oh no, I’m looking for a younger writer.” At the time I was 30.

Sometimes age is meant to mean a newer person, a younger person, but it really often means a cheaper person. In this case, she did not really mean someone who was actually younger, but just less expensive, less seasoned, because she didn’t think it was the kind of thing that they’d be spending my dollars on.

For Maria in Denver, there are writers who start in this industry in their 30s, in their 40s. It does happen. I have friends who’ve come into this industry from other industries, and it works, but I think I know those stories because they are a little bit more the exception than the rule.

It is going to be a challenge, because so many of the people who are going to be starting in these writers’ rooms have worked their way up from being showrunners’ assistants, from being script coordinators, from finding other ways into this business. Coming in in your 40s, it’s less likely to be your path in. Craig, what’s your instinct?

Craig: It’s hard. Here’s the issue, Maria. There is ageism in Hollywood, of course, but it is not quite what you would think, in that what happens is, honestly in both, in features and in television I would say, the writers who are at the top of the food chain and who are there for the most highly paid and highly sought-after writers for features or the most highly paid and highly sought after writer/producers for television, are almost exclusively in their 40s and 50s, and sometimes in their 60s. To that extent, there’s no ageism at all. We’re an exemplary industry.

On the other hand, when people are putting together rooms, and that seems like that’s what you’re going for is a writers’ room, in fact you state so explicitly, the search for diversity tends to not focus on people in their 40s and 50s because they’re already represented in the room by the higher-ups.

Therefore, the focus on filling up the room tends to concentrate more on gender and sexual orientation and race, ethnicity, cultural background, disability, a lot of other metrics of things to help expand the palette of who is in the room and whose voices are being heard, because, unfortunately for you, the 40s and 50s voice is almost always already there in the room.

Therefore, the way you’re going to be getting into a room is by writing something outstanding. Not that other people aren’t, but when I say outstanding, I mean even outstanding among the outstanding. It’s gotta be really, really good.

I don’t think you should be encouraged, and I don’t want you to be discouraged, because here’s the thing, Maria. Either you’re supposed to make it or you’re not. Most people are not. I’ve said this a million times. Most people are not mean to be make it in Hollywood, because most people don’t, but there are some who are. It doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. It doesn’t matter how old or young. It doesn’t matter if their race is this or that or anything. If you write something undeniable like that, it’s undeniable. There’s a lot of space in a lot of rooms these days, not particularly these days.

John: Not at these moments.

Craig: Not at this moment. There’s literally zero spaces for anyone. However, hopefully not too long from now we’ll all be back to work. There’s a lot of television being made and a lot of opportunities to be had. You just need to stand out in a serious way, but you will not be kept from a room because of your age, nor will you be admitted to a room because of your age.

John: Agreed. Everyone is going to read your script first. That’s really the first threshold. We’ve talked about this on the podcast a bunch. They may read the first five pages of your script, and if they love those first five pages, they’ll keep reading. If they don’t, they won’t. That’s true for writers of every age and every background.

Then if they love your script, then they’ll want to see what other experience you have but also want to meet with you. I think that’s a situation where in those meetings, you’ll be able to hopefully match your experience to what they need in that room. It may be that they’re not looking for a writer in their 40s or 50s at the top of their head, but you have some specific experience that is actually exactly appropriate for what they need.

They’re doing a show set in a school, and you are a high school teacher, you know things that the people don’t know. My friend who made it in, who broke in in his mid-30s, was hired onto a legal show. He’s a lawyer. He knows these things. It’s totally possible. Zoanne Clack, who was a guest on our show, she was a damn doctor, and that’s how she got into Grey’s Anatomy. Now she’s running those shows.

It is entirely possible, but I think you’re going to need to… With the extra life and time you’ve had, hopefully you’re bringing something into that room that no one else can.

Craig: The most important thing you can bring into a room is your specific writing voice. I think there’s probably an overemphasis on what I would call the non-writing factors. People think, “What I’m bringing to the room is my parents are immigrants,” or, “English is my second language,” or, “I have a disability,” or this or that.

All of those things are things that can contribute to specific knowledge and awareness, which is important, and that’s why we look for those things. Those things must be attended by a specific voice, a talent for writing. The writing talent comes first. Your specificity as a writer, your voice. People pick up a script, and they go, “Oh yeah, I didn’t need a cover page. This is a Maria script.” That’s what you want.

John: For sure. It has come time for our One Cool Things. It’s been a minute since we’ve had a One Cool Thing, so I’m excited to do it. Mine is a comic book, I guess it’s actually a trade paperback of a bunch of comic books put together, that I picked up this last week called Not All Robots. It’s written by Mark Russell. Artist is Mike Deodato Jr.

I just picked it up because I liked the cover, and I flipped through the pages like, “Oh, this sounds great.” I’d never heard of it before. There was a Patton Oswalt rave on the back of it. It was an appropriate rave.

It’s a really smart near-future satire of the United States. All the disasters have happened to the United States. There are these mobile cities. These robots are doing all the work of these places. Every human family has a robot assigned to them to actually earn their living. There’s resentment from the humans. There’s resentment from the robots. There’s a whole new class of robots coming online.

It’s about toxic masculinity and a lot of other class stuff, but also really funny and really smart, one of the books that I immediately started to think about, okay, how could you do this as a series or a movie or some other form. I think it probably is best in its current form, because it can do anything, because it’s just being drawn on the page. It doesn’t have to cost $300 billion. I just really loved it. I think you’d love it too, Craig.

Craig: I’ve been flipping through while you were talking. This looks awesome. I didn’t understand. Just by flipping through and catching some panels here and there, I suddenly went, “Oh, not all robots like not all men. Okay, I get it.” It’s very clear. I’ll check that out. That does sound like One Cool Thing.

John: What have you got for us?

Craig: My One Cool Thing is actually an individual person that I met, a friend of a friend. I’m not going to use his real name, because I don’t know if he wants me to use his real name. I’m just going to call him Dan. Dan works for TSA. Nobody likes TSA. They’re annoying. We go to the airport. They’re annoying. They look through our stuff. They yell at us. We didn’t move fast enough. We didn’t move slow enough.

John: We try to do the right thing, and then they tell us we didn’t do the right thing.

Craig: You can’t make them happy. Dan doesn’t work at the airport. He works for central TSA. Dan was on the team that created and implement TSA PreCheck.

John: God bless PreCheck.

Craig: God bless PreCheck. We were in a group. We were in a large group of people. It’s a friend of a friend. It’s like, we know our friend, “And who are you? What’s your deal?” He was like, “Oh, I work for TSA.” Like, “Okay, like what?” “Oh, I’m part of the team that invented PreCheck.” It was like he said, “Oh, I’m the guitarist for Blondie,” which maybe is an old reference that young people wouldn’t like but I care about because I love Chris Stein. Anyway, the point is, rockstar. We were all like, “Oh my god. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

PreCheck is a wonderful thing. The fact that the government thought, “You know what? What if we made some people’s lives easier if they qualify, if they haven’t been arrested and whatever? If they qualify, what if we just gave them a little bit of a break?” By the way, it’s not that much of a break, to be clear. Here’s what you get out of PreCheck. You don’t have to take your shoes off, and you can leave your laptop in your bag. Man, that saves up a bunch of time. The line is shorter, generally. I love PreCheck. Love it.

John: I love PreCheck too. I would only say that you can get PreCheck if you do Global Entry. If you’re ever going to travel internationally more than once a year, get Global Entry. You have to go to the airport. You have to do a whole interview thing. Global Entry will get you PreCheck, but also it lets you cut the line at Immigration. You just go through, yu scan your little card, and you’re in.

Craig: You don’t even have to scan your card anymore.

John: Your passport just goes through a thing.

Craig: Now they just look at your face. They’ve even gone past the passport. Now they just take a picture of your face and like, “Oh yeah, we know you.” By the way, do you know what trumps even Global Entry?

John: Oh, tell me.

Craig: I just got NEXUS. NEXUS is the version of Global Entry that works for obviously both entering the United States, which Global Entry does, but also entering Canada. I can enter Canada like a Canadian citizen now, which for me is kind of a big deal.

Now, the interesting thing about NEXUS is you need to have an interview, just like you do with Global Entry, and when the pandemic hit, they just shut down all the interviews. They’ve been slowly bringing them back. Because NEXUS is a joint operation between the United States and Canada, you pretty much need to do it at border spots.

I went up and did a little scout a few weeks ago and took a little side trip with my producing partner, and we drove for a couple of hours to the Washington state Canada border and met with a lovely Canadian representative and an American representative. The Canadian representative, big fan of the show. The American, no clue. No clue. Actually, so then the Canadian, she’s like, “Look,” and she pulled me up on the screen and showed the American. The American was like, “Oh, Identity Thief, that’s awesome.”

John: Amazing.

Craig: She loved Identity Thief, had no clue about The Last of Us. Either way, they were both very nice, and I got my NEXUS, not because of that, but because I qualify. NEXUS now trumps Global Entry. If you do find yourself going back and forth between the US and Canada quite a bit, NEXUS is I think essential.

John: That’s the one you want?

Craig: Essential, yes.

John: Love it. That is our show for this week.

Craig: Great.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nora Beyer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. I love to see this out on the picket line, by the way. They’re great. I saw a guy wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt. It turned out it was Adam Pineless, who has often written outros for us. Adam, thank you for this.

Craig: Thank you.

John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and the bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on our fantasy guests. Craig, Drew, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you guys.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, we may have talked about this a little bit before, but I want to dig into any living person, living or dead, and maybe even besides the dead people, because the living people we could still get, who would we want to have on the show as a guest.

This last week I’ve been talking a lot about Nora Ephron and her unique voice, so she would be very, very high on my list. I can’t think of anyone more than Nora Ephron just in terms of what she was able to bring to the romantic comedy and just her skill as a screenwriter.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Who’s on your list there?

Craig: Do I get more than one?

John: You get plenty of people.

Craig: I would go way, way back to Aristotle, because I think poetics did a great job of just laying the foundation for what we do. I’d love to talk with Aristotle about all sorts of things, but mostly like, “Hey, look at what became of drama. Look at how it does branch out from the things you wrote. What are the parts of this that surprise you? What are the parts of this that you did not expect? What are the parts that you think are good, bad? What are your comments? What do you like?” I think that’d be really interesting to just hear from the original drama critic about how things have turned out.

John: It’s always fascinating to think back that people who have no experience with the form that we’re actually doing, would they recognize this as being the same kind of stuff as the dramas and, quote, unquote, comedies of classic times, given the form and just how different things are structured. I suspect they would, but I’m not sure they would, because would they recognize the universal aspects of that?

Craig: That would just be fascinating, I think. Plus also, I think a lot of people would be very angry at me if all I did was talk about that with Aristotle and not other things.

John: It’s our show, so we can talk about what we want.

Craig: Our show’s about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

John: You’re a screenwriter.

Craig: Yeah, I’m a screenwriter. The other person I would love to talk to would be Frances Marion, who was kind of the… I don’t know, you mentioned oor [ph] as a wonderful prefix for original things. She was an oor screenwriter. In a time when you would imagine all the screenwriters were men, because everyone was men, in fact, Frances Marion was right there with them.

Let’s see. Her first credit is 1912, The New York Hat, starring Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish. She has a gazillion credits, all the way up through to 1940. Oh, selected filmography. It’s probably even longer than that. In fact, yeah, it says years active 1912-1972. She died in 1973.

John: 1912 you just barely have figured out what movies are. Those are the first movie studios are right around that time. You look at those original scripts, and they are progressing from just a shot list really to something that has a little bit more form, a little bit more shape, and so you’re moving up through the advent of sound and synced sound. It’s a huge change.

Craig: I’m loading her IMDb page, and oh my sweet lord. It’s just shocking. She wrote the story to The Champ. The Champ in 1979. I don’t know quite how that happened. I don’t know if that was from a story. I don’t know how that happened.

John: It could’ve been it’s based on something that she did earlier.

Craig: Perhaps, because her last continuous credit is in 1953, a story for something called The Clown. She has so many credits. Really when you look at somebody like this, who started writing at the very beginning of cinema in 1912, when it’s not even just silent, it’s barely working, all the way into the ‘10s, ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, that’s just mind-blowing. I would love to talk with her also to just get her sense of writing across these wild changes of technology and modes of storytelling. She’s a hall of famer, first [inaudible 01:02:07] hall of famer.

John: High on my list would be Orson Welles. I know we had the Fincher movie that was some of Orson Welles and his whole issues. I think if we could somehow resurrect Orson Welles at a specific moment in time, and just as he saw cinema and he saw cinematic storytelling. We go back to his movies again and again for this is how stuff started. Did he know as he was doing it what he was doing? What would he make of the films we make now and Auteur Theory? How would he treat the cinematic television we do right now? It’d be a great conversation.

Craig: That does sound great. You would be yelled at or just scorned. “Your question is stupid. I think your question is stupid.”

John: I want to pick a certain age where he’s not just the grumpy old drunk. That’s why I want to pick an earlier moment.

Craig: He’s fresh.

John: I’ve done some, I’ll say, hostile interviews along the way, and I still learn something out of those.

Craig: That’s good. By the way, just to clarify, and I should’ve known this, and I didn’t, The Champ, the one that we know with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder, both of who have taken interesting turns, it was in fact based on an earlier film from 1931 written by, of course, Frances Marion and also Wanda Tuchock and Don Marquis, called The Champ, a Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper. Now when you hear Wallace Beery, does that bring anything to mind, John?

John: Nothing. I don’t know who that is.

Drew: Barton Fink.

Craig: Bingo. Thank you, Drew.

John: Oh, wow.

Craig: It’s a Wally Beery picture. It’s a Wally Beery picture.

Drew: Wally Beery wrestling picture. What do you need, a roadmap?

Craig: Big men, tights. There you go. You know what? Also, since we’re saying we can get anybody, I want the Coen brothers on, and I want to make them tell me exactly what the hell all that means, or at least I want them to hear my theory of Barton Fink and then either tell me warm, cold, everybody’s allowed to have their own theory, it means a lot of different things. I want to know. I just want to know.

John: We have some bigger guests coming in future sessions, and equivalent of Coen brothers coming on the show, so I don’t think it’s too much of a reach. At some point we need one or both Coen brothers on the show.

I would love to have Spike Lee at some point, because I just think Do the Right Thing was one of the first scripts I ever read. I love the movie. Steven Soderbergh, of course, was the very first script I ever read. There are living people who we can come on to talk about how they see this world in cinema. Yet if I had my fantasy, I would love to pull younger versions up to see what they were thinking at those moments.

Craig: I hear you.

John: Some of this will come to pass. Most of it will not, but it’s always fun to speculate. Drew and Craig, thanks so much.

Craig: Thank you guys.

Drew: Thanks.

Links:

  • The biggest new moneymaking scheme for Hollywood stars? Doing nothing by Arwa Mahdawi for The Guardian
  • Rollo Tomasi scene
  • L.A. Confidential screenplay by Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson
  • Not All Robots by Mark Russell and Mike Deodato Jr.
  • TSA Precheck
  • NEXUS Program for US Citizens and Canadian Citizens.
  • Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
  • Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
  • Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
  • Craig Mazin on Instagram
  • John August on Twitter
  • John on Instagram
  • John on Mastodon
  • Outro by Nora Beyer (send us yours!)
  • Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

Scriptnotes, Episode 596: McQuarrie on McQuarrie, Transcript

May 30, 2023 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Chris McQuarrie: What the [bleeps] are you talking about?

Craig: Wow.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 596 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. In ancient times, our ancestors looked to the heavens and noticed unfamiliar objects moving amid the stars. Aristotle theorized these were dry exhalations of earth that caught fire high in the atmosphere. Later, the Romans observed that these objects return on a regular cycle, like small planets with eccentric orbits. Today we know these periodic visitors as comets and look forward to their appearance in the night sky.

For Scriptnotes, our comet is writer-director-producer Christopher McQuarrie, who first appeared on Episode 300, then Episode 400. On that episode, we invited him to come back on Episode 600, which is very nearly here. As we prepare to record that, I asked Drew Marquardt, our producer, to put together a compendium episode to remind us what Chris said the last two times he was on the show. Drew, what are we going to hear today?

Drew Marquardt: We’re going to hear Chris talk about making big movies. Obviously, he’s very good at that. He’s got these incredible insights, not just on how these movies get made but where these stories come from and where they’re going in the future on film and TV.

John: Great. I recalled these two episodes being recorded pretty clearly. The first one, I was living in Paris, and he came to the hotel. I went to his hotel. He had just come back from filming Mission: Impossible, which was filming in Paris at the time. We had a great conversation. Craig was, in theory, kind of on the episode. He was Skyped in a little bit.

Drew: He comes in at the end. There wasn’t enough [inaudible 00:01:46].

John: It was basically me and Chris. The other one, Chris McQuarrie was sitting right in the chair that you’re sitting in, and he was talking and theorizing about films.

Drew: I’ll be honest, I came out of these last two episodes with such a Chris McQuarrie crush that if he does come back, if the comet returns, I’m going to have to-

John: The comet will return. You had not listened to these episodes, but you had gone through the transcripts because you were working on them for the book, right?

Drew: Correct.

John: Great. That was a whole summer ago. You were an intern last year.

Drew: Oh my gosh, yeah. That’s been a year.

John: A whole year has passed.

Drew: What was amazing going through those two is he’s working on this massive scale, but the advice he has for young writers and directors is really careful and really thoughtful and really incredible.

John: I find he’s a good balance of idealistic and pragmatic. As I hear him talk about other films that he’s worked on or helped out on, it’s very much like, what do you need to do to actually make the movie happen on the day and deliver something that the audience wants to actually watch. Sometimes that can be a hard thing to be in both worlds at the same time.

Drew: He’s never cynical, which is great.

John: That’s correct. We’re going to listen to things cut together from both those first two things, so there’s going to be some sound shifts. It’s fine. We got Matthew Chilelli cutting them together. It’s going to be great. Talk to us about what’s going to happen in the bonus segment for premium members.

Drew: In the bonus segment, you, Craig, and Chris are going to talk about spoof movies, which Craig has a lot of experience with and Chris has a broad knowledge about.

John: Fantastic. Drew, thank you for putting together this edited episode, and we will have the real Chris McQuarrie with us here soon.

Drew: I’m excited.

John: Chris McQuarrie, welcome back.

Chris: Thank you very much for having me.

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

Chris: You know, Craig–

Craig: Here we go.

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

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

Chris: I miss that.

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

Chris: About everything.

Craig: Literally everything.

Chris: It’s not so much an argument as it is a–

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

Chris: It’s the duelists.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

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

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

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

Chris: Thank you.

Craig: Amazing.

Chris: Thank you very much.

Craig: And two more to come.

Chris: Two more to come.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Could have fooled me.

Chris: He would be doing most of this stuff–

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

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

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

Chris: That’s true.

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

Chris: I’m whittling him away.

John: Go back ten years ago and did you think you’d be directing big blockbuster movies?

Chris: No.

John: You were a writer of big movies, and I thought you were at the apex of writing those big blockbuster movies. I sort of assumed you’d keep doing that. I was surprised that you ended up wanting to direct them. What was the change?

Chris: Somebody asked me. I directed The Way of the Gun in ’99 in the hopes that The Way of the Gun would be a steppingstone. I tried to do what Rian Johnson did with his career. I was going to direct the little movie, and then a slightly bigger movie, and a slightly bigger movie until I got to direct the big movie I wanted to direct. And that first movie was not successful. You could even go so far as to call it a tremendous bomb. I guess it’s not a tremendous bomb only in that it wasn’t a big enough movie to be considered a tremendous bomb.

John: Absolutely. I have one of those too.

Chris: Boy, people really reacted quite angrily to it. No matter what I did over the next seven years to get another movie off the ground, I couldn’t. I was working on two fronts. I was working as a rewrite guy, and I was writing my own stuff, trying to get it made as a director, and was getting nowhere.

It wasn’t until Valkyrie when I let go of something that was mine to direct and opted to be the producer on that movie. As a producer, I learned so much more about both writing and directing than I ever did writing and directing my own movie.

John: Talk about the difference, because when you’re doing Way of the Gun, you had the responsibilities for everything. We talked about the bag of money. You’re dealing with all the department heads. You’re making those thousand choices a day, which always sort of terrified me about directing. What was it about producing a big movie like Valkyrie? It is just a fundamentally different beast from making a smaller movie like Way of the Gun? What was the change in Valkyrie?

Chris: Yes, the size and scope of the movie and also dealing with Tom Cruise, who at the time I did not know and couldn’t safely assume anything about him. My intention was to take a producing credit for having put the movie together, but not actually go make the movie. I really didn’t want to do it.

Paula Wagner, who was still with Tom at the time, was running United Artists, which was the studio making the movie. Paula took me out to lunch to tell me they were making the movie and said, “Now, I understand you’re producing the film.” My intention was to say yes, but-

John: You’re really going to do that.

Chris: Yeah, but no, I’m not. I sensed immediately how I answered that question would have a profound effect on my career. Instead of saying no, I said, “I am now.” She said, “Good, because I’ve been on set with Tom for the last 25 years. This is the first time I won’t be able to be on set with him. I want you to be there as Tom’s guy. I need somebody to be there day to day with Tom.”

I found myself very suddenly thrust into this position, which I had never anticipated. Tom quite graciously took me under his wing. He understood that my relationship with Bryan Singer was such that I could communicate with Bryan more effectively and probably with more force than Tom could. It allowed Tom to have a very comfortable relationship with Bryan. He never had to push Bryan. All he had to do was create with Bryan. Then he would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s what I think we should be doing.” Tom and I worked together very well on that movie, and that sort of translated into the next thing and the next thing.

The next job was we worked on a draft of The Tourist together, which is how I ended up on that movie. He dropped out of The Tourist and then called me up to do Ghost Protocol. He called me up to do Ghost Protocol after reading Jack Reacher, which was not something to which he was originally attached.

John: Jack Reacher was a project you adapted from the book originally?

Chris: Yeah. Don Granger, who was also at UA, and who had been at Cruise/Wagner before that, he’s at Skydance now. Don Granger saw the writing on the wall, saw that UA was not going to be a going concern. He said, “I’ve got this series of books at Cruise/Wagner, and I think this is the best prospect at getting a franchise made.” He offered me the movie, and I said, “I’ll do it on the condition that the studio offers me the movie to direct. I’m not going to ask for permission to direct movies anymore. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and getting nowhere,” and they did.

I handed Tom that script to read as the producer. He called me the next day and said, “Script’s great. I need you to get on a plane and come up to Vancouver right now. We’re working on Mission: Impossible, and I need your help.”

Now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. Having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in movie-making, I now understood, okay, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.

I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. I could only reshoot what I still had sets for, sets they hadn’t torn down. It gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie… I was originally only supposed to go for a week. My first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, “Okay, these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else? If I have this idea, is there something you can build?”

Without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned, so that when it came my time to do it, I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. It’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule.

For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years… That was a $60 million movie with Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million, but I wasn’t directing. The budgets continued to get bigger over time. Now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million movie. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million, and he’ll make a billion.”

That’s a very, very, very hard turn for a lot of filmmakers to make. Now I have another career, which is coming on to those movies and supporting that director and saying, “Okay, so now you’re making your big movie. Here’s what’s important,” because what happens with a lot of those guys is they haven’t gone through the trial by fire where they realize there’s only so much reinventing the wheel can take.

They’re still coming at it like an indie filmmaker, but somebody has given them $200 million and a giant franchise. They don’t really want to believe that they’re making mass entertainment, and they struggle against that. I’ve seen two kinds of filmmakers in that. There are the filmmakers who very quickly listen to reason and adapt and survive. And then there are the ones who just their movies get taken away from them.

John: Yeah, we can think of the ones whose movies got taken away, or the really bad scenarios there. If you are coming in to be a director whisperer on a project, at what point is there a realization that there’s going to be a problem? Are they bringing you in right when that person is hired on to say like this person is going to be a consigliere to you, or it’s like something has gone horribly awry and now let’s get Chris McQuarrie there to help?

Chris: There’s a sweet spot I call four in and four out. If you’re four weeks out from shooting or four weeks into shooting, you’re in this zone where you’re so freaked out, you’ll do anything the doctor says. If you’re any deeper into production, you kind of get entrenched and you get blinders on and you’re afraid to change anything. If you’re too far out, you’re afraid to change anything because you think, oh, it’s too daunting a task.

There was one movie in particular that’s coming out. I’m very interested to see it. I won’t say its name. I begged the director not to go in the direction he was going, because I really did believe in the material and I thought it was wonderful. There was one specific plot element that completely degraded the main character of the film. I said, “If you just take this thing away, your movie will become really powerful.”

There was a visual idea. There was clearly an obsession with this particular idea, and there was a refusal to recognize that this very idea that gives you one visual aspect of the movie is going to tear the movie down.

He said, “It’s just too much work.” I said, “You’ve got nine months. You don’t realize how many times you can reinvent this movie.” More importantly, because of the movies I’d worked on, I come into a movie like that and say, “I’m not going to change anything about your movie. I’m not going to change the sets. I’m not going to introduce new characters. I’m going to take the resources you have and kind of reconfigure your movie to give it a more emotional journey,” because that’s really all I care about.

It took me a long time to learn that. I was an information guy. It was what I was telling the audience. I was a writer who was all about dialogue. I’ve since learned about emotional drag. That’s my catchphrase.

John: That four weeks in, four weeks out thing is really interesting because you look at these filmmakers who are coming from… Like you and I on our first movies. Four weeks, you’re almost done with your movie on a $5 million movie. It’s a very different thing. We’ve both also been involved with these movies that just shoot for forever.

You and I both have helped out on those movies where you come in when the train is already running. Generally if we’re coming in as a screenwriter, we’re just there to fix the visible screenwriting problems, and so we’re not doing the thing of what you’re talking about with Mission: Impossible where you actually had to sort of talk to all the department heads and really get their buy-in.

A couple times we’ve had guests on the show, Drew Goddard, or David Lindelof recently, who talked about the big opportunity, the thing that changed everything was coming into a project that was in crisis. It was the TV show that was going down, that didn’t have any more scripts. In this case it was a movie that was swirling around. That’s also been true in my career. It’s the editing rooms where they couldn’t find the movie that I could come back in and actually really help. Those are the moments.

If you haven’t had both the courage to step up when those things happen, but also the education to sort of know what are the right questions to ask, how to push for the best thing, it can be really daunting. If I were that filmmaker that you’re coming in to help, I would be scared to ask for help, because that’s an admission of failure. That’s an admission that someone made a mistake in hiring me to do this job.

Chris: Yes. It’s the moment in Terminator when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” You walk in and you say to that director, “Here’s what’s happening on your movie and here’s what’s going to happen.”

There was one director in particular. His movie was in trouble. He was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in, so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” I have had that happen too. I have had studios try to manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man, and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.

I walked in and I told him, “Here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. A lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, ‘I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works, but if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.’“

I said, “What you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. The producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served.” He didn’t do it.

We had another meeting. Half an hour before, I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” He didn’t do it again. Eventually, everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had been taken over. His worst nightmare happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.

John: Absolutely.

Chris: You’re able to come into it and say, “There’s a clarity that I have on everybody else’s movies that I will never have on my own movie.” I’m dying right now in the middle of Mission: Impossible, trying to figure out the turn on page 70. I know what happens in Act Three. I know what’s supposed to happen, but I can’t quite figure out how to get there. If it wasn’t my movie, I would parachute in and just be like, “Oh, you just have to do this.” It’s just so much easier when it’s not your baby.

Especially when you’re writing for studios, you get to a place where you go, “I know what I should write. If I didn’t have to turn right here, and I could turn left, I’d know where this movie would go.” That’s the thing you’re always struggling-

John: You’re trying to find a way to finesse it so it feels like it’s a natural turn, that it’s not just now we cut to a new sequence, because we all know the directors who would just like, “On the wall here, I have all the different sequences. Find a way to connect them all together. Go.” Those are the jobs I despise and ultimately get out of, because I don’t want to just be the person who is stringing those things together.

Chris: Oh, it’s soul-sucking work. It really is.

John: It pays well, but it kills you. You’re responsible for just creating a trailer for the moments that are happening in front of you. It’s maddening.

Chris: It’s funny you say that, because that’s another thing that we think about now. Since just before Rogue Nation, the lesson I learned, having had fights with the studio about the marketing of Jack Reacher, my first meeting on Rogue Nation I just went to marketing and said, “Tell me what to do. Tell me what you need so that I’m not fighting with you.” That has evolved for me, so that in this movie, Tom and I have a rule, you give marketing one shot a day. Every day you get a trailer shot. It’s like, doesn’t matter what-

John: That’s great.

Chris: You look at it and go, “Yep, that could be in a trailer. Okay, send it away.” Then they’re happy. They’re invested in your movie as opposed to you’re fighting them. We also know that movies like this need lines like, “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” I don’t know what that means in the context of the rest of the movie. I don’t ever particularly feel that he is a kite in a hurricane in that movie. The sexiness of that line in a trailer is really effective. You develop a sense for where those lines might go in a movie. We have little placeholders.

There’s a scene between Tom Cruise and Sean Harris in this movie, and we have a blank space there, where it’s like that’s where we know the villain is going to say something that is going to communicate the story of the movie in that one soundbite. I never really thought that way until this franchise.

John: If you think about people who run TV shows, they have to think about this episode of television that they’re making, but they have to be thinking of the whole series. They have to be thinking of how am I going to keep this thing on the air. It sounds like part of what you’re doing is that realization that you’re responsible not only for this two hours of entertainment, but you’re responsible for this giant ship that is going to be sailing through its berth and the success of that. It’s not just these two hours of film. It’s everything around it. It’s this universe of marketing around it that you also have to be aware of, and from an early time. You can’t just make your movie, then get involved with the marketing.

Chris: Yes. What is Mission? It’s the life of whatever this thing is, so that your movie leaves it so that another chapter in the franchise can exist. I guess that’s where jumping the shark comes in. You worry all the time. “Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go?”

We had a big conversation about tone, because Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise, and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” We did, but now we find ourselves going, “Are we going where Bond went, where Bond became serious?”

John: Dark and serious.

Chris: It’s another kind of tone, which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place, but we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “We can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. We’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise, saying how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.

John: When we were making Charlie’s Angels, when we started making the second one, I talked to the team and I described it as like I really want to approach this as we made an amazing pilot and now we’re going to make that first episode of the TV show that actually – of the series that really is the series. Where we sort of learned everything from the pilot and now we’re going to make the most amazing one. And we didn’t. Spoiler. It was as much of a trouble and more so than the first one.

But that was sort of the fantasy. You want to be able to make the sort of movie series. Marvel is able to do it remarkably well. DC, we’re yet to see whether they’re going to be able to make a franchise-y series out of the things they’re trying to do, but it’s laudable. You understand why people want to do it.

Chris: DC has a tough road to hoe because they’ve got to do something different than Marvel. Marvel has staked a claim so strongly in a very specific tone. Marvel has Kevin Feige, who is not a traditional studio head. He’s not a traditional producer. He is a producer of the old school. That’s what producers used to be like in Hollywood. They were the guys who came in and said, “This is the movie.” I guess the closest analog in something other than comic book movies is somebody like a Scott Rudin, who really he owns the material and he is a filmmaker in his own right and has specific control.

Warner Bros has to do something to differentiate itself from that. What is that? There’s Christopher Nolan’s Batman, but that’s not a universe. That’s one character, whereas Iron Man and the Marvel universe sort of set the tone for all those other movies.

If you had told me even a year before it came out that Captain America would work as a movie, or that Thor would work as a movie, that I’d find those characters appealing, that I’d actually find Captain America one of the more appealing characters in the Marvel universe, I just would have laughed at you. We had grown up seeing so many bad attempts inn these really cheesy TV movie ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those Captain Marvel movies.

John: They’re amazing.

Chris: Oh my god. Oh my god. It will be very interesting to see how DC defines themselves.

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

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

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

Craig: Back in time.

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

John: It’s a reunion of friends who had separated.

Chris: St. Elmo’s Fire, while it wasn’t a nostalgic movie, they were at a specific turning point in their life. They were kind of looking back at—

Craig: See, to me that’s it. We have a group of people that represent some kind of contemporary arrangement, whether we’re catching them later or they were contemporary or we’re in their contemporariness, like for instance The Breakfast Club. But they are at a moment where things are changing, and we watch that happen. That to me is the essence of these things. But for the love of god, I cannot imagine anyone putting this on a screen anymore. It just doesn’t seem like they will. It’s a bummer.

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

Craig: No question.

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

Chris: Oh, This is Us.

Craig: This is Us.

John: This is Us as a movie.

Chris: Modern Family.

Craig: Correct. And interestingly Dan Fogelman–

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

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

Chris: I went to see Hell or High Water.

John: Oh, which is fantastic.

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

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

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

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

Chris: An event.

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

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

Craig: No question.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: No question.

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

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

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

Craig: Isn’t that nice?

Chris: Yes, it’s lovely.

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

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

Craig: Which is why I take my hat off to people like Derek Haas who are still doing it, not just on one show, but multiple shows. I mean, the amount of story that has to be generated by those guys is bananas. But yes, the format has become not just flexible, but there is no format. It doesn’t matter.

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

Chris: Giant movies.

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

Chris: No, because they don’t win awards anymore.

John: They don’t win awards anymore.

Craig: Precisely.

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

Craig: Correct.

Chris: Yes.

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

Craig: TV. No question.

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

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

Chris: It was a letterbox.

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

Chris: No.

Craig: It’s not a movie screen.

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

Craig: No one is going to watch it.

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

Craig: Here it is.

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

Craig: For the life of it. Primarily.

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

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

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

Craig: Yes. Correct.

Chris: I’m giving a conservative—

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

Chris: Four weeks. Yeah.

Craig: It used to be months.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: It is now about four weeks.

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

Chris: It’s a Christ figure against Rome.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Christ figure against Rome.

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

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

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

Chris: He was a great man.

Craig: He was a great man.

Chris: And it’s always a man.

Craig: And it’s always a man.

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

Craig: And just wait.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Time is a flat circle.

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

Chris: I’m looking at the–

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

Chris: Westerns.

John: Let’s talk about westerns.

Craig: Hmm, westerns.

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

Craig: Godless.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Everything is dead until it’s not.

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

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

John: Oh yeah, of course.

Craig: Pirate movies. Not only dead—

Chris: Do you remember Pirates with Walter Matthau?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Chris: Oh my god.

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

Chris: It killed Carolco.

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

Chris: Killed careers.

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

John: Yeah.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: And…

John: Pirates of the Caribbean. Just takes one.

Craig: There we go.

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

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

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

Craig: And a brand.

Chris: Exactly.

Craig: I mean, just built in.

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

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

Craig: Shane.

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

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

Chris: I will fight you on that.

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

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

Craig: Sure.

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

Craig: Maybe a book would do it.

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

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

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

Chris: Hell or High Water.

John: Hell or High Water—

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

John: It totally is.

Chris: It’s a bank-robbing—

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

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

John: It did, absolutely.

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

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

Chris: The Highwaymen. Sure.

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

Chris: That’s everything.

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

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

Craig: Correct.

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

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

Craig: Correct.

Chris: Which they are now.

Craig: And were punished—

Chris: And were punished – exactly.

Craig: If they didn’t do the impossible.

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

Craig: Way more opportunity.

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

Craig: Yes.

Chris: You know, there’s Oscar movies and there’s money-making movies. Now could there be there’s Netflix movies and there’s feature films? And that the feature films because of marketing requirements need to be bigger movies that make more money. And then Netflix becomes the farm system that teaches people how to do stuff. You could live within the Netflix bubble and make a 14, a 25, and a $60 million movie.

Craig: Yeah. I think we’re there. I mean, I think that’s where we are. The real question is, is there any kind – well, question number one. Is there mobility from Netflix type of movies or other TV movies to the big ones? Or do people even want to go? Because here’s the thing. I think a lot of filmmakers don’t – you know, we were talking to Mari Heller about this.

Mari Heller made this incredible movie, Diary of a Teenage Girl. It was amazing. And people came to her and they’re like here’s this huge superhero movie, you want to do it? And she was like I feel like I’m supposed to, because we’re trying to advance the cause of female directors and we’re trying to get into those big seats, but I don’t want to. I want to do this.

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

Craig: Yep. [laughs]

Chris: The movie is going in three weeks.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: You’ve never done anything like this.

Craig: The actor is kind of in charge.

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

Craig: Correct.

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

Craig: It is really terrifying.

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

Craig: That’s a lot to have faith in.

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

Craig: Nah.

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

Craig: Their podium movie.

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

Craig: They want to make their podium movie.

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

Craig: Big ass dumb movie they want to do.

Chris: Yes, they’ve got some big ass-

John: Comparing that to your life as a screenwriter, there are definitely days where you or I, we don’t want to sit down and write that thing. It’s almost always torture to actually get me at the computer.

Chris: Yes.

John: But at least with the director, you have a call time on the sheet. Like someone is going to pick you up and take you there. And then you’re going to be responsible for those decisions. And that’s terrifying and there are definitely days I don’t want to get in the van, but once you’re there, there’s a whole bunch of people there who are there to help you. And there’s at least some plan for what you are supposed to do. There was some assignment you were given. Like this is the thing that is theoretically on the call sheet. So, we got this location, we got these people, it should be something like this. And you can figure it out.

And, you know, some of my favorite days in directing were things had gone horribly wrong, or there’s a rainstorm and it won’t match cut into anything else, but we have to shoot this. It’s the only day on this location. And you just make it work. It’s going back to remembering like, OK, what is this actually supposed to be about. What is here that we can use to do this and how can we sort of make this problem seem like a solution?

Chris: Screenwriting is pushing a rock up a hill. And directing is running downhill with the rock behind you. [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s going, and it’s going to crush you if you don’t run. But, also, the other night we were – I think this was in our first or second week of shooting. We were at the Grand Palais. We had this big sequence at the Grand Palais. We had all these extras. And extras in France get paid quite a bit of money. So, you had to pick and choose what nights you had a lot of extras. And finally we were shooting outside the Grand Palais. There’s a scene where Tom and Vanessa Kirby and another character come – and Henry Cavill all come running out of the Grand Palais.

And there’s a big event inside. And that night there’s 150 extras. And we put the camera in front of the building and Tom and Vanessa and Henry come walking out and they’re just like three people and 150 extras barely – it’s just deserted. And you came from this big event inside to suddenly – it’s so big. There was nothing you can do.

And the cinematographer loved the building. And he said, “But this is great. This is a great shot of the Grand Palais.” And I said, “But it’s deserted. How do we make 150 people look like a thousand people?” And instead of shooting the outside of the building looking in, we went inside the building and put a long lens on the camera and created a narrow funnel of people and had the actors rushing through the door with all the extras coming towards you. And it turned into this…

The fun of it was we were shooting Mission: Impossible, but we were making an independent film. We were like I only have 150 people. What do I do to make this shot big? And we had the best time that night. That was like really one of the more fun attacks we had. It was great.

John: So, switching just for our last topic here, if a strike had occurred while you were making this movie, like what do you do?

Chris: Well, we had an emergency plan in place, assuming that if there was going to be a strike, on the day that the contract ran out, we were hedging our bets and saying there will probably be a 10-day extension. There wasn’t the feeling that it was acrimonious and that a strike was just going to happen that moment.

I had a friend who is a writer friend of mine who I have worked with on other movies and he was on deck. And if there was an extension, he was ready to get on a plane, fly out, and during that 10 days we were going to generate as many pages as we possibly could. And then we figured the lights were going to go out.

John: So you get past your page 70 thing. You just have something you can shoot at page 70.

Chris: You had to have something you could shoot.

John: Our friend Aline Brosh McKenna calls that the rocky shoals. It’s that point where the movie is transitioning from sort of one thing before it becomes that third act. It’s often a challenge in scripts, but it’s often a challenge in cuts. So I sympathize.

Chris: Yeah. It’s funny, on the last one, that wasn’t the problem. On the last one it was how does this movie end. I know the ending of the movie quite vividly. I don’t know – there’s this weird middle bit that’s happening in London. And I know what the last five pages of it are. I know there’s a confrontation that Ethan has at the end of that, which is this scene that I really love. And what happened was when we sensed that the strike was coming, I had all of these action scenes that had been storyboarded and worked out and in many cases prevised, but no one had ever written a page of those sequences.

There was something like 30 pages of material that existed in concept. We were building sets and rigs and all sorts of things. I just didn’t have them in script form. So I had this friend – the storyboard artist called him and said here’s everything we’re doing. And he took that 30 pages off of my docket. He wasn’t creating anything, but he was writing it in script form so that I could more quickly rewrite it. And he wrote this one scene, but not in any way, shape, or form the way I would have shot it, but inspired this idea where I was like, oh my god, I’ve got this really fun idea. So we know what that sequence is now. Or at least we know how that sequence ends. I just don’t know how it begins.

John: One of the things that was a big topic of the WGA negotiations was the move to shorter seasons and sort of how writers were being held for a very long time on these shorter seasons. And their writing fees was being applied against producing fees. But we see also a change happening in features where there are these mini rooms where they are bringing together a bunch of screenwriters, some really high levels, some newbies, and they’re working through a giant property. So they’ll take–

Chris: Transformers.

John: Transformers was an early example of that, where they’ll say, OK, we’re going to spend four weeks and figure out Transformers and generate, you know, a TV series and three movies and we’re going to figure out what this all is. Where do you see yourself fitting into that universe?

Chris: I believe you can create all of the Transformers stuff you want. You can build out the whole universe. You can finish all the screenplays. It goes back to the very beginning of the conversation we were having. When the rubber hits the road, that’s all going to change. They’re going to call you. They’re going to call me. They’re going to call Drew. They’re going to call somebody in at some point and go, “None of this works. It was all great in theory, but we just suddenly…”

An actor drops out. Or the budget changes. And things happen. What I try to impress upon writers going into it now, I believe the future belongs to the writer-producer. That is not to say you have to be named a producer on the movie. But that you need to be able to function on a level where you are – you need to understand editing. You need to understand elements of physical production. The more you understand that, the more valuable you will be to those people. The more you’re selling yourself and not your writing.

Writers right now – and I did it for a long, long time – tend to believe I’m going to write this script and the script is the commodity. It’s not. It’s your ability to write a script that is the commodity. The truth of the matter is, if everybody could write they’d do it. They wouldn’t call us. The fact that the strike was going to happen and had people nervous, if we went on strike, movies just – nobody would write it. It’s a lonely, miserable, very difficult particular skill. And everybody thinks they can do it. I think the same way everybody feels like playing guitar looks like it would be easy.

John: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just pick it up. Just strumming.

Chris: Well, yeah, you teach me the basics. You teach me a couple of chords and I’m like, oh, this is very easy. Then show me Van Halen and say do that. And, by the way, do it with two weeks before you’re going on stage. In those writer’s rooms and things like that, this thing with the television seasons that they’re dealing with now. The nature of television is changing and it created a really prickly situation in this atmosphere with the strike.

I can see the studios looking at it and saying, “Well, yeah, now there are only 10 episodes. There used to be 22 and now there’s 10. Why should we pay you more if there’s only 10?” And we’re saying, “But wait, you’re taking us off the market for this much time.”

The studio’s argument is going to be, “Go and create your own show.” It’s going to thin the herd out. It’s going to define who those writer-producers are. And I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to shape writers’ opinions of themselves. Writers have been trained to believe that they are simultaneously necessary and totally dependent, that you can’t make a movie without a screenplay, but I can’t get my screenplay made unless you buy it and validate me. And now you’re at a place where you can be more a part of the process.

Here’s the dirty little secret, and it’s something you know better than anybody. A lot of directors don’t know how to direct. They simply don’t know how to do it. They have some specific skill or some specific vision, or a team around them that helped them, but a great many of them don’t really understand the fundamentals of storytelling as much as they understand some specific visual style.

As a writer who understands editing, you will be invaluable to that director. You may not get the glory. You may not get the credit, but if those things aren’t important to you, if being valuable is what’s important to you, you will always work. And that was really the big change for me in my career. I wanted very much to be in control of my own destiny. And by letting go of that control, my destiny has become that much more in my control.

You were asking me at the beginning, you know, how did you – did you ever expect that you would be directing these blockbusters. I very distinctly remember when I was trying to get Valkyrie made, and I thought Valkyrie was going to be a little movie, no one would read it. It didn’t matter who I was or where I came from. They’d hear it’s about the German generals who, and they were done. They didn’t care.

When Bryan Singer attached himself, people were then offering to make it without having to read it. And I had a very painful realization which was I’ll never be at the level to direct the things that I really want to do. Booth and Valkyrie and The Last Mission and things like that. All my history stuff. Because I’m never going to direct X-Men. And X-Men gets you to a level where you can step down to do a Valkyrie. I’m just never going to get there. So I let go of that dream. And in doing that I became a producer on Valkyrie, which led to rewriting Mission: Impossible, which led to Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow. And on Edge of Tomorrow, Tom said, “You should direct the next Mission.”

So I never aimed for that target. I just showed up at work saying how can I help you make your film. How can I help you make your movie better? And not worrying about where the path was taking me.

John: That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Our earlier segments were produced by Megana Rao and Godwin Jabangwe. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Since it’s a throwback episode, let’s do a Matthew Chilelli throwback outro.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them 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 feature with Chris McQuarrie and Craig talking about spoof movies. Drew, thanks for a fun show.

Drew: My pleasure.

[Bonus Segment]

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

Craig: Spoofs and parodies.

Chris: Spoofs and parodies.

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

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

Chris: Jane Austen’s Mafia.

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

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

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

John: Yes. That was my instinct.

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

Chris: That’s very true.

Craig: It’s over.

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

Craig: The Internet is essentially a spoof machine.

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

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

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

Craig: Of a genre.

Chris: Of a genre.

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

Chris: Well that’s a mashup.

John: Yeah.

Chris: And a great one.

John: Fantastic.

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

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

Craig: In Like Flint.

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

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

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

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

John: Lord and Miller. Yeah.

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

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

Chris: Meta.

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

John: Oh yes.

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

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

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

John: It took all the comedy out.

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

Links:

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

Scriptnotes, Episode 595: Correctable Crises, Transcript

May 30, 2023 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. I have a pre-correction to this episode you’re about to listen to. Later on, I refer to Jesse Alexander of Succession. The quote is actually by Lucy Prebble, another executive producer of Succession. That’s it. That’s my mistake. Enjoy the episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we answer listener questions on the craft and the business of writing from our overflowing mailbag. In our bonus segment for premium members, what do you do when a coworker is nice but incompetent? We’ll discuss one of the trickiest workplace situations.

Craig is traveling this week, but luckily, we have someone extraordinarily qualified to take his place. Danielle Sanchez-Witzel is a writer-producer whose many credits include My Name is Earl, The Carmichael Show. Her latest show is Up Here, streaming now on Hulu. Welcome, Danielle.

Danielle Sanchez-Witzel: Hi. Thanks for having me, John. I’m happy to be here.

John: Danielle, you and I only know each other because we’re both on the negotiating committee. We’ve been sitting in these giant rooms across tables from each other. It’s so great to talk to you about what you do.

Danielle: I am so happy we met that way. I knew of you, just to be clear. I just didn’t know you until I got into that room. Happy to be doing something that’s not negotiating, to be perfectly honest with you, John.

John: Absolutely. We had a question last night at the member meeting about what does the negotiating committee actually do, what do you do in the room. I tried to answer that, and I feel like I kind of flubbed it, honestly, because I was trying to segue to talk about something else, but I was trying to quickly get through the negotiating part. Because I have a podcast, I’m going to take a second crack at it here. I’m going to try to explain what happens in the negotiating room.

I think I have this fantasy that it’s going to be like an Aaron Sorkin movie, like The Social Network, where people get these devastating lines and there’s rhetorical traps that are laid, that spring and change everything. It’s not like that.

Danielle: It’s not. It’s not like that at all, no.

John: No. It’s more like those foreign streaming shows that people tell you to watch, and they’ll say, “It’s really, really slow, but you’ve gotta stick with it, because you’ll think that nothing’s happening, but eventually it all happens.” You’re like, “Oh wow, that was actually really impressive, but it was subtle.” It’s one of those maddening but subtle kind of processes for me. Has that been your experience?

Danielle: Absolutely. I was really glad that question was asked at the meeting last night, because I think it’s such a fair question. I don’t know if our members wonder about it, but clearly that member did, so I imagine more perhaps do.

This is going to sound crazy, but something that really surprised me when we first walked into the room is that we’re literally sitting across a table from each other, just the visual. The table is pretty narrow, and we’re just sitting across from it.

This is my first negotiating committee I’ve ever been on. I know that’s not true for you. I’m really giving first impression kind of a take. I don’t know why I was surprised by being so close to the AMPTP members. I think what you’re describing in terms of vibe and pace is pretty accurate.

John: We have incredibly smart people on our side. Staff does almost all of the talking in the room when we’re actually in the room with the other people. Then we get back to our caucus room, and that’s the chance where we get to actually say clever things as writers and tell jokes and make important points.

One of the important points I really loved hearing you talk about was your experience making these last two shows. In addition to Up Here, you also have Survival of the Thickest, this Netflix show. You were talking about how challenging it’s been to make shows as a writer-producer these days because of structural changes of the industry, that the experience of doing My Name is Earl is just so vastly different from what’s happening now with these new shows. Could you give us a sense of that, what it’s like to be making a show in 2023 and how challenging it is for you as a showrunner?

Danielle: Absolutely. I have spent a majority of my career making broadcast network shows. I have to say I’m really grateful for that experience. I know young writers will understand what I’m saying, because what I had access to… Somehow we separated writing from production, and so this next generation of writers isn’t getting access to what I had access to on every show I worked on, on My Name is Earl, on New Girl, a brilliant staff of writers who were there for the entire time of making the show.

Pre-production, when there’s no production going on, when you’re just in a writers’ room coming up with ideas and stories and writing scripts and rewriting scripts, tabling scripts. I work in comedy, so the table is really important.

Then during production, which overlaps in broadcast network, so now you’re actually shooting the show and you’re making the show and the writers are still there. A writer or two is on set, covering the production, while a writers’ room is continuing to do work, continuing to rewrite, continuing to write stories.

Then in post-production, which I think is the thing that writers are really not getting access to anymore, maybe even in broadcast network, and that’s obviously watching cuts and giving notes. There’s a ton of rewriting that happens in pre-production, especially in comedy, but I think drama too. We’re rewriting jokes. We’re rewriting ADR. There’s so much you can do if you’re on an actor’s back. I’m sure savvy television watchers know, like, “That line was ADR. There’s no way that’s what they said here.” It’s the final phase of storytelling.

I came up in my career being a part of that, all of that, that whole process, and having a whole staff to be able to be there, to work on all phases of the show, including when I ran The Carmichael Show, which was a multi-cam broadcast network. I am so grateful that I had this amazing staff of writers who was there to help me. It’s very hard to run a show. It’s so much work. Writers are a vital part of the entire process. Now I am exclusively making stream. Up Here was, as you said, a show for Hulu that I did with a very talented group of Broadway superstars, Tony winners. They needed one person who had never won a Tony, so somehow I got added to that group. We’ve separated for streaming.

Even though that was a 20th studio show for Hulu, meaning 20th makes shows for broadcast network, so as a studio they understand what this model was, for some reason streaming, because it’s less episodes, somehow the industry companies thought, “You don’t need writers for as long of a time, because it’s less episodes.” Both of the shows I just made were eight-episode orders.

There’s this new model now. Any young writers who have experienced this, who might be listening, you know what it is. You can have writers for somewhere around 12 to 20 weeks, 20 if you’re lucky. That’s it. Then they all go away. Again, if you’re lucky, maybe you get to keep one writer who comes to set with you or continues the process with you, but that’s it.

This machine that has worked so well for so many generations and produced the best shows in the history of TV stopped working that way. All of a sudden, it just got cut off for a reason I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you why, because we’re the ones who make it. We know how to make the product. I don’t know how exactly over the last five, six years this industry practice started.

It became this thing where you’re supposed to try and write all the scripts and get it all right before you hit production. It’s impossible. It’s not how the sausage is made. That’s not how we do it. That’s not how we’ve ever done it. It’s left showrunners to have to do everything, again maybe with one pal, with one super talented pal, do all the rewriting, get all the scripts ready, now handle all the production, and then overlap with post and do all of that while you’re just a crew of one or two people.

On Survival of the Thickest, which is the Netflix show, the last show I made, I was very lucky that my star is also a writer, co-creator of the show. Guess what? She’s acting now. I had one other writer, a really talented woman named Grace Edwards, who thank god was there with me.

The process is the process for a reason. I really got worn down. I know there are a lot of showrunners who are having to do this who are really worn down. Plus a lot of writers who aren’t getting access to what they need know they could be valuable to the process and are being told, “We don’t need you anymore.” I assure you I’m not the one saying we don’t need you anymore. I’ve been screaming, “I need them. I need them,” and I was told no. I was told I couldn’t have them. That’s the state of the industry through my eyes, at least.

John: I’ve avoided TV for most of my career, mostly because I was afraid of the doing 19 jobs at once problem. I was hired on to do a show called DC very early on in my career. I had no business being a showrunner on it. I was trying to prep an episode, shoot an episode, write an episode, post an episode, and do all these things at once. I couldn’t do it. I said, “Oh, TV’s not for me, at least not for me at this point in my life.”

I thought, oh, this change to shorter orders, the ability to write all the scripts at once and then just do one thing at a time seems really good, until you surface all these problems you’re describing, which is that by separating these things so completely, you don’t have any support to actually make the show.

Those writers who should be learning about all the other parts of the process, they’re gone. They’re hopefully on other shows. They are just not part of the process anymore. It’s not only hurting the show that you’re making right now. It’s hurting all the future shows that these other writers are going to be making, because they will not have the experience. They’ll be just as clueless as I was when I was trying to make my first show, because they will not have had production experience. We have people who come to these member meetings who say, “I have written on three shows, a full season on three shows. I have never been to set.” That is a crisis in the making.

Danielle: Absolutely. I have told the companies I work for that this is going to hurt them. I don’t know that anyone’s believed me. Maybe I’m not talking to the people who really have the power to change it.

The truth is that the business model has worked for a reason. I think there was this misunderstanding of shorter order creating a new world that isn’t truly how to make a thing. I think it would be interesting to see what people think about the quality of TV. I know that’s something we think about creators so much and as writers and the people making these worlds is that we want it to be the best it can be. I know I don’t have the resources to do what I used to have the resources to do. I know that that is going to affect all kinds of things. At the end of the day, we’re making a product to entertain people. You want that to be the best product it can possibly be.

It’s frustrating at every level. I don’t think there’s a writer who isn’t frustrated in episodic television right now, because it is a collaborative process. That’s what it is. We’re taking collaboration away quickly. It’s like you can collaborate for a little bit, but then you’re done collaborating. It’s just not how to do 8 episodes or 10 episodes or 22 episodes.

It’s a big issue in our industry that we’re looking to fix for everybody. I do think it’s a win-win. I think the companies will win if we fix this and we will win if we fix this at the end of the day in terms of how to get it done.

John: It’s almost important to point out that what we’re describing is not impossible. I was looking at an interview with Jesse Alexander, who runs Succession. They were asking him, “How do you have so many great lines in every episode?” He said, “We have two to three writers on set at all times.” That’s the great answer.

Danielle: That’s the great answer. Jesse’s great answer.

John: It is a short season, and so theoretically, you could’ve written all of those ahead of time, sent everybody home, and had Jesse Alexander run the whole thing by himself. This is a person who recognizes, no, we actually need the writers here to do the work of writing in production. I’m sure those writers were involved in every step of post-production too. I know they overshoot stuff. You’re always making decisions about how to shape the episode in post.

This is a very, very successful show that has a sizable writing staff that is involved throughout production in a short-order season scenario. It’s very definitely doable. This is the right solution for Succession. I think it’s the right solution for so many shows. If we can make some changes in our contract that makes it more clear this is how we really need to structure these things, it’s going to be better for television but also for everyone who needs to make shows.

Danielle: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s good to hear that. In success, maybe you’ll get more of what you’re asking for. It’s like, how do I succeed if you’re not giving me the tools I need in the first place? I’m supposed to succeed by the skin of my teeth, and then if there’s any sort of succeeding, then you can have what you need. I’m really happy to hear that. That’s the truth. I think Succession is one of the funniest shows on television-

John: Agreed.

Danielle: … although it’s not billed that way.

John: Technically a drama, but yes, it has comedy bones to it. Let’s tackle some listener questions. I’m sure we’ll be threading in some more of our thoughts about television throughout this. Drew, do you want to start us off with a craft question?

Drew Marquardt: Yeah, let’s start with Patrick. Patrick asks, “How much pressure should we be putting on ourselves as writers to make sure something is purely original? I recently saw an obscure international film from the ‘50s, and it sparked an idea that would involve borrowing the initial premise and taking the story in a different direction, one that they wouldn’t have been able to explore in that period of time.

“The idea didn’t leave me, and now I have an outline for what I think could be a great drama. It’s my own story, but it would have a ringing similarity for anyone who has also seen the film that inspired it. I’m torn between whether this is a reason to not move forward with the idea and wondered where you consider the line between taking inspiration and ripping off someone else’s work.

“Part of me wants to justify it by saying writers do this all the time with genre pieces, Die Hard onto something or something in space, so why can’t I with a character drama? Part of me feels icky.”

John: Patrick, yeah, I get the sense of feeling icky about these things, but you’re also right to be pointing out that all art is iterative. Everything is inspired by things that happened before. I think you’re worried about like, am I borrowing too directly from this obscure movie that most people haven’t seen? Danielle, what’s your first instinct here for Patrick’s quandary?

Danielle: I wish I knew whatever inciting incident it was that he wanted to, because it might matter. I do think a gut feeling of ickiness is trying to tell you something. I think writers are paid for their gut. I say this a lot. I like using your gut as a bar for, “I think the story should go this way, this way.”

I think if there’s something you’re feeling icky about, then maybe there is one piece of this, and again not knowing the specifics, that might need to change a little bit more than what the plan is.

We’re never reinventing a wheel. It’s just through different eyes and different perspectives and interesting characters who maybe haven’t told a story before. If a lot of the story is personal, I would think you’re in okay territory. I would just ask yourself, what is the icky thing, and can whatever that thing is that’s making you feel a little bit icky change enough so you don’t feel that way?

John: I also wonder if Patrick needs to do a little bit more research about this premise and maybe familiarize himself with the idea there’s probably other movies that are doing a similar kind of thing.

Danielle: That’s a good idea.

John: This may be the first time you’ve encountered this dramatic question being asked in a film, but I bet it wasn’t the first time this was asked. If you do research on this film, you might even find out that this was inspired by something else that came before it.

I’m also thinking back to, I don’t know if you ever saw the Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven. It’s a Julianne Moore movie set in the 1950s. It was very much done in the style of the 1950s, but in a way that you couldn’t have done, addressed those questions in the time.

There’s something about recognizing that you are taking a period idea and examining through a lens which is transforming. It definitely could actually have the same beats as an original thing but actually become so different because of the lens you’re looking at it through that you may not be giving yourself enough credit for the amount of transformation you are enacting on this work.

I get it, Patrick, but I think you need to be a little kinder to yourself and really look at why this idea is so compelling for you and just do some more research around it, but probably do it, because those ideas that you can’t shake are the ones that are definitely worth pursuing.

Danielle: I would definitely say write it. For myself, I’ll come up with a million reasons why I don’t write something. Don’t let it stop you. Write it. You could always rewrite it too if you ever hit a bump. I think that’s great advice, John. Don’t let it stop you. I think write it. Just write it.

John: Write it. Just write it. Let’s try another one, Drew.

Drew: Michelle in San Francisco writes, “Over the years, John and Craig have taught us so much about feature structure, but now that I’m trying to write a limited series that’s six to eight episodes, I’m at a loss for what the structure should be. Could you guys talk about how a TV series should be structured, especially a limited series, and not just the pilot, but the following episodes as well?

“Does each episode need to have the four acts that many people talk about, or is that just the pilot? Do characters really need to have their own arc within each episode or is it okay to just write one long story and delineate episode breaks where there’s a nice cliffhanger-y type endpoint and where it makes sense in terms of page count?”

John: Danielle, we have you here to answer this question, because this is what you’ve been doing. Talk to us about the process of structuring your eight-episode series and what you’re thinking about in terms of how much story fits into each episode, act breaks. I don’t know, for Hulu you may actually have to plan for act breaks. For Netflix, you don’t. Talk to us about that structuring of episodes within an eight-episode order.

Danielle: Interestingly enough, Netflix now has ads. I don’t know if anyone out there is… I don’t think there is any longer a streamer where that isn’t the case. We were not asked at Netflix to structure in acts, but I structure in acts. I am a writer who always structures in acts.

I think you are always in good shape to think of it in terms of acts, to think of each individual episode in terms of acts and then think of the whole piece, if that’s 8 episodes total or 10, also as one long story, the way that she’s suggesting.

I was given advice early in my career. Things were a little bit more straightforward when I was given this advice. Look at a few limited series that you admire and break it down. Just do a breakdown yourself. Write down each little scene. Just bullet point. For you, look, where do act breaks seem to be, are there act breaks, are there not act breaks. The truth is, I’m sure if you did three or four limited series that you really liked, they wouldn’t all follow form so literally, but I think you need to know form to be able to break form.

I would certainly say, especially early in your career, yes to all the questions, even though you want the answer to be no, because wouldn’t it be easier if every character didn’t have to arc and every episode didn’t have to have four acts?

I learned something interesting. The first streaming show I did was a show called Up Here for Hulu, which is a half-hour romantic comedy musical, Broadway musical. I was working with Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who are the most prolific, talented people, let along songwriters, I’ve ever met. They’re two of the most talented people I’ve ever met. Steven Levenson, we co-wrote the first two episodes. He wrote the book for Dear Evan Hanson, as well as he did Fosse/Verdon for FX. Tommy Kail, who directed Hamilton and also did Fosse/Verdon with Steven… Anyway, these are amazing Broadway musical people who I admired, who I was so excited to work with.

Believe it or not, I am answering this question. I’m on topic. John, I haven’t left the topic. I’m on the topic.

John: I have full faith in you.

Danielle: It was interesting to do a first streaming show, which is kind of like what this person is writing in asking about. What do I do if I have eight episodes? Something that Bobby and Kristen and Steven really taught me was… They’re like, “We’re going to make eight mini musicals. Each episode is going to have to work on its own as a musical,” which is just a way of storytelling. Basically, they’re saying it has to work as a story on its own, with these elements of music. Then they’re all going to have to make one long musical. It’s all going to have to add up to one long musical. Again, same as I think what this person is asking about a limited series, it all has to add up to one long movie, or however you want to think about it.

What that does, and what that did for Up Here, and I certainly used it to make Survival of the Thickest, and I think every streaming show moving forward I’ll really get, but it was interesting to think of it in Broadway musical terms, is four or five is a midpoint. That’s the middle of your movie. That’s the middle of your story, and so you’re looking for something to really change significantly. There is some sort of moment that’s going to shift your world.

However you’ve learned the craft of storytelling, whether that’s save the cat or you have an MFA or whatever, you learned how a movie breaks down or what works, and so I think you look at it those ways. Even though it sounds daunting, and all the questions you asked are like, does it have to do this, this, this, this, and the answers are yes, it really just needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s what it needs. It needs to play that way.

I think no matter which way you approached it, if you thought of it as a long-form eight-episode, which seems daunting to me, but if you just wrote it with no act breaks and no anything, I think you would find that your brain naturally put them in, because you know a story has to turn.

Even if you’re just a watcher of television or movies, you understand story structure. You know what’s happening. You know when you need to feel what you need to feel and when you need to shift things.

The answer is yes, but I think there’s just no other way of doing it, because I’ve always wanted to be that person who can just sit down and not need an outline. I just want to write, man. I just want to let it flow, man. I’m not that person. I believe that maybe there are a handful of those people out there in the world. Structure is storytelling. Even little kids, when you tell them a story, you read them a book, there’s some amount of structure. They understand what a story is.

I would really just think of it as beginning, middle, end, but apply those rules, because they’ll help you. For me, act breaks help me understand balance. Is the story misbalanced? Is there too much at the top and not enough at the end? Is there no middle? For comedy, it’s three-act. We work in more of a three-act structure, although sometimes it’s a four-act structure. You just need to understand, am I turning things, is it interesting. For me, that’s act breaks. That’s how I get it.

John: In Episode 584 we had Taffy Brodesser-Akner on to talk about Fleishman Is in Trouble. She was adapting her own book into the limited series. It was fascinating to hear her talk about. The limited series is exactly the book. Everything that happens in them happens in both. Figuring out how you break those into episodes and how there’s growth and change within an episode, and it feels like this episode has really started, this episode has finished, is a thing she had to learn.

She was lucky to have Susannah Grant and Susannah Grant’s producing partner on to really help with that initial stage of figuring out how to structure this into individual episodes and how to make the gross of the characters and gross of the story really make sense over that limited time, which seems like it would be so different than going back to earlier shows you worked on, like My Name is Earl or The Carmichael Show. You might have some sense at the start of the season, like, this is where we’re going to, but you’re really probably thinking much more episode by episode, aren’t you?

Danielle: Absolutely, yeah. I think it’s called episodic TV for a reason. I think that in those scenarios, we’re making 22, 24, 26 episodes in a season, and broadcast network is designed… I’ll speak a little bit more for comedy here, because I think there are dramas where this wouldn’t apply. I don’t remember what the numbers were or what they said, but a viewer who loved the show watches every third or fourth episode on broadcast network.

John: Wow.

Danielle: That may be an antiquated way of thinking, but I know when I was coming up in my career, that’s what we were told. It has to be designed to drop in and see it this week but not see it next week. They really have to be self-contained episodes, even though our favorite shows that we grew up watching, pick your favorite show, had arcs, usually love stories. That’ll take you through Jim and Pam and Sam and Diane for me, for my all-time favorite show, which is Cheers. You could miss some and still get it.

I think that the streaming model is different, and that’s not how people are consuming it, and that’s not how it’s meant to be consumed. You shouldn’t be able to miss the third one, because I think you’re supposed to be told one long story. I think the goal is completion, for people to watch all of your episodes. That’s not necessarily the goal of broadcast network, by and large. I think cable is probably a little bit more of the streaming model than not, storytelling-wise. I think that you’re meant to sit down and watch every one.

John: I think in cable you see both kinds of things. You definitely see the ongoing progress of some storylines, but there’s also shows like the USA shows, which were very much, you could catch one, not catch one. There’s not huge growth between the two of them if you missed that one episode. Both things can work.

I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation growing up. It was one of my very favorite shows. Watching the third season of Picard, which is basically just Star Trek: The Next Generation but if it was done as a limited series, you have to watch it in order because there’s very specific builds and revelations and tweaks. It’s just fascinating to watch the difference between how a show works if an episode is all self-contained versus an ongoing limited series. They’re both great, but it feels like Picard is definitely the 2023 version of how you would tell that story.

Danielle: What’s amazing for I think us as storytellers is that all of those options are on the table. It really is, what do you want to tell and how do you want to tell it? Okay, then here’s the form for you.

I think we’re spending a lot of time talking about what’s not working and what’s broken in the industry. There’s a lot of exciting, amazing things as storytellers for us out there. We just need to get the ship righted a little bit. It’s amazing that there’s a lot of outlets and a lot of ways to tell stories now, completely different from when I started my career, you tell me, John, but I think in features and in television, both.

John: Obviously in features, the writers had traditionally less direct say in this is my vision for how stuff is going to go, whereas TV showrunners often had that sort of initial creator entrepreneurial vision for what a thing is. In features, we also have independent film. We have the ability to make things at incredibly small levels and just really experiment with a form. That’s a thing that is sometimes more challenging in TV, because you have to find a home for that thing versus being able to make it on your own and sell it. Drew, let’s get a new question.

Drew: Danielle, you mentioned love stories. We have an email from Marvin in Germany. Marvin writes, “I’m a young screenwriter currently working on my first big project. Without going into too much detail, there’s a love triangle in it. I was wondering, how can I analyze for myself or for the demands of the scene if it’s really necessary to explicitly show the action? Should I go into those intimate scenes or just hint at them without showing too much? Sometimes in romantic films, I like to see the protagonists finally getting together, but on the other hand, intimate scenes are often kind of sexist, and I don’t want to put my actresses and actors in a weird position where they need to flash.”

John: Explicitness. There’s a new TV adaptation of Fatal Attraction I’m really excited to see. I’ll be curious both how explicit the show is on screen but also what those scenes look like on the page, because I feel like most of the times when I see something made in 2023, what’s on the screen is also reflected on the page.

Danielle, what do you see? How explicit are you seeing stuff being written in scripts? Obviously, the comedies you’re making, maybe it’s not such a factor, but what are you thinking?

Danielle: There was a show called Normal People, which was an adaptation of a book for Hulu. That was really the first time as a creator I started thinking about… Because I spend so much time doing broadcast network too. We were not showing anything on broadcast network. When I watched that show, it was so intimate and beautiful and beautifully acted and beautifully shot and beautifully written and a really true adaptation of the book. That was the first time I had read… There was an article I think that came out after about an intimacy coordinator, which is a crew position now that I think we didn’t always have and now I think we always have.

When I was talking earlier about listening to your gut and that we get paid for our gut, which doesn’t sound elegant but I think is true. You as the writer, this person who’s creating this world, I think will ultimately need to listen to their own instincts about what is necessary to tell the story.

I agree that we have seen so much sexist content for decades in movies and this. In the ’80s, which was my era of growing up, watching movies, there was always boobs. It was just like, oh, here’s boobs. It’s going to be boobs. If it’s a comedy, there’s going to be boobs. Why? Why is that the case? I think that there are so many interesting ways to tell a story and tell an intimate scene.

What I would encourage this writer to do is think of it through a different lens. How have you not seen it? What have you bristled at that you’ve seen? What is the story you’re telling? What is the intimate moment that you might want to tell that maybe isn’t nudity at all, or maybe it is but it’s just in…

I thought Normal People, just to go back to the original point, just did something, made these two characters… The whole series was about connecting and connection and that these two people keep being drawn back to each other. The intimacy was really necessary and I think well done.

I appreciate that this writer is thinking about ultimately putting an actor in front of a camera, because now that I’m making streaming, having shot recently with my partner, co-creator, and muse of Survival of the Thickest, a stand-up named Michelle Buteau… That is based on a book of essays that she wrote. There’s a really funny chunk in there that’s about sexual encounters and when she was single. We’re inspired by a lot of what there was.

You write a certain thing, but then you get there to shoot it, and you’re like, “Oh, my goodness. Now we’re really doing this.” When I’m asking two actors to go be brave… Michelle is the bravest of the brave, and an amazing actress, comedically and dramatically.

One of the things that we were excited about doing with that show, in terms of what I’m suggesting, thinking about it through different lenses or whatever… If you’ve not seen this, Michelle is a plus-sized, beautiful woman, which is where the title Survival of the Thickest comes from. We wanted to show her in intimate scenes. We wanted her to be the star, the one who is in the love triangle and is having sex and is having all of these encounters, because we felt like that wasn’t being shown enough, that that’s just not the person who is always front and center in a show, especially as a woman. We wanted to make sure that character was a very sexual character, not that the show is super R-rated or anything, but it was really important to us, so we had a reason for it.

I guess my best advice would be, have a reason for what you’re doing and know why you’re doing it. If there is no reason, then you’re right, it will be gratuitous and unnecessary.

John: If you’re writing a love triangle story, there’s good odds that the sex that you want to put in the story is not going to be gratuitous. Then you have to think about, what is it about this moment that’s going to be interesting? What am I actually going to want to look at and show in this thing?

Ultimately, anything that’s going to show up on screen needs to be on the page. It can be awkward at times to put that stuff down there, but someone has to make those decisions. If you don’t make those decisions, those decisions are going to be made for you by somebody else, by directors or other people, and it may not be what the story actually needs. I think you have to start with what’s on the page.

Then it gets to a process of a director, an intimacy coordinator, and actors, and hopefully you involved as well, about what is the story point of this moment, to make sure it’s really reflecting the goals of the scene.

I would just say, again, follow your gut, but I also say be brave. You’re telling this story for a reason. Make sure all these scenes are really helping to tell the story you’re trying to tell. Let’s do a simpler question, if we can. How about something on intercutting?

Drew: Jared writes, “Formatting question. I’m intercutting between two different conversations occurring at the same time, say between Bob and Steve and Sarah and Tina. After I’ve established scene headings once for each conversation, it looks very odd to then just have a string of conversations without anything in between. It might be difficult for the reader to discern who is talking to whom, especially if only one person speaks before jumping to the other conversation. Would it be preferred in this multi-party intercut to just include scene headings every time the conversation switches?”

John: Danielle, what’s your instinct here? What do you tend to do when you’re having to intercut between two different conversations or two different scenes?

Danielle: It is tricky, and it’s a frustrating as a writer when you’re like, “I just need you to understand what’s in my head. I just need you to understand what’s happening here.” I don’t think that there’s only one way to do it. I think there’s multiple ways to do it.

I just try and make it as easy as possible for the reader. I think a lot of times readers skip action that might be explaining, which sounds crazy, but I just think they skip action that might be explaining it to you. I feel like scene headers probably just really will get the eye and the brain to go, “Now I’m in a different setting. Now I’m in a different setting. Now I’m in a different setting. Now I’m in a different setting.”

I understand that it may hurt the rhythm of the page a little bit, but I think clarity is what’s important. You don’t want someone to have to go back up and go, “What did I just read? I don’t understand. Where is anybody, and what’s going on?” You want your reader and ultimately your audience to be smart, but you also have to prepare for if that’s not the case.

John: I agree that you need to make sure that a person who might skip that little notification that we’re intercutting two scenes still gets the point of what’s going on there. You can obviously bold the intercutting there if it’s helpful.

What I find is often most useful is, rather than doing a full INT. BAR, NIGHT and INT. HOUSE, DAY, that you’re cutting between those two spaces, just go like, “Back at the bar,” dash dash, “Back at the house,” because whenever you see an INT., I think you naturally think, oh, it’s a whole brand new scene, we’re in a whole brand new place.

If you’re just intercutting between two places, doing the intermediary slug line, it’s not really a scene header, might be a way just to let the reader understand, okay, that’s right, we’re jumping back and forth between these two conversations.

It’s again one of those things you’re going to feel on the page that you won’t know until you see situationally how it’s going to work. If these are two-page scenes and you’re intercutting between the two of them, that’s more probably a scene header situation for me. If it’s quick rapid fire between two things, then the shortest little things are going to be probably your friend.

Cool. Let’s try two more questions. What do you got for us, Drew?

Drew: Carl asks, “How can I warn a reader that I’m not being cliché, but I want the viewer to say in their mind, ‘Ugh, so cliché.’ For example, a boy goes back to their hometown and sees his former hometown love. Their eyes lock, and the viewer thinks it’s the standard love story scene a thousand times, but within a few beats it’s made clear that this isn’t the case. Should I be worried about a reader losing interest and putting the screenplay down upon reading the cliché or am I over-thinking this?”

John: Danielle, this must come up all the time in comedies that you’re writing, which is basically you’re playing with a trope. You’re definitely trying to set up the expectation like, oh, it’s this kind of thing, but it’s not this kind of thing. How do you deal with that?

Danielle: I think in comedy, I will make the action line funny. I will say, “Sit with me here. It’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do,” in a parenthetical or something, if that feels appropriate to you. I don’t know exactly what this piece is, but if that feels appropriate.

I’ve worked a with lot of stand-ups. Like I said, Michelle Buteau is the last person that I just worked with. She writes the funniest action lines I’ve ever read. It’s almost like you’re having a dialog with her in her voice.

I think that you can be entertaining, and I think you can get your point across by… If you’re trying not to be cliché but you have this tone you’re trying to achieve, if you can achieve that tone in an action line, I think that that can be really helpful for you and might entertain the reader.

I don’t know if it’s pages of cliché until you get to the turn, but I’m assuming it’s not. I’m assuming it’s fairly quickly that you get to the turn. I also wouldn’t be too worried about a reader tuning out because it’s something they’ve seen. Everything is something they’ve seen before to some degree, with twists in there. I wouldn’t be too worried about that, but I would suggest trying to get it across in the action line.

John: Totally. Carl says here it’s like a boy goes back to hometown, sees the hometown love, their eyes lock. You’re going to have moments in there where you can really signal to the reader, yes, this is the most cliché moment possible. By setting that up, the punchline for how it’s not going to be that is going to be more rewarding. You’ll be fine. Don’t worry about that.

The ability to communicate tone through scene description is such a crucial craft skill you pick up over time and one of those things which, if this were a show rather than a movie, you’d learn the house style for how you do these things.

It’s fascinating to watch how in a given show, the scripts, they have the same voice. They have the same way of working, and you start to understand how to read those scripts. If you read a Lost script, the Lost scripts, no matter who’s writing them, all sound like they’re from the same person, because their house style develops. Part of that house style will be how ironic you are, what happens in the scene descriptions, how much caps are being used, and teaches you how to read those scripts.

If you were doing this as a feature, you have to do all that work from the start, basically letting the reader understand how to read your style, your script. That’s why those first couple pages are so crucial, to make the reader feel confident that you are going to be leading them on a journey that’s going to be worthwhile.

Drew, I said a craft question, but I see a business question here which I actually have the answer for, so let’s skip ahead to our Australian Sam.

Drew: Sam in Australia writes, “I loved your recent episode with Megana and her cluelessness about how to write a check. I feel her pain pretty hard. I’m a writer based in Australia who wrote on my first US show a couple of years ago. I was completely delighted to start receiving those glorious residual checks from the WGA until I learned that there’s absolutely no way in my country to cash them. All the big Australian banks have stopped taking overseas checks, rightly believing that they should become extinct, and so now I’ve got about six residual checks sitting on my desk staring at me. I tried sending them to my US agent, but they got lost in an accounts vortex, and I had to get a lovely man at the WGA to reissue them before they were lost forever. Why can’t residuals be electronically transferred? Surely that would be cheaper than all that postage.”

John: Oh, residuals. Danielle, do you love residuals?

Danielle: Oh, me. Who doesn’t love residuals? With all my heart I love them.

John: You open your mailbox. You see that green envelope. You’re like, “Oh my gosh.” There’s just some money in there. You don’t know what it’s for. You don’t know how big it’s going to be. It can be just wonderful and something you’ve forgot you ever worked on. Suddenly there’s a residual check. It’s a nice thing.

Danielle: Absolutely.

John: The problem that our Australian friend is having here is that Australia basically doesn’t deal with paper checks anymore. It’s just not a thing that exists there. I asked on Twitter for other international listeners what they’re doing, and actually some Australians wrote back in. The best advice I got was to just get a US account and deposit all of your residual checks there in a US account and then transfer the money out. That’s probably good advice for most situations, but it could be a weird case of tax things, so don’t do that until you actually check with somebody who actually knows about taxes for that.

I also got a recommendation from a guy named Jason Reed, who says, “The only bank I’ve found that’ll process US dollar paper checks is RACQ Bank. Just make sure to do it within 90 days of it being issued.”

I don’t know how much longer we’re going to have paper checks, residual checks. It’s a thing that does come up. Without tipping anything, I think both the studios and the writers would love for this to happen. It’s just a matter of getting it all figured out and how to make sure we do it in a way that has clear accounting. Danielle, what’s your thought? Your weekly checks for working on a show, are those still check checks or are those direct deposited for you right now?

Danielle: I know you want me to know the answer to this, John. How is that money collected? I think they’re paper checks.

John: I think they’re still paper checks. I think that they’re probably going through one of the payroll services companies, and they’re still paper checks. That’s a thing that, yes, it can and should change. Drew’s checks I know are electronic. Correct, Drew?

Drew: Correct.

John: We were able to figure that out. We go through a payroll services company that was able to direct deposit into his account. It’s tough because as writers were working on a project or with a company for a short period of time. It’s not like we are a years-long employee of the Disney Corporation, where we can set everything up. There’s only a couple payroll services companies. It feels like it’s a thing that we should be able to figure out, because they know who you are and they know your tax ID number. It should be doable.

Danielle: Absolutely. I pay myself digitally, because a lot of writers are their own companies, their own LLCs.

John: That’s right.

Danielle: I don’t give myself a check. I know that much. That just goes right into the account.

John: We love that. Those are a lot of good questions. We still have plenty of good questions left over, so Craig and I will tackle those later on. Before we get to One Cool Things, I have a correction for last week’s episode.

I talked about Jefferson Mays and that I’d seen him in I Am My Own Wife. I said that he’s written I Am My Own Wife, which is crazy, because I know he didn’t. Doug Wright, who I know from Sundance, he wrote I Am My Own Wife. He’s an incredibly talented playwright. He is the person who wrote I Am My Own Wife. Jefferson Mays is a talented star of it, but Doug Wright is the playwright who wrote it. Doug Wright also has Good Night, Oscar, starring Sean Hayes, on Broadway. Doug Wright, not Jefferson Mays.

I was wrong. I just want to make sure that it gets publicly into the record that I was wrong just this once, on an episode that Craig is not a part of and not listening to. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Danielle, what do you got for us?

Danielle: I have an Instagram account. Glucose Goddess is her name. She is a French biochemist. She has one book out and another book coming out I think in May. I am always looking for ways to be healthy, because I think this job certainly does its best to challenge that, to challenge staying healthy, especially when you’re in season, making a television show.

Her account is all about keeping your glucose spikes level and not having huge spikes, which sounds like a very small thing. This isn’t about weight loss. This is just about general health. Apparently, your glucose levels have a lot to do with disease predictors and all kinds of things. I don’t know how cool it is, but she’s very cool. It’s a very fun thing.

Her first book is 10 hacks about keeping the spikes level. I’m trying them for fun, because I’m like, what could it hurt? What could it hurt? I’m feeling really good using her hacks. That is my Cool Thing, Glucose Goddess on Instagram.

John: Nice. I would say something that is not helpful for glucose spikes would be the candy closet in the negotiating room.

Danielle: A hundred percent, but you know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been looking at the nuts. The other thing is… I’ll just keep telling you about her hacks. If this is interesting to no one, I apologize to your listeners. She’s not an anti-dessert, anti-sweet. Again, this is not about weight loss. This is about general health. If there’s something in the candy closet I want, one of the hacks is to have savory snacks but save the sweets for dessert. What she would suggest is I put that candy bar in my purse, and after dinner, with a full meal, I eat the dessert. Even that is like, yeah, that candy closet, there’s a way to do it.

John: There’s always a way to do it. My thing is also a food-related One Cool Thing. I think I’ve talked before on the podcast that my favorite pancake recipe is this one that Jason Kottke has up on his blog, which is a buttermilk pancake recipe. It’s really great. It’s really great if you have buttermilk, but so often you just don’t have buttermilk and you want to make pancakes. I found this other recipe, which is also really, really good, that uses just milk, but you also put two tablespoons of white vinegar in it, just to sour the milk, to curdle the milk before you make it, which sounds like it would be disgusting, it would taste vinegary.

Danielle: It sure does.

John: It doesn’t. It’s really good. Actually, it’s very close to the buttermilk pancake recipe and really simple. The pancakes are crispy on the edges in just the perfect ways. If you’re looking for a pancake recipe, I’m going to recommend this. It’s just on All Recipes. It’s delicious. I’ve made it twice, and I highly recommend it. I think pancakes are probably not good for the glucose of it all.

Danielle: Can I tell you what she would say?

John: What would she say?

Danielle: Then if you’re interested, you’ll look it up and see what this means. She would say put a little clothes on your carbs. Put a little clothes on your carbs.

John: Does that mean eat a protein with it?

Danielle: Yes. You’ve decoded it immediately. She’s just done a ton of research. I like her because she’s coming from a science background. It’s really cool, the experiments she’s done and the science that she… It would drastically change what happens when you eat those delicious pancakes if you put a little bit of clothes on them.

John: Hooray. Danielle, before we wrap up here, remind us where we see your programs. Up Here is currently streaming on Hulu?

Danielle: Currently streaming on Hulu. All the episodes are up. Watch the eight mini musicals and the one long musical that they all add up to. Then Survival of the Thickest will be premiering on Netflix later this year, 2023.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alicia Jo Rabins. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them 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 people who are incompetent but nice. Danielle, you are nice and not even remotely incompetent. You are so, so competent. Thank you so much for joining us here.

Danielle: Thank you, John. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I know there are so many writers who are fans of this podcast. I just think it’s incredible, what you guys do, providing this kind of information. It was such a pleasure to hear your advice.

John: Hooray.

Danielle: Thank you.

John: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Okay, our bonus segment. It’s a blog I started reading. I don’t even really quite know why. It’s by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. He’s mostly writing about HR and management stuff and things that happen, hiring and firing of stuff.

This one post I thought was really smart, because he talks about how among coworkers or people you’re hiring, people you’re managing, there are two axes you can look at that factor in here. You can look at how good someone is at their job, are they good at their job, or are they bad at their job, and are they nice to work with, so are they nice or are they a jerk.

He breaks it down into four quadrants, that you have people who are good at their job and nice to work with, and those are superstars. You just love them, because they’re so great to have those people. You want all those people around you. You also have people who are good at their job but are kind of jerks. Those would be the brilliant assholes. You might put up with them, but oh my god, they’re hard to work with. You have people who are bad at their jobs and jerks, and you just fire those people. It’s great to fire them.

The most difficult category for his post here was, what do you with somebody who is really nice to work with but just bad at their job? I thought we might spend a few minutes talking about those folks and times in my life where I’ve been that person and how we think about that, because Danielle, you definitely have more experience managing people than I do. Is this a useful quadrant theory for the kinds of people you encounter working on sets, working in rooms? Does this resonate at all with you?

Danielle: A hundred percent, and it made me laugh, which is my favorite thing about a graph. I think it’s very funny. Wait, I have to go back to… Which person have you been? What are you saying?

John: I’ve been the incompetent but nice.

Danielle: No.

John: Here’s an example of me being incompetent but nice, because also, I worked as a temp a lot. I was given an assignment to work at this bank in Colorado, maybe Fort Collins, somewhere, or probably Louisville, close to where I grew up in Boulder. They sat me down at this desk. I was just the person at the front desk who just directed people where to go. Within an hour of sitting at that desk, I had set off the silent alarms and the police came. I had no business doing that, being there. I didn’t last long at that job.

Danielle: That’s an amazing visual. I love it.

John: That’s example.

Danielle: Love it. I love that. I think managing people, it’s the craziest thing about all these crazy things that there are in Hollywood. The fact that we’re just, especially for episodic writers, we’re writing in a room, we’re telling jokes, we’re eating the candy, because there’s candy closets on TV shows too, and then all of a sudden you’re in charge of everybody and you’re supposed to be able to manage writers in the writers’ room, but also like you said, the crew, actors.

Not to bring it back to our original point, but hopefully you have had the training to do all that stuff, because if you hadn’t, what kind of chance do you have? I loved this thought. I loved this graph, because I think we’ve probably all worked with, even if you weren’t in charge of the people, people in all of these quadrants.

My rule of thumb with regard to, not even just managing people… This is how I decided to conduct myself when I got to Hollywood. I think I credit my parents for giving me a wonderful foundation of how to treat people and how to demand to be treated. I have three older sisters who are really great role models. I feel like it’s somehow accredited to the foundation. The way I translate it in my head is, whoever I’m dealing with, whatever the hard situation is, I want to be able to run into them in a restaurant a week from now or six weeks from now or six months from now and not have to hide, and be able to say-

John: Oh, wow.

Danielle: … hello with my head up and have them say hello back to me. When I was working for people in difficult situations, I always thought, okay, I need to go have an honest conversation, be very respectful, and know if I run into them, I don’t want to have to hide, and I don’t want them to hide from me.

Once that became the reverse and I was managing people, I thought the same thing. I was like, okay, whatever happens, you’re going to want to be able to… This is a small town. Comedy is small. You’re going to want to always have good relationships with people.

I’ve definitely worked with people, not just writers, the crew, worked with people who fall into this category. As a manager, I think my job is to make sure that I’m providing for you everything you need to be your best, and I’m creating an environment where you can be your best.

If I’m doing both of those things, which is not a perfect science, because I think we do the best we can, but those are basic philosophies of mine, if I’m doing both of those things and you’re wonderful and you’re not doing well, then I think the next thing I owe to you as a good manager is to come tell you you’re not meeting expectations, whatever those expectations are.

I need to clearly state, “You’re a wonderful person. Everyone loves being around you,” which I’ve had this conversation before, but fill in the blank. Whatever job it is you’re doing here on my show as part of this crew isn’t hitting the mark and here’s why. You have to be able to state where it is that they aren’t being what you would hope they would be, filling a role you’d hope they would fill.

Then you’d give it time. You give it time and you hope that it improves. Then if it doesn’t, I feel like where does that person go? That person ultimately in my world gets fired, but only if they didn’t improve, and only if I really gave them a chance to understand where something was lacking. I think that that’s where that person goes for me.

John: We’re mostly a writing podcast, so let’s talk about, let’s say there’s somebody in your room, hopefully a normal room, not a tiny mini room, but whatever. There’s a writer who’s working under your employ who’s just not cutting it, who’s falling into this incompetent, is nice but incompetent category. What are some things that would make you feel like this person’s not living up to their end of the bargain? Is it how much they’re participating in the room? Is it the actual quality of the drafts they’re turning in? What are some things that might lead you to have that conversation with them?

Danielle: It could be both of those things. One thing is they’re just not getting the tone of the show like everyone else. That could be in room participation, like you said, or in drafts, like you also said, that I have seven people in a room, and six of them are really pitching things that are getting in or at least make sense or are landing with me or feel like they’re in the world of the show, and one person is not hitting that target. The target should be fairly generous, certainly in the beginning of something, but their things are just not the same tone.

With comedy, every show has a tone, a very distinct tone. Maybe you’re collaborating to make it, but once everyone’s on the same page, which as a writer I think you would know… Look, all of our pitches get turned down all day long, myself included. I turn my own pitches down all day, like, “That’s not good. That’s not good. That’s not good.” You know when you hit one that’s good.

If you find yourself in that position where you feel like nothing’s getting in, then it shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise if someone were to tell you, “Let’s talk about what this show is and the direction that it’s moving and why is everything you’re pitching dark or sad,” or I don’t know, I’m just filling in the blank of whatever this is. “This is trying to be light.”

I would say it’s about is it hitting a target, is the script hitting a target, are the story pitches hitting a target. That’s at least the most difficult one to deal with, because it’s the most nuanced.

If you’re just not doing work, if you’re just not spending time on a draft, but you’re nice, but you’re not working hard, that’s a much easier thing to deal with. You’re just not working hard. You’re not working hard enough. Most people are working hard I think in this category and just not hitting the mark.

I think the conversation would be… Give them specifics. “You pitched this, and we were talking about this storyline. You pitched this. We were talking about this storyline. You did this with the B story that you were sent off with, but really that’s outside of what we were trying to send you off to do.” I really think you have to be specific with people if you want them to improve.

Anyone in this little quadrant I would want to improve, because if I like them, that’s a lot. If they’re fun to be around and everyone likes them, that is really valuable, especially in a writers’ room. That’s something that really matters. My first hope would be that I could get this person on course.

I think my advice to someone who might be receiving this information is to try not to be defensive, even though that’s a painful thing to hear. I’ve been told I’ve been off course. There have been jobs I haven’t gotten that I wanted and all those things. There’s so much rejection in our business.

The best thing to do would be to receive it and really think about what is it, what is happening, because I think there are a lot of things that can improve and are correctable. Not everything, but if given an opportunity, I would expect that person would try and listen more and get on track for where the show was headed, because being nice is great, but the quadrant that’s the talented asshole, that person’s working all the time. That’s the truth about Hollywood. That person is working all the time.

John: Let’s get back to the things that are correctable and things that aren’t correctable, because this blog post is really talking about some sort of tech management kind of thing. Some of the solutions that he offers are like, okay, maybe this person needs more training or they need to take a break to do a thing.

In the case of a writer who’s in the writers’ room, some of what you’re describing sounds like a person who just doesn’t get it. I worry, I wonder, and maybe you have much more experience about this than I do, if a writer just doesn’t get it, doesn’t get the tone, doesn’t get what it is that you need, is that correctable in your experience? Have you been able to have that conversation and get that writer back on track?

Danielle: I think it depends how far off they are. Again, I’m really focusing on the creative, because that’s the hardest, most nuanced part of it, because I think if you’re talking too much, if you’re cutting people off, even if you’re likable and you’re doing those things, which is conversations I’ve had, those are a little bit easier. You know those things are correctable. You choose to do it or you don’t.

I think the sad reality of this is, if someone is way off, they’re not going to get back on. That person in that quadrant is going to be fired from that show. There are a lot of talented people who have been fired from shows because they didn’t fit that, especially if they were nice. They didn’t fit that. They didn’t fit the thing that you were trying to do. It depends on the level too.

I’ve been very lucky to work for showrunners who were really mentors. Greg Garcia, who’s a creator of My Name is Earl and many other shows, really mentored me. Everyone I’ve worked for, from my first job to the last time I was on staff, I’ve been really, really lucky. I know there are a lot of people who are really unlucky, who’ve worked with some people who suck and who aren’t looking at the next generation and aren’t considering how they got to where they got. I’ve been wildly lucky to work for people who have really taken the time to talk to me when I was young, to give me responsibility when I was young, and to let me see things. I think it is especially correctable if it’s a younger writer who just no one stopped and told them.

My parents grew up in East LA, but I always joke, I’m like, “It’s as far away from Hollywood as it could possibly be.” If you have nothing to do with Hollywood, you have nothing to do with Hollywood. I had no role models coming in. I had no nepotism. I wish I did. I have a niece who’s writing now. I’m all for nepotism. Let’s go. Let’s bring the whole family into the business. I had nothing. I had nothing and no one to look to. Luckily, I got my MFA at UCLA, because I’m a nerd, and so school was the road to be like, “I don’t know anything about Hollywood. Let me see.” Unless someone is kind enough to tell you, you might be off in terms of how you’re pitching your tone or whatever because nobody stopped to tell you.

I took a class at UCLA taught by a man named Fred Rubin, who changed my whole world. It was a sitcom writing class. It was actually in the MFA program. I was in the producers program, but they let us in. They let us audition in. Andrew Goldberg was in my class at UCLA taught by this guy, Fred Rubin. It just opened a world for me.

I was always trying to figure out, what is the dream? My parents set a goal for my sisters and I, “Wake up every day and love what you do.” When I took Fred Rubin’s class, everything just clicked. I was like, “Oh, this is it. This is what I’ve always anted to do. This is what I’ve been training to do with my loud, funny family where the best joke won the night.” It was like this, this, this. I was so lucky to find him, to find his class, to have someone tell me. There I had school, and then I had great mentors.

I want the door to be way, way, way, way open. When you way, way open the door, you have to also prep people and make sure that someone is stopping and telling them. I think we have amazing people, especially in the Guild, John, some amazing people who are mentoring young writers and really working for the cause of making sure people understand. It’s all related. We’re talking about eliminating so many things from the process and people not having access to production, writers not having access to production and post, and they only have 12 to 20 weeks, and then they have to go find another job.

I guess what I’m saying is, bringing it all back to this idea and the people who in the quadrant, they just might not know. The way of mentorship is really… We’re at a very dangerous brink here of losing being able to show people how to do that. I do think that there are things that might appear to a showrunner to be like you just don’t get it, when really someone didn’t stop and say, “Here’s what we’re trying to do. Do you even know that that’s… ” I don’t mean in a condescending way. I mean truly in a like, “Here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s what the mission is. Here’s what TV writing is.”

There was a really cool guy that got up and spoke in the meeting last night and was just talking about what his experience is. He was writing on Zoom from his apartment in Brooklyn with no heat. I hope that was a very nurturing environment. Someone’s got to tell you how to do it. Someone has to tell you what the expectations are.

That’s the version I think in this chart that can really be addressed. I think if we look hard enough, what you might be doing is dismissing as so out of the box something that you could bring in if you could just get them aligned. The fact that they’re not thinking like everyone else is great, would be hugely helpful to your show and to the characters, but you’ve got to understand what’s going on and why they’re missing the mark. I guess that’s what I’m saying. I think a good manager investigates that, versus just being like, “You’re nice, but you suck,” because that might not be the truth.

John: Circling back to our initial conversation about these writers being cut out of the production and post-production process, I think you’re going to see a larger group of people who are now suddenly having their own shows, who are nice but incompetent at certain functions of it because they’ve just never been exposed to it.

They don’t know how to cover a set. They don’t know how to do post and how to look at that director’s cut and not vomit, and instead, recognize these are the things that aren’t working. It’s not that the director is incompetent. It’s just that it’s not what you need for the show and how to have that conversation with the director and then the editor to get to the cut that you actually need. There’s going to be a whole generation of these writers who just don’t have the experience.

That’s a case where having a mentor who could say, “Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s talk about why that didn’t work. Here’s what you need to know about this part of the process.” I just worry we’re not going to have people to do that mentoring and the time to do that mentoring. I just don’t know we’re going to have a structure where that makes sense. I just really see a train wreck coming 5, 10 years down the road, probably less than that, if we don’t really address some of these problems right now.

Danielle: I know. It’s happening now. I think you talked about it a little bit earlier. We hit it already. There are co-APs that haven’t been on sets before. If they have, they’ve only been on set, which is a great only. At least they’ve been on set, I should say. It’s very hard to teach someone post. You understand post by doing years and years of posts.

John: It’s feel.

Danielle: There’s so much instinct that is happening in the storytelling. I am so grateful that I could look at something that someone, let’s say an executive, might deem a mess and go, “This cut is terrible. Whatever cut this was, it’s terrible,” and I can just see my way through it and be like, “I know it’s not. I was there when we shot it. It’s not terrible. What you’re not getting, I can fix, I can fix with ADR. I can just zero in on what you’re not getting. I know I can fix it.”

The only reason I can do that is because, just to take one of the many shows I’ve worked on, but New Girl. Just one of the most talented staffs I’ve ever worked on, and I only worked on one season of that show. We watched every cut as a group, and then we did notes as a group, and then we wrote jokes. You had to give Liz Meriwether and Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, who are the amazing people who ran that show… Liz created it, obviously, and Finkel and Baer ran it with her. You had to give them jokes. We were rewriting.

I went to work on it because I was such a huge fan of it. I was like, “I love this show.” I think generations continue to love that show. So much work was put into the craft of that show. Post, it was fun. We watched it together. There was a viewing of a cut. Then whether it was your episode or not, we all pitched jokes and did all of these things.

Those are the things that it’s impossible to teach someone. It’s not impossible to teach someone some things to understand about post, but that is a skill that comes from experience. We did the same thing on My Name is Earl, which was a show that used VoiceOver. So much work was done in post, so we saw so many cuts together and had notes on everybody’s cuts, because that’s just what you did, because writing is still happening. I think that’s the thing that we’re really trying to get across is that writing is happening through this whole process.

John: From your description of it, it sounds like the process of making those two shows, you got through it for eight episodes, killing yourself. It was not sustainable to do more episodes, to do a second season. It wouldn’t have worked. It took everything you had to get what was there.

Danielle: Yeah. I didn’t run Up Here. Steven Levenson is the one who killed himself. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think I can. I was there. I was there watching. The person who was running the show has everything on their shoulders, all of the rewriting. I was available to him, but he didn’t have another writer. He was doing everything.

Like I said, I had Grace Edwards on Survival of the Thickest, and I had Michelle Buteau, but again, she was supposed to be acting in front of the camera, but she was still doing writing, because there was just so much.

When I hear what you said Jesse Armstrong said about Succession, the idea that I could have three writers on that set… Our staff was amazingly talented. We had stand-ups. We had all these different perspectives. We were tiny but an amazing staff. If I could’ve had all of them, that would’ve been the best version. If I could’ve had three writers on that set, it would’ve changed everything. It would’ve changed everything. There were three very talented writers there every day, but they were being asked to do 27 things.

I’m so used to the system where you can call a writers’ room and go, “This scene isn’t working,” or, “We need this,” or, “You know what? We figured out this actor. We need to write into this for this talented actor who wasn’t even cast, by the way, when we had our room.”

There’s almost so many flaws that we can’t even talk about them all. We’re not really doing table reads in comedy. Some shows have figured out how to do some. I managed to get some done, but I didn’t get all eight done. I didn’t have the cast. There are so many things that are very correctable. We’ve done it before. We know how to do it. I don’t think they’re very costly.

The upside, everything that you’re saying, and the concern you have and you know I share and everyone on our negotiating committee shares, as well as the thousands of members that we have, is these are big concerns. We can’t let his happen, because if this happens, what is the future? The young writer who stood up and worked for The Bear, what does it look like for him? Like he said, this is about his next 10 years, his next 20 years.

I had my last 20 years, and I’m still struggling in this system, but I know I’m going to survive. I know I’m going to survive, because I can make demands that everybody can’t make. Even in that, I can’t make all the demands. Even in that, I’m told no. I know I’m not going to make another show this way, but that’s not going to be true for everybody else.

It’s the reason why I said yes to be on a negotiating committee. I’m so comfortable on my couch doing nothing, including not doing podcasts. I’m just comfortable sitting on my couch watching TV under a blanket, but I’m getting out into the world and doing things because I’m so motivated for change. This can’t be how we move forward. It can’t be how we move forward. I think we can change it, and I think we will, John. I think we will.

John: I think we will, you and me and 10,000 members and some good fortune.

Danielle: That’s it.

John: We’ll change it.

Danielle: That’s it.

John: Danielle, thanks again.

Danielle: Thank you.

Links:

  • Danielle Sanchez-Witzel on IMDb.
  • Up Here on Hulu.
  • Succession Podcast, S4E2 with Lucy Prebble and Laura Wasser from HBO.
  • Incompetent but Nice by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
  • Glucose Goddess on Instagram.
  • Non-Buttermilk Pancake Recipe
  • Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
  • Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
  • Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
  • Craig Mazin on Instagram
  • John August on Twitter
  • John on Instagram
  • John on Mastodon
  • Outro by Alicia Jo Rabins (send us yours!)
  • Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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