Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 503 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is traveling, so today I’m hosting solo. But I’m hardly alone. Later in the show I’ll be talking with WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer about her amazing series, and writer-director Lance Oppenheim about his acclaimed documentary, Some Kind of Heaven. A question I asked them both is what do you do when you don’t control the characters you’re given. Jac and Lance had very smart ways of thinking about that challenge.

But to kick things off I want to welcome back the writer-producer behind such iconic films as The Wedding Date, How To Be Single, Couples Retreat, and Isn’t it Romantic. She’s also the co-writer of the new film, Cruella. Welcome back returning champion, Dana Fox.

Dana Fox: Woo-hoo. I need my playout music.

John: Yeah. You’ve got to – you walk down, you take your seat, you pick up your mic and you wave to the crowd.

Dana: Ah, big time waving.

John: Dana, I can’t believe I’ve not seen you in person for more than a year. This is not good.

Dana: I miss your face so, so much. Sometimes I just Google you just to see you, because I miss you.

John: During this whole crazy time you decamped to Virginia, right? You’ve been in Virginia for most of this pandemic.

Dana: That is correct. We were in LA for the beginning sort of horrible sudden three children on Zoom school scenario where we were all jammed in like sardines and it was pretty intense. And we decided to come to Virginia because more space, just grass, just outdoor space. And we just told our kids to go outside and never come back. You’re wild animals now. Goodbye. And they became like feral. They stopped showering. There’s zero hair-brushing happening here at this house, including for me.

But we all just needed a little bit more space from each other. We love each other so much, but we needed a little space. Three kids under eight was intense.

John: That’s a lot. So, you were still able to manage your career though. So an interesting thing about this year is that it has sort of shown that people can be in places that are not Hollywood and still get stuff done. You had a whole second season of your show Home Before Dark. That all happened during the pandemic and you did it all from Virginia, correct?

Dana: Yeah. I mean, Home Before Dark season two, which comes out June 11, was literally almost entirely completed from a creepy room in a house in Virginia with just me being sweaty, with a lot of monitors. A lot of Apple products. A lot of whiteboards. So much laundry. So many piles of laundry all around me at all times.

But what I learned was that I’m actually weirdly possibly more efficient this way. I know it’s going to be controversial to say, but the Evercast system which allowed me to sort of watch what was going on on-set I know can be a little bit of a tricky thing for some people, but I tried to make sure that I was calling in more like compliments and cheers than anything else. And the only time I ever really called in notes was just if I had a good idea about something. I was like, oh, that made me think of a different line. Try this, because I didn’t want to use it like a creepy big brother who called in to complain from 100,000 miles away.

But it was incredibly effective because I could watch set. I could write scripts on one monitor while I was keeping one eyeball on set. I could pop into a Zoom to talk to the editors. All of a sudden I’m looking at one episode in one Zoom room and then I’m hopping into another room, watching another cut in a different room with a different editor. And like weirdly I ended up being a ton more productive.

I was also really lucky because I had this incredible woman, Margie Love, who helps me with everything. And she was like – not CJ Craig, but who on the West Wing is the one who orders everybody around and tells them what to do? The chief of staff. She’s like my chief of staff.

John: The Allison Janney character?

Dana: I don’t know who it is. I’ve seen West Wing 75,000 times and I love it so much and god forbid you held a gun to my head and told me to say what everyone’s jobs were. But truly it was like amazing because she was just sort of a chief of staff. She would sort of order me around and be like you’re going in this room next, you’re going in that room next. You’ve got 45 minutes. You’ve got to look at this script. You’ve got to do your changes on this script. So that was sort of what kept the whole train on the track. And it was weirdly I think I got a lot more done which is terrible because it becomes very man behind the curtain-y.

Like I think we all realized a lot of the like getting in your car and driving for two hours to Santa Monica to do color timing is maybe never going to happen again for me. Because I was able to do it from home. They sent me a fancy iPad. I looked at the color timing live. I could say, hey, can you brighten up that window, or hey, I feel like she’s sort of like this, and can you treat that. And, boom, he’s tweaking it and I’m looking at it from my creepy room in Virginia.

John: So Dana what I’m taking from this description is that there’s no reason for Craig to be in Calgary for all these months coming up here. And that he basically just ran away to escape me and the Scriptnotes recording process?

Dana: Literally 100%. That actually is why I was called to do Scriptnotes today. This is so awkward. Craig wanted me to come to tell you that it’s because of you that he’s gone.

John: Yeah. So, with Craig gone, this is normally the part of the show that we would talk through the news. And so maybe you could fill in for Craig on this part. Because I’m sort of struggling here without him.

Dana: I can’t possibly do as well as Craig, but please, try me.

John: So I want to roll out a new segment, it’s really a beta test of a new segment called Did You See in Deadline Where…? So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And so we should make it clear that ten years ago this would have been Did You See in Variety Where, but really Deadline has supplanted that as the thing people talk about when they go into one of those meetings. Like did you see in Deadline where.

So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And I just want to get your feedback on this headline, which may be complete news to you because maybe you aren’t following the trades the way you were before.

Dana: Hit me.

John: Are you ready?

Dana: Yeah, big time.

John: Dana, did you see in Deadline where Timothée Chalamet is set to play Willy Wonka in a new origin tale from Warner Bros?

Dana: Yes, I did. And that was one of the moments where I just Googled your face to think about you because I remember you did that movie. And I love me a Timothée Chalamet. I think he’s actually kind of fantastic for this part. And I was like, all right, I see where you’re coming from. I wonder what they’re going to do with it. What were you thinking? That’s kind of intense. You must have had some emotions.

John: I did. I mean, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made like a billion dollars and it was an origin story, so I guess there’s still new territory to explore. But Dana as the writer of Cruella I want to say you’re no stranger to origin stories, but at least Cruella only killed dogs. I mean, here you’ve got Willy Wonka going after Augustus Gloop. You’ve got some Violet Beauregard. You have Veruca Salt. You’ve got the unambitiously named Mike TV. This is like The Joker with chocolate.

Dana: Do you think we’re going to meet those people, or do you think we’re going to be like hanging out with him when he’s in his house before he gets the chocolate factory?

John: I suspect it’s before all of those people exist because they would be too young if it’s Timothée Chalamet. But it’s a good question. It could be the origin story of the Oompa Loompas, which is potentially problematic so you’ve got to find a way through the Oompa Loompa and their sort of indentured servitude to Willy Wonka. Yeah, there’s a lot.

Dana: We were always thinking of ways to sort of tease these future things when we were talking about Cruella and sort of saying well how much do we want to do nods and winks to the sort of canon. So I feel like you can do the math on Timothée Chalamet’s age and I think maybe you could watch Augustus Gloop’s parents make love and know that Augustus Gloop is coming? No pun intended. He’s like coming into the world.

You can always do the math and say well what would be the cool precursor to the thing and the thing. And so I mean I feel like I’m in for that movie. I’m intrigued by it. Who is directing it? Do we know who is directing it?

John: It is I think the guy who did Paddington if I recall correctly, who is great.

Dana: People are like obsessed with Paddington 2. Is Paddington 2 guy the same as Paddington 1 guy?

John: I think it’s the same person. I’ve never seen Paddington 1. I’ve only seen Paddington 2 and it is indeed delightful.

Now, going back to Cruella though, you know, one of the things I found so frustrating about the discourse on Cruella is this question of who is this movie for.

Dana: Oh, god, my favorite.

John: Yeah. And with this movie I guess you can ask that question. Who is the audience? If you want to see a twink navigate a chocolate river you’re probably not going to the multiplex.

Dana: [laughs]

John: I mean, that’s niche content Dana. No judgments. But you’re going to want to VPN for that.

Dana: That’s amazing. I really, really didn’t think about it that way, but now I will never, ever be able to think of it any other way. That’s really special and important.

Yeah, I feel like the question of who is it for is the number one thing I have been asked in the last three years of my career. And I keep just being like, I don’t know, I just kind of like it. I think it’s pretty great.

John: I think it’s pretty great.

Dana: You know, that’s the kind of thing that people ask when they’re scared that they don’t know exactly how much money something is going to make. And I just kind of feel like it’s fun to try to straddle the different worlds and try to say I think young kids want things to reach up to. And I think adults want to feel like kids again. So, don’t ask me that question anymore people. I’m not interested.

John: Speaking of adults feeling like kids, another casting news, did you see in Deadline where Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s The Man Who Drew God. Spacey will play a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. Spacey said he’s been researching the role–

Dana: No.

John: –for decades.

Dana: No. Are you kidding?

John: No, it’s a real movie.

Dana: That’s not what the part is about?

John: That’s what the part is about.

Dana: That’s not the part.

John: That is the part.

Dana: No, John.

John: Yes. He’s a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. That’s the confusing part.

Dana: Oh my god, John.

John: I mean, Spacey, he’s so excited to be in a film that asks the question what if a guy didn’t do what I’m accused of doing.

Dana: I have to take a minute. I actually have to maybe potentially get down on the ground. I tend to sort of go low when I feel dizzy. Are you kidding? I literally thought you were 1,000% joking.

John: No, it’s not a joke. There’s a joke around it, but that’s the actual premise of the movie.

Dana: Oh my god. [Unintelligible]. I saw the headline and I intentionally didn’t click on it because I was like I’m not OK with it. I’m not ready. It’s too soon. Possibly it will always be too soon for me. I can’t do it. Unfortunately I can no longer watch Woody Allen movies. I love a Woody Allen movie. I used to have a secret thing where in the very beginning before I felt like it was like fully confirmed I was like I’ll only watch them on planes where nobody notices I’m watching. Like I’d like get on a plane and I’d immediately look for Annie Hall and then just sort of embarrassingly check both directions and then hit play, and then just watch it on planes where I feel like it was like, look, what happens at 40,000 feet stays at 40,000 feet.

And even that I can’t do anymore.

John: There was a time which I was a vegetarian, but I would eat chicken if it was the in-flight option.

Dana: Totally. Totally.

John: That’s you with Woody Allen.

Dana: And for me Kevin Spacey is chicken, which is that I no longer eat chicken even when it’s a secret, or when nobody is going to know about it. I just can’t do it. Can’t do it.

John: Dana, what are we going to do if this movie is good? That’s my biggest worry is Spacey is actually a good actor. And so this movie could be good and then what do we do?

Dana: I couldn’t agree with you more. But I think it’s like it doesn’t matter if it’s good. I think you just can’t see it. I think people just have to say we’re just not giving – to me it’s sort of like a serial killer writing a book and making money off of it. It’s like no. You don’t get to do that. Not my money. I’m not giving you my money.

And I think he’s a great actor, but you know, I was going to make a horrible joke that I’m not going to make about murderers being like painters. Like so and so is a good painter, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if the movie is good.

John: I know who the so-and-so was, and you know what, it’s right for you not to have made that.

Dana: Exactly. Thank you. Not funny. Never funny.

John: Speaking of restraint, did you see in Deadline where John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country?

Dana: [laughs]

John: I get it. He’s got F9 to promote and China is a huge market, but still I have not seen a public figure so fully prostrate themselves to a foreign power since Craig apologized to Liverpool for misattributing You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Dana: Oh my god.

John: That’s a niche joke. That’s for the fans, I’m putting that in there.

Dana: That’s literally for my husband. I’m like you’re welcome, Quinn Emmett. Please enjoy.

I have to say I know I’m supposed to be talking about the headline, but I don’t know anything about it, so I am going to say I didn’t realize you were so amazing at segues. Have you always been this amazing at super natural segues in between stuff?

John: It’s a found skill, a found art. I’m one of those mutants in X-Men who like very late in life it manifests. Oh my gosh, he can do this really unimportant thing. But I became Segue Man only because of Scriptnotes.

Dana: You’re incredible at it. It’s sort of like how Craig discovered he’s an amazing actor. Did you guys both discover that because of Scriptnotes? It’s beautiful.

John: I don’t know. I think he did a lot more voice work sort of because of Scriptnotes, so who is to say. I don’t have a good segue for this next joke though. Dana did you see in Deadline where Amazon is buying MGM for $8.5 billion?

Dana: Oh my god. They have all the money.

John: Amazon vows to keep releasing movies theatrically with the new James Bond movie due out October 8, or October 7 if you check out in the next 30 minutes.

Dana: [laughs]

John: You can throw some batteries in the cart and push it over the limit.

Dana: It’s kind of amazing. But I have to say I know I’m supposed to be cynical, and I know I’m supposed be like ugh they’re destroying the world, but I just love sunscreen and I love being able to just order as much of it as I want anytime I want and five seconds later it’s at my house. So I was like psyched about the MGM thing. I like MGM’s catalog and I like sunscreen. So I was like it’s kind of a beautiful marriage for me.

John: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are freaking out but I don’t think there’s really anything to worry about Amazon entering the movie business because look what they did for books.

Dana: Correct. Can you explain – I got the joke, but I’m moving on from it. Again, I like to order off of Amazon, I’m so sorry. But can you explain to me why people are freaking out about it? Because I didn’t totally understand why everyone was so up in arms. I was sort of like, yeah, there’s going to be a place where you can watch the movies that you couldn’t watch before this, now this other place. It’s all on your thing.

John: I think it’s just the problem of all of the consolidation in the industry. I think it’s people trying to take a do-over for Disney and Fox, which should probably never have happened. And so I think it’s just people recognizing like, oh my god, there’s going to be three buyers and you’re going to go to just the same three places the whole time.

Dana: Right. Right.

John: I think it’s just awareness of how much the industry is coalescing around these giant players.

Dana: I hear that. But I feel like if any of these places had been making these like profoundly amazing artistic films and then had been gobbled up by it I’d be like, oh trag. But, I mean, they’re kind of commercial movies. Here, go buy your batteries and watch your movie.

John: They got their Creeds. That’s sort of it.

Dana: I like that Creed. I’m not going to lie to you. That was a nice Creed. Love that Creed.

John: Finally, Dana, did you see in Deadline where in the new movie Army of the Dead Tig Notaro shot all of her scenes alone? So it was all reshoots and she’s in a bunch of scenes with actors but, nope, she was just in a green screen. It was just all Tig Notaro alone.

It reminds me that Craig was originally supposed to be in those scenes but he got too busy making his new show.

Dana: That’s amazing. That does not surprise me. And I’ll say it’s because I finished a TV show in complete Covid protocols and I was kind of amazed at – you know, in the beginning when we shut down in the middle of an episode I thought, oh, there’s going to be this fun bingo game, drinking game, that everyone is going to get to play after the end of the pandemic where you’re going to be watching your favorite TV show and then you have to drink when you see the character age by like a year in the middle of a scene.

And I thought it was going to be really complicated and everything was going to look crazy. And it’s like I watched the show and you absolutely can’t tell. We have huge crowd scenes that we just did totally safely with tiling and all sorts of stuff. We had to do a bunch of stuff like what you’re talking about. Just kind of shooting people alone so that they could be in scenes with people that they couldn’t breathe around. And so it kind of doesn’t surprise me.

And again I don’t think it’s something that we want to do in the future because I think that actors really feed off each other’s energy and I think it’s a little bit oddball to be up against a green screen for like an entire conversation. But like, OK, I’m buying it.

John: Yeah. The real question is Dana why isn’t Tig Notaro in your show? She could be in your show. What do you have against Tig Notaro that she’s not in your show?

Dana: Well now we know that there’s no reason Tig Notaro can’t be in every show. So it’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a real reckoning with that. I like Tig Notaro a lot. I think she’s great.

John: I think she’s that little bit of pepper you need to sort of spice things up. She’s great.

Dana: I think that’s right. And I think maybe–

John: She’s like deadpan pepper.

Dana: Maybe just send me the footage and I’ll see if I can work it in from the other thing.

John: Done. 100%.

Dana: Some of the green screen stuff. Let’s just stick it in my thing with a different background.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for helping me out with the headlines. I’m going to be back talking with you–

Dana: Oh, I love you.

John: –in our bonus segment about naps. And everyone check out the second season of your mystery-thriller series Home Before Dark. It appears June 11 on AppleTV+. Yay.

Dana: Yay. Oh, you’re the greatest John. Thank you.

John: Stick around because after the break I’ll be cheating with Jac Schaeffer about WandaVision and navigating the Marvel universe.

[WandaVision clip plays]

So Darcy may not know what’s happening, but luckily we have someone who does know. Jac Schaeffer is a writer-director whose credits include Time, The Hustle, and the story for the upcoming Marvel Studios’ Black Widow film. She also created and executive produced the hit series WandaVision. Welcome Jac.

Jac Schaeffer: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

John: Now, I emailed you probably after episode two to say how amazingly well-done I thought your show was and just how much I was enjoying it week-to-week. And I’d been curious about your show really early on because as listeners will know we lost our former producer, Megan McDonnell, to your show. She was hired away from Scriptnotes to work on your WandaVision show. And I was just so excited that it turned out so amazingly well.

Jac: Yes. I’m so delighted that I got to poach her directly from you. She is extraordinary. I love her madly. And that was her episode that you were just playing. One of two that she contributed to and many other things on the series.

Yeah, I could spend this whole segment just talking about Megan McDonnell if you wanted to do that. She is very smart.

John: Well maybe we can do that off-mic. But Megan is also an absolute steel trap because she told us nothing about your show or what was happening in it. And even as it was airing she was like I can’t say anything. She revealed nothing.

So now that the show is out and done I really want to talk about the process of putting together WandaVision and we’re not spoiling Marvel secrets. I’m just really curious how it all came to be. Because I don’t have a good sense of was Marvel pitching you? Were you pitching Marvel? What were those early conversations when it came time to think about doing WandaVision?

Jac: Sure. You know, it’s unusual at Marvel. It’s unlike anything else that I’ve experienced in the industry. They have their own system and it has been very successful for them.

They typically develop their concepts in house. And the only other actually place that it’s a little bit similar to is Disney Animation, where there is a lot of dedicated in-house development time. And so when you come in to pitch on something usually they have materials for you and they sort of know essentially what the gig is going to be. And then you’re meant to come in and bring your voice and perspective to the project.

So for WandaVision it was Kevin’s idea. He wanted to blend – to put Wanda and Vision’s characters together with the history of sitcoms and sort of use that to examine her very robust and tragic backstory of loss and grief. And they had a lot of sort of – they had some little ideas. They had this idea of like a milkman who was really scary. And so they had some granular stuff. And then they had big picture stuff of is it a dome, and is it the world, and who is helping, and what’s going on. And so I adjusted all of that material and then came back to them with a pitch that sort of gave shape to all of these pieces.

John: So it feels very much like a feature, you’re also a feature writer, so it feels like situations where there’s a book to adapt, and so obviously you have everything that’s in the book and then they may be bringing you in. And then you say like, OK, here’s how I’m going to do this. This thing you’re pitching towards me, here’s how I’m pitching it back to you. This is what I think it feels like. This is how I think it might work. Is that fair?

Jac: It’s sort of like that. I mean, I haven’t adapted a book, but I’ve sort of gone down the road. And I have felt that for me it’s a different approach. Because I find books are so immersive, especially when they’re very POV driven, if they’re very first person. And so you feel kind of surrounded by a world and a voice and a tone and a character. And this is different than that because it’s so sprawling. Because what you’re pitching on is like a kernel and a tone. Because they often assign genre to their – so the most reductive thing is like, OK, we’re doing a western, we’re doing a heist. So you’re sort of buying in on what, like you know Black Widow obviously is sort of spy genre, in the Bourne world.

John: As opposed to Ant Man which is like a heist comedy.

Jac: Yeah, heist comedy. Exactly. Exactly. With a novel I feel like there’s a little bit more containment. And yes you can depart from the book, but you’re always kind of housed in whatever that original container is. Whereas on this there’s like no container. It’s just an enormous table full of materials. And some of them – it’s sort of like I would imagine, I don’t know anything about cars, but cars before they were computers. If you took apart a car and there were all of these pieces spread out over a table. One is a huge engine and one is a tiny little whatever piece. I’m going to say wingnut, even though it’s probably not that. And this metaphor has gone off the rails.

But do you know what I mean? There’s so many parts to it that – on this one in particular I had to find the sort of spine and through line of it.

John: That’s what I really want to talk about is how did you find the spine and through line, which I guess quite early on you had to figure out sort of a tone and an approach. Because one of the things I loved so much about WandaVision is you watch that first episode and second episode and you’re like I’m not even quite sure what show this is. I’m not sure what the tone is. It’s just so wild and weird and unusual.

So what was the containment device for it? You say that it’s not a heist movie, it’s not a western. What did you feel this was? This surrealist existential drama? What limits did you put on yourself?

Jac: It’s funny. When I was thinking about having this conversation with you today and I was thinking about Craig actually and how amazed I am that he wrote The Hangover sequels and then also Chernobyl, and I always really admire people who can do it all, and can dance all the different – they can do all the different dances at the ballroom competition.

But for me, I just like them all in the same spot. That is really exciting to me. The challenge of can you do the kitchen sink with the one project.

You know, my first way in, I sort of had two points of entry on this. One was I mapped – I broke the episodes according to the stages of grief. It was a very reductive framing device that just helped guide me. And it ended up – we ended up straying from it a little bit, and then kind of returning to it. And now if you look at the show it’s very evident. She is in denial for the first three episodes.

And she’s angry and kicks Monica out. And then she’s bargaining outside, the sequence that we called the hex flex, when she steps out of the hex. You know, and the whole thing was meant to culminate with acceptance. That she has to accept the truth of her circumstance. So that was like one of the ways that I approached the pitch and kind of gave shape to it.

And then the other thing was that I knew that there was a huge risk that it would just feel like parody and just feel like a gimmick. And there was such a risk that we wouldn’t care about these characters. And I just knew instinctively that if we told the linear story of Wanda goes to get Vision’s body, is denied, and freaks out and creates a dome that there’s no tension in that.

John: Yeah.

Jac: So, it was my instinct and I think it was also kind of implied in their early documents of starting inside of the world and then trying to sort of unpack that mystery. But I think their instinct was to kind of parse it early, like in the first episode reveal. And I wanted to hang onto it. And I wanted to try and create an actual sitcom. So that was the driving force is like how long can we keep the cat in the bag and create maximum tension and intrigue and interest.

John: Well tension and intrigue and interest, you’re really talking about expectation. You’re talking about where the audience is at. What does the audience this is going to happen next? How can you reward that and how can you challenge that and sort of move past it? So those first two episodes, the first episode is so very classic black and white and really arch performances and so we’re expecting is this show, and then as we move to the second episode we see the time has jumped forward. It felt like you were from a very early stage anticipating what the discourse would be like week to week and where the audience was going to be at and what the audience was expecting to happen next. Is that fair?

Jac: It is fair. It is fair. We weren’t entirely certain that it would be week to week. When we were making it it was up in the air whether or not it would be a dump and be binge-able, or if it would be week to week. And it was always my hope it would be week to week. And I was so pleased that that’s how it landed.

But, yeah, I mean, it is bizarre writing in this world because you’re not writing alone. You’re writing with the legacy of everything that came before. People say lovely things about the show and I’m delighted that it has resonated, but I also – you know, I didn’t think it would play for people who didn’t understand the Marvel universe. I didn’t think it would play outside of the states. I was like if you’re not steeped in American sitcoms this is going to be Greek to you. And of course I completely under – and it’s actually even in the story she learns English. The character Wanda learns. So I don’t know why I was so sort of shortsighted about it.

But I mean so much of the eeriness and the uncanniness is about going into it knowing that these are superheroes. And that’s part of what’s so kind of delicious about it. So, yeah, I was absolutely playing to the expectations of Marvel fans. But then, you know, I wanted people who weren’t fans to be pulled in as well.

John: Now, one of the challenges of writing these characters though is that you don’t really fully control these characters. These characters existed before you. And they will exist after you. And so you have them for this period of time. It’s like you have them for college and you can do whatever they want to do in college, but they’re going to enter college and they’re going to leave college and you only have them for that time.

What were some of the challenges of taking Wanda and Vision and all the other supporting characters you brought in from the Marvel universe and using them to your best effect, but also knowing that they would have to go on and do other things? Like how early in the conversations with Marvel did that come up as an issue?

Jac: The continuing on you mean?

John: Yeah.

Jac: Well, you know, it’s really not as much of a burden as it sort of seems on the outside. First of all, it was a real surprise to me to discover how much I enjoyed picking up other people’s story threads, especially when they’re peripheral. There’s something about the characters with less screen time that really fascinate me, because you end up being able to make a meal out of these tiny moments. And actors are amazing and they make all these little choices that you sort of pass through but then upon inspection – you know, Randall Parks’ whole thing from what I understand that the moment in Ant Man between him and Paul Rudd where Jimmy makes the mistake that he thinks that Paul Rudd’s character is asking him to go to dinner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this moment. But it’s this really charming and totally disarming moment of miscommunication between two men who aren’t friends, but it reveals that Jimmy’s character is actually seeking connection.

And it was like so pleasurable to run with that. And also his sort of little interest in magic in the Ant Man movie to then sort of take that. So all that textural stuff is very, very fun.

And then of course with Paul and Lizzie like they’re performers who really operate with an enormous amount of integrity. So they had so much to contribute and there was so much already there.

In terms of where they’re going, I mean it’s an ongoing conversation throughout making your thing, because while you’re making your thing they have an idea about what the next thing is, but it’s not rolling yet. And then once it starts rolling there are conversations. I never really felt – the only place where it sort of made me feel a little bit hemmed in is the tags. The tags are always really challenging because typically they’re iterated and iterated and iterated through the process and then really they’re decided upon so late in the game.

And that’s the handoff.

John: It’s not really wrapping up your story.

Jac: Correct.

John: It’s setting up the next one which you had nothing to do with.

Jac: Correct. Yeah. And I love the tags. I always find them to be so fun. And I’ve written a bunch that I fell in love with that then were cut because it didn’t align with the next thing, or the actor was unavailable. So that’s sort of where you handoff the baton. That’s the only place where it gets a little bit sticky. But really I have felt very fortunate that in the larger scope of whatever project I’m on you’re allowed to do what you need to do to make it the best that it can be.

John: So let’s talk about the characters you’re using, like Randall Parks’ character. How early on did you know that he was going to be a force? Was that already part of the Marvel pitch to you? And same with Darcy or other people who sort of exist in the Marvel universe. Did you need them or did they say like, oh, here’s available people we’d love you to use?

Jac: Yes, so they had a list of possibilities. And it’s funny now. I can barely remember who else was on them. Usually it’s a long-ish list. Randall and Kat Dennings were on there. And high up. And I was like absolutely. That is just an immediate yes to those two performers and to those two characters. And same with Agatha Harkness was on there as a maybe, I don’t know, maybe she’s in the mix somewhere. So those were the ones that I pulled out.

You know, we went down a road with a couple other characters that didn’t end up working out very early, because it’s also like you’re gambling on actor availability, which in the MCU usually that’s not a huge problem because they’re interested in continuing their participation. But it is a little bit tricky. And then sometimes characters get pulled into another property and that on a very small scale happened with us. On Black Widow that was a little bit more blue sky on that.

I was the first writer in on that. In conjunction with my producer on that we sort of set the table on who those characters were going to be. So, the short answer to your question is they have some ideas. It’s sort of like it’s a menu and then you can select and run at it and then if it doesn’t work often it can be modular and you can slide somebody else in.

John: Well let’s talk back to the process for WandaVision. What were the first documents you ended up writing for this project? Do you do an outline for the whole series? Did you do a pilot? What were you writing first?

Jac: Let’s see. That’s a good question. I mean, Marvel has a very extensive pitch process. So I had really detailed pitch documents. Because you pitch multiple times. So I had my pitch document which broke the whole series. And then I got notes on that which just sort of shored it up. Gave it a little bit of shape.

So the next step was putting the writer’s room together. And so when we were hiring writers they would come in and I would pitch the series.

John: So at this point you had not written a script, but you were hiring writers based on the approval of this pitch document and saying like, OK, we’re going to try to make this thing.

Jac: Correct. And it was in broad strokes. I can’t remember. Monica being kicked out. That was always there. The first three episodes, obscuring the truth, and kind of having red herrings. That was all – so I think that that kind of basic shape was there and that was part of what I was pitching to the writers. You should ask Megan. It’s all gone.

And then one of the things that you have to do is like you have to pitch over and over again because you have to pitch to the actors and then when you’re hiring the directors you have to pitch to them. So we ended up having it all on a wall. We had this really fabulous writer’s room with an enormous amount of art which was one of the things I did before the writers came in is I put all the art on the wall because it’s such a visual story and because we were telling such a multi-layered story.

So we had the wall broken by episode and then we had the art, like the posters from those classic shows above each episode. So it was this kind of wall that was a pitch document.

And then once the writers came on that’s when we started producing documents for the studio to receive notes on. And those were kind of series overviews. And then eventually once their episodes were assigned they were writing outlines that were part of the series overview. So we went really, really, really deep before anybody started writing a script.

John: So there were no lines of dialogue written until everything had sort of been signed off on, right?

Jac: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s actually true. You know, the pilot opens with the like “my wife and her flying saucers,” like that kind of stuff was in – those type of cute moments and big moments like “he was killed by Ultron, wasn’t he,” that stuff was in the outline documents.

John: OK. So you had those little moments. And it sounds like the James Cameron scriptment kind of things.

Jac: Correct. Yeah.

John: You have dialogue where you absolutely need the dialogue to sort of show how stuff works, but the scene work is not in those. It’s really showing—

Jac: Yeah, the scene breakdowns. Yeah, I guess scriptment. I mean, the way that I did it, which I don’t know if it’s any kind of formal system, was slug lines and what we planned to do. It wasn’t in Final Draft. It was in a Word document. But we broke out the scenes for everything and what would happen. Yeah, bits of dialogue here and there.

John: Now, finally you feel like, OK, we have a shape for this whole thing. We are signing off scripts. Is this your first time running a room? This is your first time working with other writers? What was that process like for you?

Jac: It was. It was my first time running a room. And it was the very best experience of my career. And I loved hiring these phenomenal people and I loved working with them. And I will keep it in my heart until the day I die. It was so wonderful and so special.

And it was a tricky thing because I needed to hire talented, inspiring, somewhat seasoned people, because I hadn’t done it before. But I also needed to hire people who weren’t going to have a problem with that. And weren’t – I didn’t have time for anyone to have a problem with my authority. I’ve heard on your podcast before that you and Craig talk about kids and having kids and the impact of family on your career. My children were two and four when I got this job. And I live on the west side and Marvel is in Burbank. So I had an hour plus commute every day.

So I was working on an extremely tight schedule. So I needed people who were just going to be in and be excited and optimistic and up for the whole thing. And so that’s who I hired. And I wanted people that I would learn from. And I wanted people who would keep the engine going if I ran out of gas. And that’s what I got. I mean, this team never quit.

And they had so much love for it. And I also chose them based on the kind of people that they are, but also because of their influences. I hired this group that just like they know film and TV in all the ways that you need them to, but the love that they have for it, and the deep cuts that were brought to the table in the room when we were breaking the show, and because it’s such a bananas show I needed those people with those super bizarro frames of reference.

John: I actually was writing down your quote, “I didn’t have time for anyone to question my authority,” because that is just such a great encapsulation of the real challenge of trying to do this job. My first experience running a TV show was this disaster called DC. It was me and Dick Wolf. And my authority was constantly being questioned at all moments. It became impossible for me to do this show because not just the question of authority for the network or the studio or Dick Wolf, but also you’re too young to be doing this. You shouldn’t be doing this.

So to hear you say that is such a smart way to approach how you’re making the decisions.

I want to know how you actually picked those writers. Were you looking for recommendations first and then reading them to make sure they were really good? Were you looking at the words first and then meeting with writers? How did you pick who would be the people in the room?

Jac: So my producer, who is my Marvel executive, Mary Livanos, who is wonderful – Marvel is really great because these executives are always doing the next move way before it’s time for the next move. Because of the way they operate, you know, they plant a flag. This is when this thing is coming out. So they just run at it and it’s kind of amazing whether or not it’s ready to go.

So I think she was reading scripts before I was hired. And also I met with some people who had been up for my job as well, because there were great people in that pool. So she was passing me scripts, things that were her favorite. I told her what my priorities were in the read which were I wanted people with original voices. It was less important to me that the specs stick the landing of whatever the show was trying to do. I just wanted ideas to leap off the page. Or I wanted comedy to leap off the page.

I just wanted it to be memorable. Because those were the brains that I needed in the room. I needed people who were going to constantly be questioning the tradition of storytelling. Megan’s spec was so good. It was such a fully realized mythology. And it was so achingly melancholy. And it had such an original voice to it.

Cam Squires’ spec was such a swing. And I remember when he came in to meet my first question was where does this series go. What even is your plan for this story? Because I can’t see it and that’s not a ding. That’s not a fault. It’s just you bit off so much in the pilot. Tell me what your plans are. And of course he had a plan and it was fascinating to hear what that was.

And I knew I needed people who could do mythology and world-building and genre and procedural. And I knew I needed people who could do sitcoms and comedy. I ended up leaning away from a lot of the straight sitcom writers, because our show was so ambitious. So I did hire sitcom writers. So Mackenzie Dohr wrote on the Mindy Project but she also wrote on Lock and Key. So she’s no stranger to fantasy and genre.

So that’s what I was looking for on the page. That was truthfully 30%. Maybe 30% of what was important to me. It was really so much more about the personality. Coming up in the industry I’ve had my share of bad experiences and being in rooms where I felt small. Whether or not I allowed myself to feel small, or I was actively made to feel small. But I was adamant that the room culture be positive and respectful and joyful. And that everyone would feel heard and valued.

So I hired people who that’s how they operate at. I hired Chuck Hayward because I invited him over to my house. I was like, OK, crack the code. Tell me how I run a room. And he painted a picture of what his dream room would look like and I was like, OK, great, because you’re hired because I need you to bring that energy into the room. I actually hadn’t even read his script. [laughs] And luckily it was great and he’s wonderful and very talented. But it was so much about a friend of mine, Micah Fitzerman-Blue who is wonderful and so talented himself, he was like you know you can write. So what you need is the people to help you break this. And you need people who will inspire you.

And my friend Chris Addison who is an incredible – he directed The Hustle and he won Emmys for Veep and is fantastic, he was like look at your room like a toolbox. You don’t need – every chair isn’t supposed to be a writer who is better than you. Every chair needs to bring something different to the table. So that was very much part of my approach.

I’ve been talking forever John because I love talking about building a room. It’s so fun. And I, yeah–

John: Well it sounds like you’re going to have a chance to do this again because just this last week it was announced you made a deal with Marvel and 20th Television to create some new shows. This is very exciting. Congratulations.

Jac: Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I’m very excited about it and I feel incredibly grateful and honored.

John: So what do you see as priorities? Would you want to do traditional broadcast? Do you want to do more streaming? What do you think is really interesting in television for the next couple years?

Jac: I mean, for me I love this limited series space. I mean, that’s not to say that things can’t have another iteration, but I was so surprised at how much freedom I felt in making WandaVision. That every episode was a chance to redefine the actual show itself. In the years leading up to getting WandaVision, you know, it wasn’t my intention to go into television. That wasn’t the trajectory. But I had been watching these shows that were just blowing my mind with – especially with bottle episodes. The bottle episode of Girls, the Panic in Central Park, I was so dazzled by that episode. And it was the first time that I really sort of looked squarely at the bottle episode and what it could be.

Because prior to that in network television it had always seemed like filler or I remember my parents watching an episode – there was an episode of The Cosby Show. I think it was John Ritter who was on and his wife Amy Yazbek, is that right?

John: That sounds right.

Jac: I don’t know if I’m remembering this correctly at all, but they were having a baby and the enormous amount of show real estate was dedicated to their storyline. And I remember my dad saying, “Oh, they’re lining up a spinoff,” which didn’t turn out to be the thing. But I remember feeling like departures from the norm in network television was like filler or a detour or con. And now, you know, another one that I just couldn’t believe was Escape at Dannemora, the penultimate episode, that was very much an inspiration for the penultimate episode of WandaVision in that it’s a rewind. And you don’t know where you are when you start the episode.

That feeling of disorientation, rather than it being filler, rather than it being just like, oh, watch this instead, that you have to lean forward. I mean, that is what I am clawing after at every turn.

John: That’s how you know you’ve engaged your audience is they are desperate to figure out what’s going on. And they’re with you to solve the mystery. That’s it.

Jac: That’s totally it. That’s the juice.

John: Jac Schaeffer, congratulations again. I’m so excited to see what you’re going to make next. Do you know what that is? Is there anything you can announce yet that you’re going to be making next?

Jac: There are no announcements.

John: Nothing will be announced today on Scriptnotes. But thank you very much for coming on the show. And thank you for hiring Megan McDonnell and giving her that platform, even though we were sad to lose her. Thank you for taking a chance on her because she is a superstar.

Jac: She is. I mean, I’m the one who benefited from that. Let’s be honest. She’s the best. Thank you. Thanks so much.

John: Thank you, Jac.

Stick around because after the break I’ll be chatting with Lance Oppenheim about the writing that goes into documentaries.

[Clip plays from Some Kind of Heaven]

In that clip we hear from Dennis, one of the people in the documentary Some Kind of Heaven. The film follows four seniors living in The Villages retirement community and explores how they cope with later adult life. The film premiered at Sundance in 2020 and is now available on Hulu. And we have with us Lance Oppenheim, the film’s writer and director. Welcome Lance.

Lance Oppenheim: Hello. Thank you for having me, John. Big fan. It’s funny. The writer – I don’t consider myself the writer of a documentary, but I guess all documentaries are written somehow.

John: I want to talk about that. Because sometimes you see writing credits on documentaries and sometimes you don’t. But there’s clearly a lot of character work, a lot of story work that’s happening here. So I want to talk about how you do that in a documentary sense.

But I also want to make sure that people who are listening to this understand that your movie is actually really funny and visual and surprising. And it’s sad at moments, but also that clip might make it seem like it’s all dark and grim, and it has this really kind of weird spirit to it. So I want to make sure people don’t get the wrong idea about your movie.

How early on in the process of coming up with this movie did you know what it was going to feel like?

Lance: Oh man. I think it took a long time to know what the movie was going to be about and how it was going to do that. But I think the feeling of it actually came pretty early to me. And that came from spending a lot of time in the world. The Villages, as most people know of it from how much of a political spectacle it became this past year during the election cycle. It’s a very conservative stronghold of America.

But I think that the thing that appealed to me, I’m a Floridian. I grew up knowing about the place was that it really was kind of like The Truman Show in real life. It’s designed to simulate the 1950s, the 1960s. Kind of like an America that never really existed, but an America that I grew up with in movies, like in Blue Velvet or in Safe or in Edward Scissorhands. And Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life. The suburbia of those movies is the same suburbia of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America and it’s the same suburbia that is literally brought to life in the Villages.

So I knew that I couldn’t just make a standard cinema verité style documentary that the aesthetics of it were handheld. I wanted to find a way to bring the audience into the world and make it as immersive and make it feel as [transportive] as if you were really there, as if you had stepped afoot in the community.

John: So those choices were about the kinds of shots you’re doing. Just literally the production design, sort of what you’re showing on screen. But you also need to show characters on screen and that’s really what I wanted to dig into. Because that boundary between what is writing and what is directing and what is being a documentary filmmaker and what is sort of shaping narrative.

How did you find these people? Because I keep wanting to call them characters and they’re not characters. They actually are people. But they felt very carefully selected and edited. And over the course of your times meeting with them you are putting them in situations that can help tell your story.

So, let’s start at the beginning. How did you find these people and when did you know these were the people you wanted to follow for your film?

Lance: Well, I think over the process of making the film, it was about four trips over almost 18 months of time spent on and off in the community and filming with a lot of different folks. It only really became apparent I think at the end of our second strip who our ensemble really was. We were following a lot of people. But I think going back to the root of the question of just documentary, fiction, how we watch documentaries, how we watch fiction films. I mean, I think it’s interesting.

A lot of people in documentary – the documentary orthodoxy likes to talk about this word “manipulation” and I think it’s a word that should exist. But I think, you know, I may be stating the obvious but everything in documentaries is manipulated. The moment you put a camera and train it on anybody. And anybody that is living a life and breathing and existing, something happens. Depending on how much time you spend in a place, how comfortable, and how much that bedrock of trust exists between you, the filmmaker, and the subject that’s on camera, there may be some kind of alchemy that gets you closer to real life. But it’s a tremendous hurdle.

And even the way most documentaries no matter how observational they may seem are put together in the edit. It’s a lot of times following the tenets of a thing we call story, which is inherently I think the tenets, the touchstones of how we think about story go back to the things that you talk about so well on the podcast which is narrativizing and the way we even narrativize our lives goes back to that same thing.

So I think a lot of movies, even the film that we made, contain these manipulations. And I think for me the world, the setting of the Villages, felt perfect to drop a camera and to kind of experiment with a more heightened, more stylized way of telling real stories. I guess my process kind of involves a lot of me getting to know people, spending a lot of time with them, and then essentially riffing off of reality. Putting them in situations, as you’re saying. It’s not even a matter of me putting them in situations they wouldn’t normally be in. It’s bringing those situations to life and shooting them in a way that may feel and evoke how a narrative film looks and breathes.

John: Let’s talk about one of the characters in this. So in the initial clip here we meet Dennis. And so the first shot that we’re seeing of him is he’s in his van and he’s going through his daily life and he’s talking to us about the kind of woman he wants to meet. And it’s a character who he can seem like a grifter, he can seem like a hustler. And yet he is kind of a classic protagonist, like a shaggy dog protagonist of a story.

So, when you first meet this person as a filmmaker are you thinking through sort of like where you want to see his arc going? Or are you just observing? Because that’s really the question. So often as a writer we kind of know what track we need that character to go, and so we’re tailoring that character from the start because we need that character to achieve these things.

You as a documentary filmmaker have limited means of actually deciding how this character ends up. So when you’re first meeting Dennis do you have a plan for him?

Lance: I’d say no. I think what compels me to the process of making docs, and also the process of making a doc in this way which is maybe a little bit more unorthodox to how docs are normally made, you know, the process in the beginning is similar. It’s observing someone. I’m meeting them. They’re meeting me. We’re getting to know each other really well. We have a few drinks. We have dinner. We have more drinks. We do that process, that cycle kind of repeats several times over, as many times as possible until we feel comfortable and we are friends with each other.

And once we got to the place where we were in this movie, you know, the film is shot entirely on a tripod, right. A lot of the intention was to make our frames as composed, feel as composed, as manicured as the Villages, as the setting dictates, as the landscaping is. It’s this very meticulously crafted suburban bliss that’s there. And I wanted the camera to feel that.

But in doing that and shooting the movie entirely on tripod it really did not allow for us to be flies on the wall. For one I’m much younger than every subject in the film, including Dennis. The process of shooting it on tripod in a way immediately established this distance and the challenge with the movie was to eliminate that distance and get as close as we possibly could. In a weird way something happened where midway through our shooting, you know, there were times where this process did not feel like it was working and it felt like it was corrupting too much of reality and it felt too artificial, even though we were putting things on screen that normally do happen in their lives.

And there were a lot of times where we were just observing and kind of putting the camera in a place where we would just let it run for a long time until something would happen in the frame. But what happened over time was that in kind of embracing the artifice we got to something more real. You know, the process of shooting on a tripod made me be a lot more honest about what I was shooting, why I was shooting it, and how I was going to shoot it for the subjects of the film. So in a way our process, our relationship, didn’t just evolve – it wasn’t like a mosquito biting someone and sucking up their blood and then painting a portrait with their blood in the edit or something.

This was something far more collaborative. I’m using such a violent example for how I imagine documentaries are normally made. But I think it’s like somewhat true. You get closer, the material you end up making out of somebody’s life, and it’s a very [vampiristic] relationship. So I wanted to do something different. This whole process of shooting on tripod kind of allowed and enabled this sort of collaboration and trust and honesty. I had to be very honest about the places and situations I wanted to shoot. And I had to be just as honest about how I thought it was going to work in the edit.

So in a way these were real people but they were playing a version of themselves that was entirely real and all the things that are happening in the movie are real. The way we’re shooting them, the framework we’re shooting them in, and sometimes even the way a situation is blocked, that is very much planned. And I think that’s the kind of joy of it all is that you’re riffing off of reality. It’s like jazz and you’re trying to shoot actively unfolding things in as stylized and interesting of a framework as possible.

So to answer your question I prefer not to know where a person’s journey goes. I have hopes, I have dreams, I have wishes for where they move, and how they move through a world, but I’m never telling them what to do or how to do something. It’s really more they make a choice to do something and for me the reason I chose these folks was, one, I was interested in some ways of making a movie about relationships, so there was that subtext to each of their stories. But, two, they were actively having things happening to them when I met them.

Barbara, the widow in the film, was trying to get back out in the world again. That was something very active. There’s conflict there. Dennis is someone who is trying to find a woman to move in with. And he needs to find a home essentially. His journey is about companionship and comfort and freedom. And these things that he talks about very articulately and beautifully. And the last subjects of the film are Reggie and Anne, a married couple, who are very different from one another and are about to just experience how different they really are and how there’s so much distance in that relationship. And how she has to deal with the fact that her husband may not just be recreationally dabbling in psychedelic drugs. He actually may be losing his mind.

And to me each of those stories, it took a lot of time to find each of them and befriend them and then get to a place where they were comfortable with me putting their lives onscreen. I’m not interested in taking it I guess to that degree. What’s more interesting and more challenging to me is taking real life and creatively lensing and creatively treating it. And that’s what I think my favorite documentaries do that. And it’s a shame that not all documentaries do.

John: Well, let’s talk about trying to frame it and you’re literally framing it with your camera, but you’re also deciding what parts of their lives are going to be useful for your film to be showing. So you said that initially there were other people you were following and they did not make it into the edit, or you stopped filming them because they were not helping you tell your story. So you said there were a total of four visits, between those visits what was the process for you in terms of like this is what the movie wants to be, this is the story that it looks like we can tell here? And was there writing involved in that? Were there conversations?

Or was it just looking at what you’d already shot in the edit bay? How did you figure out what the movie wanted to be? Because that’s a question that screenwriters are facing all the time. They have all these scenes, they have this stuff, but they may not necessarily know what the movie is from the moments that they’ve found.

Lance: You know, the process of making this – for so long I had no clue what it was. And I knew that we visually found a way to lens the place in a way that felt very expressive and not just representational and that I think was exciting to me and exciting to my cinematographer who I really consider a coauthor of the film. But it was only until I brought on an editor named Daniel Garber who I consider – screenwriting in documentaries, what that really is is the editors of the films.

Daniel is someone who is really well versed in both documentary and narrative films. He edited a film called Cam a few years ago. And I owe a great deal to him. We edited the film together, but he was the person who was making sense out of the lasagna, the cold noodles of footage that was just sitting on a hard drive or sitting in a refrigerator basically forever. And I had no idea how to make sense of any of it, or how all these people, places, and things added up. And he was the person that showed me what the film needed to be.

I think the thing that was guiding him in making those choices and guiding me, after seeing material structured in a particular kind of way it guided the rest of the way we were filming. Daniel came on I think at the end of our second trip and was struggling to figure out what it was.

There was one story that we actually released as a separate short documentary that the New York Times put out. I think it was about two months ago. About one of the stories that I thought the movie was about. I thought the movie was about this little girl who was living actually outside of the Villages and the development was trying to buy her land and turn this home that has been in her family for generations into prefab cookie cutter retirement home essentially, a house in this retirement community.

And there was another thread that I really liked about the ecological devastation this place causes. Sinkholes that were forming in the bottom of the ground. I mean, just like totally unbelievable things that we just kept shooting because that place is just unbelievably insane.

I’m trying to remember how we decided it didn’t work, but I think one of the things for sure that I think I was interested in and existentially so felt when I first got there. I had just gotten out of a long relationship. I felt pretty upset about that. And I was wandering around trying to figure out how these people who are navigating their seventh or eighth decade on this planet are still together. And what romance looks like there. And do we repeat the same things – if you’re returning to a place that reminds you of your youth do you make the same mistakes that you made as a young person?

John: So what you’re describing sort of sound like central dramatic questions. And so it sounds like you didn’t know going into it – you knew what the movie might kind of feel like. You knew what was interesting about it. But you didn’t have a central dramatic question until you really winnowed it down to like these are the people we’re going to follow and these are the questions the movie is going to try to answer, which is kind of what happens – it’s not about the place. It’s about what happens when you’re at this point in your later adulthood.

Lance: Right. Precisely. I think for a long time I was interested in making something that I thought at first was going to be about the place. And I realized over time that this movie, that stories aren’t settings. That this movie didn’t want to be about the setting. It wanted to be about people going through real problems against the backdrop of this unreal place. That seemed more interesting to me and that also – when I first started making the film, before I even rolled a frame on anything, before my crew came, I lived in the community for about a month and a half. These two retired rodeo clowns I found off of Airbnb, I rented a room in their house.

And I think a lot of those central dramatic questions came from seeing how they lived their lives and who their friends were and what they were doing. One of them had leukemia and the reason they were putting their Airbnb room up was to pay for the medical bills. So immediately I was like this is so fucking dark, but also they are still clowning. There was something – the tension between those two things, something that is more tragic through the funniness of it, and more funny through its tragedy. That was really nice and interesting to me and I knew I wanted to bottle that up somehow.

John: Well let’s get a sense of who you are in this picture. Because how old were you when you started this movie?

Lance: I was 22 when I first got there.

John: So you were literally just out of film school when this is happening. You’re straight out of undergrad and you’re trying to do this thing which has got to be both inspiring and also annoying to many of our listeners who are like how can this young kid do all these things. And my guess just from interactions we’ve had is you are not shy about approaching and asking people for this. You hustle. And it’s a thing I admire just in my interactions with you so far is you seem to recognize what you need and how to very graciously approach people about getting that thing that you need. And that feels like that’s Hollywood you get your subjects for your movie. But also how you sort of get the movie out there in the world.

Lance: Yeah. I’m an annoying person. You know, I think even the process of getting this film made, it was not – as I’m sure you would imagine it was not easy. It was I think throughout the process a lot of people were constantly, even in trying just to get the money to keep going back, you know, people could see through what I was doing. They could see through that I didn’t have it figured out yet. That I didn’t have a narrative that seemed like it would satisfy all of their funding needs, especially in documentaries which is a world – financing in documentaries I think goes back to a lot of other questions about issues and advocacy and stuff like that that is important but not – that was not this film.

So, it took time and it took a lot of bullshitting I think to really figure that out. I mean, the film that I thought we were making, the film that is this short film called The Paradise Next Door, that was essentially my pitch was that here’s a movie, you have a younger person, and you have these older folks, and it’s a movie about these two people and when those worlds collide, which was complete bullshit because it never collided. So, you know, after we were able to successfully bamboozle some people, graciously this company called the Los Angeles Media Fund, they were still down for the ride even as I started realizing that that narrative wasn’t the thing that we needed to be shooting.

What we needed to be shooting was something much more intimate and interior and subjective about these people and about this existential feeling of being in a place where you’re supposed to be having the best time of your life and time is running out and tht stress of not feeling that and also when this thing you’ve invested in, this dream – what happens when it becomes a nightmare? And that’s something that I think anybody can relate to, especially anybody who grows old, which is everybody on the planet I guess.

John: Now what I hear you describing though, it sounds like you weren’t asking for permission, and you weren’t waiting to figure out all the things, you just kind of started doing it and you sort of built the road underneath you as you were going. And that applies for a documentary feature, but also applies to a lot of writing. I do feel a frustration that sometimes the questions we get in on the podcast are about like am I allowed to do this thing, is this possible, is this a good idea, and the advice I want to shout so often just like well just try the thing and see if it’s a good idea. And if it’s not a good idea you haven’t lost that much.

And it sounds like as you started to make this movie you didn’t have – you kind of weren’t risking a ton. I mean, you might be wasting your time, but it wasn’t expensive to do the initial things you were trying to do. You could just go off and do it and eventually you had some footage you could show and you could bring in another person and another person. You got to Darren Aronofsky. You could sort of keep the ball rolling by just bringing in new people who could see what you’d already done. Is that fair?

Lance: Yeah. I think that is. I mean, you know, the movie – I started working on the film like kind of [co-curricularly]. It started off as my thesis film in school and that was how I initially was able to go down there. But even when we got the financing, the process didn’t change much. In terms of shooting it still was just me, my cinematographer, and I’ve been working with him since I was like 17. My sister who has a fulltime job, not in movies, but I convinced her to come and help us figure it out. And one of my college friends who coproduced the film. And then I had the sound guys.

So it was like a crew of five basically across the journey. And then obviously on the post side and everything else things started to get a little bigger and just a lot more people to answer to. And wanted to make sure that even though it wasn’t a ton of money to make, they wanted to make sure their money wasn’t being wasted. That’s fair. I feel like all first time feature filmmakers have to go through that process of just getting people to trust you in that way.

But it’s a process of trying things and taking risks and swinging big. And when you are there, when you’re up at the plate you’ve got to swing as big as you can possibly can and be as ambitious as you can. And I think going back to the thing you just said before, like don’t worry about being annoying. No one is going to find you on the Internet and pluck your script or you movie or your short out of obscurity. The only way they’re going to find it is if you sort of get it in their face.

And I remember reading this story about like Gus Van Sant. I think he called, I don’t know if it was William S. Burroughs, so forgive me if I’m screwing up the story, but I remember he found someone he admired very deeply, his name in the phonebook, and he just gave him a call. And they became friends and then he ended up adapting his story into a movie. So I’ve always just been inspired by that and took that to heart.

John: We just spoke with Jac Schaeffer who ran WandaVision and her Scriptnotes connection was that she ended up hiring former Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell as a staff writer there. You also have a Scriptnotes connection. Do you want to tell us what that is?

Lance: I would love to. I grew up with Stuart Friedel. His father was and has been my dentist for my entire life. Stuart was the first dude that I ever knew that was working in movies. He worked for Alexander Payne and exposed me to his films. And exposed me to your films, John. Told me what the podcast was. I didn’t know what the podcast was at all at that point in time, but I had seen so many of your movies. I’d seen The Nines. I’d seen Corpse Bride. I’d seen Big Fish. So I was like oh shit I should listen to that.

And I am devoted listener. Especially as someone who is trying to make stuff that is documentary and nonfiction based but also as I’ve tried to learn and remediate myself on how to write a screenplay which is an art, a dark art that is not easy. So I’m very grateful – I feel like your podcast keeps me going, and I’m sure keeps a lot of people going when they’re trying to figure out how the fuck to do it.

John: You also have Stuart’s vocal cadences, which I find so fascinating, because I wouldn’t guess that there was a South Florida accent, but you and Stuart sound so much alike. It’s jarring.

Lance: Oh, that’s funny. Huh. We’re just two Jewish South Floridian guys I guess.

John: Maybe it’s all that Friedel dentistry on your mouth that has shaped it into a specific way. So, you made this movie, but you’re still very, very young. So, what are you doing next and are you trying to stay in the documentary lane? Are you trying to do narrative features? What’s next for you?

Lance: I don’t know. I don’t feel very young. I feel, if anything I feel weird in a way. This was the thing that I basically went as far in as I possibly could on. And there was a kind of tremendous period of just like, wow, what do I do next. And this feeling of sadness of finishing something I cared so deeply about. And the people in the film, the subjects in the film, I speak with them still once a week. We’re still very close. And I’m always like, god, I wish I could go back and keep making something there.

But I’m working on a bunch of stuff. I am interested in continuing to make docs, but I also am very interested in narrative films and seeing if I can find ways to bridge that gap. So I’m working on another film right now that’s a small narrative film that’s based on a short story that I really liked. And then I’m adapting one of the short documentaries I made a few years ago and I’m writing that right now. And Darren Aronofsky is producing that. So we’ll see. I just want to make movies and I find it so interesting how I think especially in the narrative world it’s like so much time – hurry up and wait. You work and work and work and then if you get to that place where you can set something up it just takes a million years to get it made.

So I feel like I’ll probably just keep making documentaries because at least I have more agency and ownership of the process of just going and shooting stuff. Even if it’s the wrong stuff to shoot, it still feels good to be shooting something rather than talking about it I guess.

John: We’re always big advocates on this podcast of just making the thing. And so I believe you will continue to just make the thing and you will have the frustrations of development hell and all of that stuff, but as long as you can always make some things for yourself you’ll be set.

Lance Oppenheim we can check out your movie on Hulu right now. So everyone on Hulu can see it. I’m sure internationally you can find it through all the other streaming and download places. Congratulations on your movie. And it’s great talking with you.

Lance: Thank you so much, John.

John: Stick around because after the break we’ll be talking about writing while at your day job.

OK, this is the part of the show where we normally answer some listener questions. Megana, do you have a good question for us?

Megana Rao: I do. Cautious from San Gabriel Valley would like to know “Can a company gain partial ownership of something I wrote while at work? I got a day job where I basically babysit a building and my supervisor doesn’t care if I write for the majority of my shift. I was worried when I found out through an episode of Silicon Valley that a company can sue you for ownership of your project if you worked on it on company equipment, i.e. a computer. I thought I was fine because I’m a third party contract worker and continue to write at work, but recently due to my coworker’s constant cellphone and YouTube use my company sent out a scary memo regarding computer usage.

“Though the memo may not hold up in court, I’m uncertain how to proceed working on projects at work. I don’t care if I’m fired or transferred to a different post. I just don’t someone else to already have a bite out of my apple. I’m leaning towards continuing to use company computers to write scripts and only saving in the cloud because if I do sell a script I’d have a whole production company backing in the unlikely event of a lawsuit. As for other writing projects that I might self-publish I’m just writing in a notebook and tediously typing it up at home. What do you guys think? Is the time saved worth the hypothetical risk?”

John: All right, so this gives me a big flashback to my days when I was writing my first script. I was an intern at Universal. And so the first script I ever wrote was this romantic tragedy called Here and Now. And I wrote it basically while I was at work, when I was sort of at work in my job. Mostly I had a really mindless day job sort of like Cautious has where I was just filing stuff all day and really not using my brain at all. And I would go home and I would handwrite pages and then type them up over my lunch break at work.

And I was using my own laptop, but I think the same kind of idea applies is that you’re kind of doing it on company time and the question of could they control or own that work. I think you’re possibly asking for trouble using the company computer. That’s the only thing that gives me sort of pause. I think the fact that you’re still doing your job but you’re also writing at the same time, if your supervisors don’t care it’s going to be fine.

The fact that you’re using their stuff could be the problem. Even just using a browser or saving it online might be a problem. So my instinct would be to either get yourself a cheap laptop you can work on while you’re there. Write on it using your iPhone, your iPad. Write by hand and then type it up when you get home. But I think you could be asking for some trouble just because anything that’s edited in that computer kind of feels like it is their stuff.

Megana, you used to work at Google. What was the policies when you were at Google? If you were using the company’s computer to do stuff did they own it?

Megana: Yeah. I remember this came up during orientation. So my first day they have this policy that whatever you work on Google technically owns if it’s at the office or on company computer. And I remember being so confused. And I was like, well, what if I wrote a poem. Because if I wrote like an application, sure, that makes sense to me. But why would you guys want to own a poem that I wrote?

And the person who was leading our orientation, I think they brought someone from legal counsel was like technically we would own anything like that, and so I never wrote at the office or on my company computer there because I also saw that episode of Silicon Valley and was scared.

John: Yeah. It’s probably not going to be a problem, but this last paragraph you asked I’d only write scripts there because the production company would back you up. That’s not a guarantee. Like you hope the production is going to back you up. And, again, it’s probably not going to be a problem, but it’s like getting vaccinated before going on a trip or something. It’s probably not going to happen to you, but it’s better to ease your mind and not run into those problems. So if you can find a way to not write on their stuff that’s going to be a better choice.

Megana: And something, I don’t know if this is tricky advice, but I would just research a lot while I was at work, or I would do a lot of reading. Because they couldn’t possibly own that, right?

John: No, they can’t own your research. That’s another great point. If you are researching stuff for your project that’s great. And realistically what Cautious is describing, where maybe you’re typing into Google Docs documents, it’s completely on the cloud and no one is ever going to see it. It’s unlikely to be a problem, but still why take the chance.

Megana: Mm-hmm.

John: Cool. Well that’s a good question. We’re a pretty full episode so we’ll save the rest of these questions for next week when Craig is back. But thank you for helping us out with that. Maybe you can help us out with One Cool Things. So this is the part of the show where we recommend something. I’m going to recommend a really great episode of Slate’s Working podcast where they talked to this dialect coach named Samara Bay. Really smart and great.

So she’s the dialect coach who works with actors before they’re starting a role. So they are about to go in to shoot something, a British actor who has to play American, or an American actor who has to play an Irish accent. And she’s really smart about talking through the process and really thinking about there’s not just one accent you’re going for. You’re trying to get into the space where you can inhabit that character and then while you’re in that character have all the vocal ranges and expressions that you need for it.

She compares it a lot to how a costume designer works. You are trying to really suit the voice/costume of that character and make sure it really works for that actor and works for that piece and that period. So, she was just so smart and such a great way of looking at something that’s so challenging.

Because we think about dialogue being just the words we write and sort of these are the words in the right order. But it depends so much on how they’re delivered and how much that voice fits nicely. So, if you’re someone who writes dialogue, which is probably most of the people listening to this podcast, I would definitely check out this episode of the Slate Working podcast with Samara Bay.

Megana: Cool.

John: Now what do you have for us?

Megana: Well, I feel bad because I also was going to recommend a podcast episode.

John: You can do that.

Megana: I can? OK. I also feel like I’m cheating on Scriptnotes. I feel guilty.

John: But Craig is not here and also Craig rarely has one, or fills it in at the last minute.

Megana: So I have this podcast that I really love, in addition to this one. It’s called You’re Wrong About. And it’s a podcast hosted by these two journalists and each week they examine a historical event or a person in pop culture who was misunderstood or miscast in the popular imagination. And then they recontextualize the story with research and information that we have decades later.

And because they’re journalists they’re really good at parsing out what was the media narrative and why was it that way. And then following how the information gets weaponized. So I feel like for our listeners who like the How Would This Be a Movie segment, this is the perfect sort of supplemental listening.

And it’s also really fun. The female host, I picture her as the adult Daria. She’s very sardonic and her voice sounds just like Daria. And my personal favorite episode of this is they have one on the Exxon Valdez oil spill which does not sound sexy or fun, but it is so fascinating. And that’s one I’ll link to in the show notes.

John: So my recollection of the Exxon Valdez is that we did cast a villain. The captain of the Exxon Valdez was sort of penalized for his role in it, but my guess is that’s probably not actually accurate. Correct?

Megana: Correct. And like he actually had alerted Exxon to – like he might have made some errors, but like the way that the system and the company was treating regulations had already degraded so much to that point. And he had already alerted the company to say hey the way we’re running these ships is really unsafe. And there’s like a lot of twists that have happened in the past 10 years that I think, you know, nobody is going to keep paying attention – or most people do not pay attention to a news story 10 years later. And I think that’s how a lot of corporate malfeasance happens is that they can make really huge gestures and amends immediately and then 10 years later repeal all of that work that they’ve done.

John: Yeah. I remember that happening recently. A lot of stories came out about Y2K and it’s like, oh, Y2K was overhyped and it was a disaster that didn’t happen. And just recently I’ve seen a lot of recontextualizations saying like oh yeah it wasn’t a disaster because people spent five years working their asses off to actually make it not be a problem. So it’s those things, the nonevents that were nonevents because we actually did the thing.

Megana: Yeah.

John: Don’t make it into the news.

Megana: And they have a great episode on the Y2K bug.

John: Great. I will check that out. I will add it to my podcast app. And that is our podcast for today. Scriptnotes is produced, as ever, by Megana Rao. Thank you, Megana.

Megana: Thank you.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is also by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we recorded earlier this afternoon with Dana Fox which is epic and we talk about, god, we talk about everything. We talk about sleeps, and naps–

Megana: Teeth.

John: And teeth. And all sorts of things. So you’ll find out about all the secrets behind how Dana Fox kicks so much ass. So sign up for Scriptnotes.net.

Megana: it is a life-changing segment.

John: Megana Rao has already emailed to get links to all the things Dana talked about, because it could change her life and yours as well. So Scriptnotes Premium, it’s good stuff. Megana, thank you for a fun show.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

John: And we’re back and we’re back here with our initial guest, Dana Fox. And I asked you here because I want to talk about naps. So my daughter takes naps, my husband takes naps, I don’t take naps. But you know who takes really god naps? Dana Fox. Dana Fox, can you talk to me and Megana about naps?

Dana: Thank you so much for knowing that this is really one of my best skills. And thank you for having me on the show to talk about the fact that when you asked me to be on the show to talk about naps, I’m not joking I was literally napping. And I woke up and I saw your email saying can you come and talk about naps. And I was like, yup. And I am refreshed as hell and I can’t wait to do it because I just woke up from a nap.

Yes. So napping controversial. I have a lot of things to say about it. I think one of the things that has sort of unlocked, not to be like all what color is your parachute about it, but one of the things that has kind of unlocked my max productivity in recent years is not trying to be someone I’m not anymore. Just being super exactly who I am. And I’m a napper, John. I think you know this because I worked for you. I was your assistant and I slept basically every day, middle of the day. I would so much rather shovel food in my mouth at my desk while working and then use my lunch break to sleep, which is what I did and you were so nice to me.

You would like walk in and I’d be fast asleep on some couch and you would just quietly walk out and you were just the best boss in the entire world.

But for me it almost makes me have two full days instead of just one day where at four o’clock I’m non-functional. I’ve done a lot of research into sleep, because I’m obsessed with it, and I need a lot of it. I think part of it is burn really sort of brightly and spastically when I am awake. So, just being alive is sort of exhausting for me.

And the research I did on sleep is that you need so much less of it in a nap to feel refreshed than you actually think you do. And I think half the reason that most people don’t nap is because they’re like, oh, I’m going to get groggy, or I’m going to lie down and I’m going to feel all this pressure if I don’t sleep, then what’s going to happen, and then I’m going to lie there freaking out about not sleeping for 45 minutes and that seems like a waste.

So the way that I have sort of combatted that is that I have this app that – I can’t think of the name of it – but I have this app that I call Fat Bastard because he’s like a meditation guy who talks in like a very thick Scottish accent and sounds like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. And I started listening to it when I was pregger-tits because I was working on a TV show. I was a showrunner and I was super pregger-tits. And I was exhausted all the time. And I was like oh my god I have to sleep during the day or I’m literally going to die.

So I started listening to this sleep app that puts you to sleep for whatever number of minutes you have to sleep you sort of program into it. And it puts you to sleep and then it wakes you—

John: Like a digital tranquilizer dart. It just shoots you in the neck.

Dana: Digital tranquilizer dart. Full on Maui blow dart in the butt cheek. And you can do it pretty much any time of day. And you can have it put you to sleep like good night-night and it never wakes you up, or you can have it wake you up. And the key is for the naps is the wakeup. Because as I’ve discovered through my excessive research it’s about waking up not in a REM cycle.

If you’re in a REM cycle and you try to wake up it’s like coming out of wet concrete. If the app wakes you slowly out of the REM cycle and then wakes you up it’s as if – like so much energy. I wake up and I’m like bam. I bound out of bed. It’s incredible. And for me it’s a total game-changer. Unfortunately because I got addicted to the one where the guy was talking to me about being pregnant every time I take a nap he’s like, “Feel your baby in your belly.” And I’m like, mm, all right.

But by that point I’m already asleep so it doesn’t matter. It’s like the Scriptnotes thing. It goes ding, ding, ding and I hear that and I’m asleep.

John: That’s amazing.

Dana: I’ve listened to it so many times. It’s become totally Pavlovian.

John: Yeah, Pavlovian. So, you nap every day, is that correct?

Dana: I try to. But I would say I nap three weekday and both weekend days.

John: And what time do you go to bed? How much sleep do you get overnight?

Dana: Oh my god, John, this is where it’s going to get super weird where all of your wonderful listeners are going to be like she has a medical problem. She should go to the hospital immediately.

I get in bed at no later than 9:30 every night. And I read my book. Right now I’m reading about Ada Lovelace. It’s fascinating. I read on Kindle, which is a whole other conversation that will lead back to an aggressive John August compliment if you will allow me to.

John: All right.

Dana: Which is that I discovered on Kindle that I am dyslexic. I did not know I was dyslexic until I was reading my Kindle one night and I was like why do books make me so tired, why is reading so hard for me? How come reading has always been hard for me? And I was on Kindle and I pressed this button for the font that says Open Dyslexic and I was like I’ll just check out what this looks like. And it was literally like a superhero movie. I was like pow. And there was a light flash and everything was crazy.

And I looked at the book and I was like oh my god I just read 42 books. So I went from being a person who reads like maybe three books a year to I read a book a week now. I’m just a voracious reader and it’s all because of this font. And my sweet, sweet John August who has his incredible app, which is called Weekend Read, sent me an email saying that he put Open Dyslexic onto it so that I could have it. Because you’re nice to me and you like when I have nice things.

John: I do like when you have nice new things. So, the new Weekend Read has Open Dyslexic on it as a font choice.

Dana: Which was amazing. So anyway, back to the sleep thing. I go to bed at 9:30 but I read for about a half an hour to an hour maybe, ish. Sometimes I read for like seven seconds and then fall asleep, but mostly I’m asleep by 10:30 and I wake up at 7.

John: Wow. So you get a lot of sleep.

Dana: I like a lot of sleep. Yeah, it’s weird how much sleep I get.

John: Ricky Gervais apparently also needs 12 hours of sleep. Some people just need it.

Dana: Who does that?

John: And you get a lot done during the day. Ricky Gervais.

Dana: Oh, wonderful. I love that story. And I get a lot done all day. I mean, I don’t want to call it like mania, but I would say when I’m working I am an assassin. What’s next, OK. We’re doing this. I stand at a standing desk. I never sit down. I do yoga for 45 minutes every day Monday through Friday now which has like saved me during the pandemic so I didn’t murder my whole family.

And then when my whole family turns up dead you’re going to have to call the police because you’re going to have this on the thing. I’m totally not murdering my family. I love my family. They’re the greatest. But the pandemic was very stressful for all families, I’m sure. And I started doing yoga which completely saved me. But because it’s so hard it’s also another reason why I have to nap.

Oh, and John, can I tell you the other really embarrassing thing?

John: I want to hear it.

Dana: The first time I was on Scriptnotes I talked about breast pumps, so this is definitely not as embarrassing as that, which I’m so glad you made not embarrassing, because it shouldn’t be.

John: But we also tried to normalize breastfeeding. You know, screenwriters who breastfeed on the podcast. So Rachel Bloom breastfed while she was on the podcast. It’s fine.

Dana: It’s so sweet. I love it so much. It’s the best. These attitude-changing things actually super-duper matter, so I thank you for that.

But, no, this is sort of an embarrassing admission which is because of the yoga my back was hurting one day, so I started sleeping with a heating pad for my back. And now I don’t think I can give up the heating pad. It’s amazing.

John: I want to talk about all the things I now use to sleep and they’re all great, but I do worry if I were ever to be in an emergency situation and didn’t have all my things to sleep I just could never sleep again.

So, here is the things I need to sleep.

Dana: Tell me your stuff.

John: First off, I need the pillow between my knees.

Dana: Classic.

John: Because if my knees are touching each other, not doable. I need the white noise machine which has been a previously One Cool Thing.

Dana: Of course.

John: I’ve got to have the white noise machine.

Dana: Do you do the Rohm? May I ask are in the ‘70s style Rohm? Because that’s the best one I think.

John: Yeah. So the one I like so much is the one from the Wirecutter and it looks like a black little octagon or hexagon.

Dana: Oh, no, I don’t have that one.

John: Oh, I think the one you’re talking about, the one that’s sort of like a dimpled bell. Is that the one you’re thinking about?

Dana: You spin it and you can create hallow-ness based on how much air is coming out of it. It’s pretty dope. You would like it.

John: I know what you’re talking about. Yes. No, this one is digital, but it’s not looping, so it’s generating those noises. That’s important.

Dana: Oh nice.

John: But I started to need a Breathe Right strip, a nose strip, to keep my nose open.

Dana: Sure.

John: And at Scriptnotes producer Megana Rao’s suggestion I tried this mouth taping thing, where you tape your lips together so you can’t breathe through your mouth.

Dana: Oh my gosh. My father-in-law talks a lot about that. Does it work?

John: It works so well. Megana, are you still doing that?

Megana: I’m still doing it. And it really helps with my allergies because I think during allergy season I get stuffed up, so I breathe through my mouth so much more. And this kind of helps me I think regulate that. I don’t know exactly how the science works. But I wake up feeling better.

John: I wake up feeling so much better. So that plus my eye shade. So I need all of these things. And my melatonin. So I need all of this stuff and I sleep so well. But I need all of this stuff.

Dana: First of all, I support you and love you. And I know you enough to know that you’re not packing for anywhere without all that stuff. So I’m not worried you’re going to not have it. I can’t even imagine a scenario where you end up without it.

John: A mouth guard. Oh my god.

Dana: I was literally just going to say mouth guard. So I got a mouth guard and let me tell you guys, first of all, super sexy. My husband is like, yeah, this is great. But second of all I have a mouth guard that completely changed my life. Because I don’t know if any of your wonderful listeners have jaw clenching, but I was clenching my jaw because of stress. And I got this mouth guard that is different from all other mouth guards. It’s like the Passover, why is this different from every other night of mouth guards. And basically what it does that’s different. OK, this is what I learned. This is crazy.

Number one, the guy was like – I went to a specific dentist for grinding of your jaw. And he’s like do you drink sparkling water. I was like I’m a writer in Hollywood. I exclusively drink sparkling water. There is no other kind of liquid that goes in my body that isn’t a different flavor of La Croix. Like of course I drink, or La Croix, or however you’re supposed to say it. I call it the French La Croix because I’m fancy.

John: Yup.

Dana: So he was like, oh, you have to immediately cut that out because apparently sparkling water decreases something about your calcium and is like the enemy of jaw clenching. I was like that’s crazy. So I cut it out immediately and it was definitely helpful.

Then he was like I’m going to build you this mouth guard because 90% – he goes you know how everybody is probably telling you you’re too stressed out and you need to exercise more and you need this, and diet, and blah-blah-blah. And I said yes everybody is telling me that. And he said, well, it’s 10% of jaw grinding is that. 90% is tooth misalignment. And he’s like back in the day when you didn’t have dentists and you were like cavemen if something bad happened to your teeth your teeth would fix themselves. So you would lose a tooth and the other teeth would kind of like slide in to take care of it.

So really when your teeth get misaligned and don’t touch when you close your mouth your nighttime self is trying to fix your teeth for you. So all night long it’s going like let me fix it, let me fix it, let me fix it. So you’re grinding to try to fix the alignment of your teeth.

So the mouth guard I got, all it does is create a fake little tooth connection in the three places where my teeth aren’t touching. Boom. Literally night one the grinding stopped. I was about to have surgery for my jaw grinding because it was so crazy. It was so bad and like night one it was over, fixed.

Megana: I’m sorry. I am going through the same thing and I just had a dentist tell me that I’m going to need adult braces to fix it. And so this is…

Dana: But let’s talk later and I can tell you my guy. Because you’ve got to drive to Calabasas. Thoughts and prayers. But still he was amazing and he solved me because he said most people will tell you to get adult braces. And he said you can do that, but if you can solve it with a $400 mouth guard wouldn’t you rather do that? And I was like, yes, I would rather do that. And so, boom, solved.

Oh my god, we’ve got to sidebar after this.

Megana: Yeah. Well something else amazing I learned is that if you are jaw clenching it’s harder for you to get to REM sleep because–

Dana: 100%.

Megana: Your body is still moving and whatever muscles.

Dana: And do you know why? Thank you. Oh my god. By the way, thank you. I’ve never felt more understood by somebody. Do you know why?

Megana: No, please tell me.

Dana: Thank you so much for asking. The only time your jaw doesn’t do that kind of thing from when it’s trying to fix your teeth is in REM sleep. So it is literally trying to prevent you from going into this state that will make it so it can’t fix your teeth for you.

John: I mean, Dana Fox.

Dana: I mean, I’m not saying I’m an actual doctor.

John: Usually you come on this podcast to solve screenwriting issues, but here you are changing people’s lives, like people who have no interest in writing at all, but have teeth. People who sleep.

Dana: I have some other good advice, too. Some other things that have been really changing my life include color. Have I talked to you about color, John?

John: I love color. We did a whole episode on colors. But what are you doing with color these days?

Dana: Thank you so much. Well I have two different versions of it. Number one, when I’m writing a script I will put obviously like the storyline between this lady and that guy will be one color. Or the character will be one color. So I love to see color in a script because it ignites these different serotonin explosions in my brain. That makes me super happy.

Recently I had to pitch out an entire season of something and I was doing it over Zoom, which is sort of a different thing than being in the room, and I was trying to figure out like, OK, what’s my move. I’m like a good pitcher, but how am I going to do this differently on Zoom.

And what I did was I created this huge document which was very long, because it was obviously a whole season. And I was like how am I going to do this without seeming like I’m reading this document. So what I did is I went through and I took each idea and I did it in the consecutive rainbow colors. So red was the first idea. Orange was the next idea. A darker yellow so I could actually read it was the third. And then the fourth idea was a green. And the next idea was in blue.

And then every time I started a new episode I went back to red. So, I could like glance over with one eyeball and be like I know exactly where I am in this pitch, because I’m on the third thing I was going to say about this episode and now I’m like, OK, now there’s the next one and the next one. And I’m like, oh right, now I’m on the next episode because there’s red again.

John: I love it.

Dana: A delight.

John: Color. Color is good.

Dana: Color.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for solving all of our pitching problems, our sleep problems, our jaw problems. You are just the best. I cannot wait to have you back in Los Angeles.

Dana: Is it weird if I want 23 hours of my day to be on Scriptnotes and one hour of my day to be just my regular life? Is that weird?

John: That’s fine. That’s fine. That’s most people. Maybe get the premium episodes, get the premium feed. Get all those back episodes.

Dana: Just binge it. Just crack out on it.

John: I think your husband already has the premium feed, so he can share his URL.

Dana: Oh my god. I don’t believe that. I’d pay for it twice. I support artists. What are you talking about?

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Watch Cruella on Disney+
• Home Before Dark Season 2 on Apple TV June 11th
• WandaVision on Disney+
• Some Kind of Heaven on Hulu
• Didja see in Deadline about Timothée Chalamet To Play Willy Wonka In New Origin Tale, Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s ‘The Man Who Drew God’, ‘F9’ Star John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country, Amazon Confirms It’s Buying MGM For $8.45 Billion, Army of the Dead, Tig Notaro shot all her scenes alone.
• Dana Fox on Twitter
• Jac Schaeffer
• Lance Oppenheim on the web
• Slate’s Working podcast dialect coach Samara Bay
• You’re Wrong About Podcast – Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
• Dana’s nap app Positive Pregnancy with Andrew Johnson
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 504 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show how long should it take you to write a script and how can writers best estimate that work? We’ll try to give you an answer. We’ll also look at new guidance for writers working on features at Netflix and Amazon and follow up on child prodigies, movie theaters, and free will.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s talk about UFOs.

Craig: All right. You asked for it.

John: Let’s do it. Let’s talk about UFOs. Because I know you are a strong believer in extraterrestrial life visiting earth. And I want to hear your detailed views and I’ll try to bat those wild theories away.

Craig: That is not how it’s going to go.

John: But let’s start with a little amuse bouche. A conundrum that came up on our weekly call this week. What is the statute of limitations on spoiler warnings for movies? Craig, when is it fair to say like, OK, now you should have seen that movie so we can talk about The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club?

Craig: Sure. Well it was a little easier back in the day when there was a somewhat conventional release pattern. A movie would go into theaters. You would see it there. And then it would leave theaters and it would show up on DVD or cable or something. And my general feeling was if you didn’t see it in the theater and it was finished with its run then, you know, sorry.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the way it is. There will be spoiler issues. You know, now where movies come out the same day, I don’t know. A month? I don’t know. I don’t know.

John: Yeah. I think that there’s sort of two classes of problems. So there’s the movies that are more like TV shows because they’re coming out in different things, people can see them kind of whenever they see them. So for new movies those sort of TV rules apply. When you can talk about Mare of Easttown? I don’t know. I haven’t seen the show and I’m trying to avoid the spoilers, but I also recognize that people need to have that conversation. So there’s that.

But look back to like older movies, like The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, or Citizen Kane, I just want to argue for there’s no such thing as a spoiler because you should have seen this movie.

Craig: There is no spoiler warning on old movies. And I must admit that I don’t necessarily think revealing the twists or endings of things in fact spoils anything.

John: No.

Craig: Because that’s really not where I get my enjoyment from. I’m a weirdo I guess in that regard. I know how Fight Club ends. I love watching Fight Club. I’ll watch it again. It’s a great movie. It doesn’t matter to me that I know how it ends.

John: I will say it’s sometimes fun to watch a movie with a person who doesn’t know what’s going to happen, so you can see like, ah, ah, did you figure out what was actually happening there. So the Shyamalan movies might be a good example of that. So like my daughter probably has no idea what actually happens in The Village. I don’t know that I need to watch The Village, but I would be curious to watch The Village with her to see if she figures out what’s actually really going on in The Village.

Craig: Yeah. So to that extent it is amusing to watch other people getting fooled.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And, sure. But I feel like the panic over spoilers is – I just think it’s overblown. I mean, you know, anybody that is adapting anything, the spoiler exists. So people would worry about spoilers for Game of Thrones, but the books were there. So, you know, anybody who had read the books knew that at least in the book Ned Stark dies. And in the book there’s a Red Wedding. And a bunch of people get killed at a wedding. So what? That’s not – we’re not watching things for information and data.

John: Yeah. We’re watching them to enjoy them.

Craig: Yes. And I’m so much more interested in watching the people on screen react to what they didn’t know. That’s what’s fascinating. Not that I didn’t know it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So that’s my weird thing about spoilers. I’m not so wound up about them.

John: All right. Well we’ll have no spoilers for A Quiet Place 2, but that movie came out over Memorial Day Weekend and did so much better than people thought it could do. It made $57 million in theaters which is great. So, hooray for them. Cruella also came out and did $26.5 million. And it had its day-and-date release on Disney+ for $30 for subscribers. So, it looks like people want to see movies, which is great news.

Craig: It is. That $57 million is eye-popping, because that would have been a good weekend really at any point.

John: It’s not $100 million, but it’s still just terrific.

Craig: Sure. It’s terrific for a movie that I’m sure didn’t cost a massive amount. I think maybe helped a little bit by the fact that there’s not much else in theaters, so they occupy a ton of screens. If you wanted to see a wide release movie and you didn’t want to see a Disney film then I guess you were going to A Quiet Place. And if you did want to see a Disney film you had the day-and-date to kind of choose from.

What’s interesting financially to – and I don’t know the answer to this – is who makes more money here. So Cruella makes $26.5 million at the box office and then $30 a pop on Disney+. That’s a lot.

John: Yeah. So on Cruella, all five credited writers are previous Scriptnotes guests. And I was talking with one of the them, or texting with one of them. And that $29 for the Disney+ subscribers, the chunk you get from that is actually really good money. So, weirdly our five prior guests who worked on that movie will get more off of that than they would have off of the theatrical box office.

Craig: Well they would get nothing off the theatrical box office.

John: Nothing. You get nothing.

Craig: Correct. I mean, unless you have box office bonuses. But those have pretty much gone bye-bye over time. And, yeah, Internet sales, you know, we have a good rate. It’s basically five times the rate of the DVDs, or close.

John: Premium video-on-demand.

Craig: Yeah. So it’s – well, actually, no it’s not five times. It’s much better. The point is it’s better. It is five times. They will make good money off of that as long as the studios are fair about it and don’t attempt to argue that this primary exhibition, because they can. They can make that argument and we would make the argument that it’s not.

So interesting to see what happens there financially because we may be living in a time where this continues permanently. That most movies come out day-and-date and you have a choice. And I don’t know. I cannot predict.

John: So we also had some other big deals in the news this week. Coming off the success of this box office, it’s nice to see the Alamo Drafthouse is out of bankruptcy. There’s a lot of speculation that AMC might buy out our beloved ArcLight. So it would be lovely to see the ArcLight come back.

Craig: It’s available.

John: Hopefully AMC could run it the way the ArcLight was and not sort of the way AMCs are run. We’ll see. I don’t want ads in front of my movie. That’s really what it comes down to. More than anything else I want no ads.

Craig: Yeah. Look, if the movies are coming back, the theatrical experience is coming back, then it stands to reason that ArcLight would be profitable as it used to be. I think maybe the problem with ArcLight was they just didn’t have the financial cushion to weather the storm of this lengthy shutdown. I don’t know. But I agree with you, if AMC buys ArcLight what would be the point of buying it if you don’t let it be it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Which is I guess something that AT&T should have considered when they bought Warner Bros and HBO.

John: Yeah. I’m not even mentioning the Warner Bros/Discovery merger which has the absolute worst logo. Not since like the initial DreamWorks logo which was–

Craig: The boy on the moon?

John: The boy on the moon is fantastic. But the DreamWorks SKG, some of their initial logo-ing around that was not fantastic.

Craig: Oh, looked like it was made on like an [Amiga] against like a blue sky or something?

John: That’s what it was. The logo-ing for Warner Bros/Discovery, which I don’t understand why you’re keeping the Bros in there. It should just be Warner-Discovery makes more sense. But it looks like it was done in Word Art.

Craig: Oh good lord. Look at that.

John: Describe it for our listeners. Describe what this logo looks like.

Craig: I’m going to get in trouble as I’m an employee of this corporation. But that’s just silly.

John: I’m an employee as well.

Craig: So it is also against a weird dim blue sky with blue clouds. I don’t know why the clouds are so blue. Anyway, and then it says Warner Bros., Discovery. Discovery is underneath it. The letters are three-dimensional, sort of coming out, and they’re this fairly gaudy gold color. They have this bad reflectivity that again feels very kind of [Amiga] circa 1991.

And then underneath is a 2D line that says, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

John: With no punctuation. The “of” is just dangling there at the end.

Craig: Dangling. I don’t like it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Don’t like that.

John: So I don’t like the main Warner Bros/Discovery logo, but I especially don’t like it against that blue sky. And then the thing underneath it just looks like they stuck it in. They were in Keynote and they were like, oh, we have to find a tag line. Quick, type a tag line.

Craig: I don’t think that’s going to last. I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: I don’t think it’s going to last. I don’t think we need to worry about it.

Craig: I don’t think it’s going to last at all. I’m just looking at the Internet, because I guess the Internet was going bananas about this. I had no idea this was going on. Someone said that it looked like something that was made in Microsoft Word’s Word Art Utility. Yeesh.

John: It does.

Craig: That’s not going to last. There’s absolutely no way.

John: We don’t need to worry about that.

Craig: No, that will not last.

John: But a deal that will last is CAA sold a big chunk of Wiip. So it sold the majority stake in the production company Wiip to a South Korean studio which is great. Good for them. And this is all coming out of the WGA deal with the agencies, basically forcing the agencies to divest themselves of their production entities. And I really wondered who was going to buy Wiip or who would buy Endeavor Content, and I should have been thinking of like, of course, there’s a lot of international money that would love to have some domestic production and they’ve got money. I think those are going to be the buyers for these places.

Craig: Yeah. It’s hard to say what will happen with the larger ones. Wiip was not a big version of this. And like I had said many times in all my years as a client at CAA no one had ever even mentioned Wiip to me. I didn’t even know it was a thing. I didn’t know it existed. So they weren’t pushing it too hard back in the day.

So I don’t know how much Wiip was worth and I don’t know what the sale entailed, but I have a feeling, I could be wrong, but that maybe CAA sort of looked at this part of the settlement with the WGA as possibly a gift. Because I think what happened was WME got into this business in a massive way and everybody else sort of felt like they needed to. But didn’t necessarily commit. Yeah, I’m happy that the people that were employed by that studio, by Wiip, because there’s two Is in it, Wiip, will continue. Hopefully to be employed and they’ll continue to compensate people fairly and all the rest of that.

John: Yeah. And so Wiip I hadn’t realized made Mare of Easttown, so the second Mare of Easttown reference in this episode.

Craig: Well it worked on them. I don’t know if they made them. That’s the thing. Like I never know what these companies actually do.

John: Yeah. You never know. Did they throw in some money, or were they the studio behind it?

Craig: Were they there sort of at the beginning, kind of. I don’t know. I’m still – I don’t even know what Wiip stands for.

John: I don’t either.

Craig: Wiip. There’s two Is.

John: Too many.

Craig: One too many Is.

John: All right. Let’s do some more follow up. So two episodes back we wondered why aren’t there any child screenwriting prodigies, because obviously we have prodigies in chess and athletics and other things.

Craig: Yes.

John: We had several people write in with some good suggestions. Do you want to start with Victoria here?

Craig: Sure. So Victoria DiCapawa tweets, “In my opinion screenwriting successfully, let alone brilliantly, requires a tremendous amount of emotional literacy. It requires an extremely proactive curiosity about the emotional narrative of others and I think for younger people they’re still really figuring themselves out.

“I went to film school at 18 which was great, because it gave me the energy to do production in a way I really can’t in my mid-30s. But I also did not end up becoming a successful director the way I’d planned. It turns out no one wants to be directed by an 18-year-old.”

John: I think Victoria is making a really good point. It’s that if you’re writing movies you’re probably not writing people who are just your own age, you’re writing a whole range of people, and you have to have sort of theories of mind in terms of like why characters are doing what they’re doing and sort of how stuff works. And that just takes some time to develop and mature.

So whereas there are so many Taylor Swifts in the world and Billie Eilishes who are writing the brilliant and insightful songs, it’s a shorter thing where you’re not writing multiple characters interacting. It’s really sort of a singular voice and it’s a singular point of view. The ability to hold multiple points of view simultaneously may just be something that develops later on.

Craig: Yes. And songwriting occupies a much shorter space. So, you can make a single point and if you make your single point beautifully you’ve got yourself a good song, putting aside the musical aspect of it as well. You want obviously a good melody. But a screenplay needs to make a whole lot of points, every single scene, over and over and over. And all the scenes need to connect. And they need to reflect back on each other. It’s more complicated. It’s definitely more complicated.

John: That ties in well with what Gus writes here. Gus says, “Prodigy conducive mediums like math, music, and fine arts merely require immense talent and intuition, whereas narrative storytelling also necessitates a healthy dose of knowledge, as in knowledge gained from years of observing and consuming comparable material. A four-year-old might dictate a few brilliant lines of blank verse, for example, but would likely stumble over long form rule and structure heavy formats like sonnets.

“All that being said, feature filmmaking also has gatekeeping factors present in virtually no other medium. If a child or teenager writes an amazing screenplay that somehow makes it in to meaningful hands the response will almost certainly be, ‘You’re very talented. Keep at it. Or let me put you in touch with some reps I know,’ as opposed to, ‘We must spend millions of dollars turning this into a movie immediately,’ because that risk adverse exec would then look like a crazy person.”

Gus goes on to write that he sort of was that teenager who wrote that thing and couldn’t get any traction. But just a few years later a similar project when he was in his early 20s he could get set up and that’s how he got started as a writer. So I think he makes a good point. Your ability to write improves, but also your ability to be perceived as a writer and to do all the social aspects of screenwriting comes with age as well.

Craig: Yeah. And it does occur to me that one thing we haven’t talked about is that screenwriting is an art form that is designed for adaptation. And that in and of itself implies a certain amount of complexity. Chess is chess. Music is music. A song is a song and a painting is a painting. So a prodigy is doing the thing that is supposed to be done, and viewed, and seen.

A screenwriter is not. A screenwriter is actually imagining something and putting it in an entirely different format from what it ultimately must become. That is complicated and that may have something to do with it as well.

John: There are some examples of like fantasy novelists who got started in their teens, but even then, yes, you’re writing a very long piece of work, but you’re writing the final thing.

Craig: Right.

John: So what you’re writing doesn’t have to go through another stage in order to become the finished art form.

Craig: Precisely.

John: Peter wrote in and this is something I should have been thinking about when we first discussed it, reminding us of the tale of Riley Weston. Do you remember Riley Weston?

Craig: I do.

John: So she was a writer who was employed on Felicity, I believe. She was 18 years old and it was a big story that like, oh, this 18-year-old who is writing on Felicity which is great because she has such insight as being part of that generation. And then in fact she was not 18 years old. She was 32. And she was passing herself off as 18.

Craig: Yeah. Which then became sort of the premise of Sutton Foster’s television show Younger. I mean, they weren’t basing it on this story, but that is, you know, the idea that in a business where people are perhaps discriminated against on the basis of age, passing for younger could be valuable. But there was not an 18-year-old. And even then in that case the alleged 18-year-old was working on a staff with other writers and not solo writing a movie for instance.

John: Yeah. So like Catherine Hardwicke is 13. She was collaborating with a teenager on that. But it was collaboration.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So someone with the experience of actually making the thing could use the voice of the person who actually knew that stuff. I was also thinking back to Lena Dunham. So I first met Lena right after she did Tiny Furniture, and she was young, but I had to actually Google to figure out how old would she have been, and she was 24. So 24 years old to make a feature as good as Tiny Furniture is remarkable, but that’s not the same as being a child prodigy. And her early work, the short film she did, built up to that. But she was doing the work and learning as she was making short films which are sort of that finished product. They are the poems and songs of filmmaking. She was doing that work before she got up to her first real feature which was Tiny Furniture.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know how this happened but somewhere along the line in our country we forgot that people who are twenty-somethings are adults. We think of them still as children. But, yeah, I mean, that’s when I sold my first thing was at 24. It was not quite as good as Tiny Furniture, but certainly I could write a movie.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But I wouldn’t have been able to do it at 17. Or even at 21. That was probably about as soon as I could do it.

John: Yeah. Now that same episode we talked about free will and determinism and how it’s OK to not be a screenwriter.

Craig: Right.

John: We had a couple people write in about that including folks who had stopped the ambition to be a screenwriter. Do you want to take Sam’s question here?

Craig: Sure. Sam says, “I’m in my mid-40s and I really wanted to do screenwriting.” I like by the way, just as an aside, I like “doing screenwriting.” I like that idea. Do it.

“And I really wanted to do screenwriting. I’ve always been full of imagination and this seemed like a way to get that on paper and share it. However I’m a senior project manager, which I enjoy doing, at Microsoft with a pretty good salary and it dawned on me that trying to switch seems like maybe a stupid move. So I decided to keep it at the hobby level and make my own movie which has been great because I’ve been learning about other aspects of filmmaking. In looking back at the whole journey I realized I was more in love with the idea of screenwriting than doing the same thing day in/day out to write screenplays. I also realized there’s a difference between screenwriting, writing screenplays, and being a screenwriter, writing Hollywood screenplays.

“All that to say if you’re just looking for a way out of your current work, be careful. It’s much better to run towards something than to run away from something. Make sure you’re in love with writing and not in love with what you think writing will be like. If you’ve never done it before and you haven’t done writing as part of who you are it might not be for you.”

John: Yeah. That point about running towards versus running away is so important to keep in mind for career stuff, but relationships, and so many things in your life. Why are you making this choice? Are you making this choice because you really want that thing that’s there, or because you don’t want the thing that you have and you’re looking for any other option that’s out there?

Craig: Same thing applies even inside of the writing of screenplays. We’ve often said that you don’t want to write away from a problem. You want to write towards something you like. And Sam is pointing out that there’s a romantic view of what screenwriting is, of what a screenwriter does. We’ve seen depictions of screenwriters that even in their portrayal of the clichéd misery seem kind of weirdly attractive and romantic. None of that is correct.

John: Oh yeah. The Barton Finks. All the sort of hacks with Underwoods. Oh, I want to be part of that downtrodden class of scribes.

Craig: Correct. And they’re always smarter than everybody else and more insightful than everybody else. And they’re overlooked until they’re not. And they are underappreciated until they’re not. And none of it is correct. It’s just like everything else. You’ve got to wake up and then just work. And it’s not – it is rare that you have these moments of high drama like any of that stuff.

The grind is the deal.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the job is the grind.

John: Kara writes that she’s not a screenwriter and that’s OK. She says, “I was an unhappy lawyer and I finally paid off my loans and quit my job to explore other options right before the pandemic. Many of my plans were canceled, but I decided to take a screenwriting class. I know how you feel about those, but it’s where I learned about your podcast, and I’m glad I took it anyway.”

Craig: So now people are paying to hear about our podcast. [laughs] I’m angry.

John: You know how you find out about Scriptnotes? You have to take a class.

Craig: Ugh, so angry.

John: In order to listen to the podcast you have to take a class first. Kara says she wrote a complete screenplay using Highland2, of course. And felt like “my creative side, so long buried beneath soul-sucking contracts was reawakened. While I loved writing and still have potential projects floating around in my mind I don’t think it’s the right career path for me and like you said that’s OK. I’m now an urban gardener and trying to start our flower forming business in New York City. I still listen to your podcast every week while growing flowers on a rooftop out in Staten Island and in a parking lot in Brooklyn. Thank you for all you do and for embracing listeners like me.”

Craig: Hey, Kara, Staten Island! All right. I was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, so in many ways I’m like one of your flowers. And I think that’s great. And that’s another example of somebody that maybe was running away from something that she didn’t want to do, like dealing with contract law, and you know what? No big deal. There’s nothing wrong with taking a swing at something. And if you figure out really early that it’s not for you then you cut bait real fast and hopefully she has a little bit more passion for the flower farming business.

John: Well let’s look at what Kara did and did not do. What Kara did is she took a class and she wrote a script and she sort of saw like do I like this or do I not like this. She didn’t quit her job, move to Los Angeles to say I’m going to become a screenwriter without having written a screenplay. I would just urge everyone before making big changes to say like, hey, do I actually enjoy doing this work. Because you can then sort of – again, aspire to a thing rather than just be like I want to get out of the rut that I’m in.

Craig: Yeah. It also seems like Kara did not load this decision with a lot of emotional weight. If I fail than I am no good. I must be…I am called by the universe…you know, these things are setting you up for real trouble. Because any time you’re called by the universe to do something that very few people do the odds are that you’re not going to get there. So, just be realistic.

John: Let’s think about a hypothetical listener out there who might be listening and saying, “You know what? I’m not sure I want to keep being a screenwriter or doing the screenwriter job.” Like they may be here in Los Angeles but they’re not having a lot of success. Trying to think what good advice we’d offer him or her listening to this show right now.

I might start with the same thing that we learned from Kara is that really look at what are some other things that might be attractive to you. Rather than sort of I’m going to run away from screenwriting, or feel like I’m going to give up on screenwriting, say like what is there that is out there that might be really interesting for me to do that I could go and pursue and not be so worried about like I’m giving up screenwriting.

Craig: Yeah, step number one is to put screenwriting in its appropriate position which is a thing that some people do. But it is not the be all end all. And it is not a glorious life. It’s something that if you do it you do it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And if you had a dream of it and it didn’t work out, dream a new dream. Because if you can find something that you both enjoy and other people demand from you then you are fulfilled. You need both of them. And it’s not enough for you to love it, but for no one to want it.

I do like cooking, but if I cooked and nobody liked the food then I would maybe just cook for myself and stop dreaming of creating grand meals. It’s the same for this. And there’s no shame in it. There’s no shame.

John: Zero.

Craig: By the way, even for us, I mean, look, some people like things, some people don’t, you know, of what we do. Nobody is batting a thousand, or even remotely close to that.

John: So Garrett thinks we’re batting far below a thousand. So Garrett has a very long email he sent to us. It would be the whole podcast reading through this email, but Garrett, thank you for sending through this email. He was really focused on our discussion of free will and determinism. And so there is a school of thought that even sort of bringing up free will being an illusion and determinism is sort of culturally self-defeating. It’s bad for the individual to think through.

He writes, “Here’s what determinism does to your listeners emotionally. It grieves, deflates, and discourages. Why am I chasing this dream of becoming a screenwriter when I haven’t had a break up to this point? Maybe I’m not a chosen one after all. It’s just a new breed of Calvinism,” which I thought was actually an interesting point.

He says, “We must all live as if we do have free will.” And I think that was the point we were actually making in the podcast is that we can say that free will is an illusion, but it’s still an illusion that is important to kind of believe in. The same way we believe in consciousness, even though we don’t really understand it. Is that fair, Craig?

Craig: Yeah. I’m a little puzzled by his point. Let’s pause it for a second, Garrett. That determinism is correct. There is no free will. And when he says it grieves, deflates, and discourages, why? Just because you haven’t had it now? When you say I haven’t had a break up to this point, maybe I’m not a chosen one after all, or maybe you are and it’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s not Calvinism. We’re not suggesting – the problem with Calvinism is that Calvinism did look at outcomes and then decide based on the outcome who you were. So if you were poor, it’s very hard to stop being poor, especially in unfair societies.

So Calvinism said, well, you’re poor, you deserve it because you were born bad.

John: Well it’s your fate. It’s your place in life.

Craig: Right.

John: And don’t sort of question it.

Craig: Don’t question it.

John: It even goes back to sort of older times. Yes.

Craig: There’s nothing indicative like that about screenwriting and whether someone has bought a screenplay or not bought a screenplay. That is not the deal at all. We’re not talking about anything like that. There’s actually no valuable information that I get from the fact that I don’t believe in free will because part of my lack of belief in free will is that the illusion of free will is just as determined as everything else.

So no matter what I do I’m still making choices, because I am a determined consciousness that thinks it’s making choices. Just like I think that the sky is blue. But if I were a different animal with different eyeballs it would be a different color. Yeah, it doesn’t mean any of this. You’re reading into it and you should stop. That’s what I think. You should stop.

John: And so I do appreciate long emails, but I agree with you that, yes, I think you can fall into a trap where nothing matters because we’re all on rails and just give up because there’s no point. And I’m actually arguing the opposite of that. Acknowledging that, yes, even if we’re sort of on rails and even if we don’t have the choices that there’s no little monkey inside of us who is actually pulling the levers, who actually has free will. It’s still important that we live that way because also we’re writing characters who must live that way, too.

Craig: We have no choice.

John: It comes back to being the protagonist.

Craig: We have no choice.

John: Be the hero in your own story.

Craig: We don’t have access to the things that determine all of what’s going to happen anyway. So we have no choice. This is how we live. And this is also why I get puzzled when people say, “Well do you believe in any kind of existence after death?” And I say I don’t. And they say, “Well then what’s the point of everything?” And I say there isn’t one. But the fact that there isn’t a point doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy this whole thing tremendously.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I have things that give me joy and pleasure and there are things that are fulfilling and I have experiences and I learn and I engage. And that’s enough for me. I don’t need a purpose or a point in the long run. I don’t. There isn’t one. I think maybe he’s looking for one. I don’t know. But I’m fine with that one.

John: All right. Let’s move on in the spirit of self-advocacy and doing what we can do to look at this last week the WGA put out two articles of particular interest to screenwriters. And I thought these were great. I saw early versions of these and I think they are genuinely useful. The first is the Screen Compensation Guide for Streaming Services which looks at contracts over the last three years from WGA members for features done for Amazon and for Netflix and sort of what common threads we can find in this.

And there’s some really good news here. 90% of these deals were multi-step, so not one-step deals, with two guaranteed steps, up to five guaranteed steps. So if you’re writing for Netflix or Amazon the great precedent is you should get a multi-step deal.

Craig: Yeah. That’s startling and I’m thrilled to see that. And I would direct the attention of the conventional movie studios to this because this is something that I specifically have been beating a drum about for well over a decade. And I got to say, again, hey regular movie studios if you’re wondering partly why these other services are eating your lunch it’s because they actually have a system where things can be developed, instead of your system where they can’t.

John: Yeah. Other good news, Netflix pays more than Amazon on an average, $375,000 versus $300,000 at Amazon. And almost a quarter of these deals begin with a treatment and Netflix is more common to ask for treatments.

So, my Netflix deal didn’t have a treatment on it, but I do see that happening with other writers I talk to where they are turning in – I think Godwin was telling us this. They’re asking for a treatment before the screenplay stage. OK. If that’s what they want. If they pay you for it.

Craig: You know me. I love a treatment. I think that’s actually also terrific. If Netflix can help garner a new farm system, a new bench of new screenwriters who are trained to outline and prepare I think it actually will help – even if those individual writers abandon that practice later on, because they don’t feel they need it anymore, it is a good discipline to learn. I do think there’s great value in it.

John: So the quick explainer on pros and cons of treatments. The good thing about writing a treatment for one of these projects is theoretically you’re all on the same page about what is the movie you’re going to write. And they’re also paying you for this step. So you can resolve some of these story issues before you get into your screenplay. So your first draft of your screenplay should be closer to what they want.

The downside of treatments as an actual step is you could get stuck in treatment for a very long time, and that’s a thing we need to be mindful of and sort of have reps who can push to say, OK, let’s really go to draft. Or producers who can really say like, no, we really need to have him start writing this project.

Craig: Yeah. If they are breaking things out into steps like this then hopefully they are following the basic rules which is we pay you this, you write a treatment. You give the treatment, you have written the treatment. So, a step for a treatment does not mean a step for four treatments. It means a step for a treatment.

And the whole point is that even if there are a bunch of things that people are like, ah, I don’t know about this, you have the discussion, you take the notes. Great. Got it. Done. The job has been done. You have your own new outline that you can use in note cards or whatever for the writing of the draft. But the good news is that they’re giving all these steps.

The numbers are not great, I have to say, for the medians. They’re not awesome. Because if the median for Amazon is $300,000 and most of those are for two steps, you know, that’s down I think from what – that’s a little bit lower than the median at big studios, I would imagine. Although I’m guessing on that.

John: It’s a hard thing to compare apples to apples because there’s so few multi-step deals at studios, at conventional studios.

Craig: Right.

John: So, yes, that’s more math that we can do. But still promising. The second thing that the WGA put out this last week was Screen Deal Tips which actually covers some stuff that we talked about two episodes ago about selling projects, reacquisition, how to get back the – if you’ve done rewrites on a sale how to get that stuff back, which when you and I had that conversation I didn’t realize that there’s actually language in the MBA about reacquisition of originals.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: And reacquisition of the rewrites you’ve done on an original that you sold.

Craig: I mean, yeah, it is extremely hard to pull off. We have talked about reacquisition before. It does happen. But it is very rare. But it exists. So, yeah. Be aware of it.

John: So a couple key points to take through and we’ll put a link in the show notes to this stuff, but we talked on the show before because you cannot be assured that this movie that you’re writing for theatrical is actually going to come out theatrical, try to avoid language that so ties into the assumption of the theatrical release, like box office bonuses.

So, get this in as a deal point and don’t let this drag out to the contract stage because it could be a long time before you get your contract. So in your deal points talk about sort of like what happens if it’s theatrical, what happens if it’s streaming.

Make sure that credits bonuses, if there are credit bonuses, are tied to screenplay by and teleplay by, because there’s a possibility that this movie will be put into a streaming situation where teleplay by becomes a credit rather than screenplay by. So look for that. I know somebody who got tripped up by that.

And if it’s underlying material you don’t control, try to get stuff in your contract that gives you the right to acquire back any material you write. So if it’s based on a book and that book option lapses you have the ability to get the stuff that you’ve written out of that place, if possible.

Craig: And if you have a decent lawyer they are already on top of this. The nice thing is they all talk.

John: Yes.

Craig: So anytime somebody gets speared by an unforeseen consequence, all the lawyers chit-chat together and say red alert.

John: Oh yeah. Don’t let this happen.

Craig: Yeah. So hopefully they’re on it.

John: That sense of like it’s not clear whether this movie is going to theatrical or to streaming, just as recently as a year and a half ago I was in deals with Ken Richmond, my attorney, and was like how do we protect ourselves in this situation. And he’s like it’s all still new territory and we’re still figuring this out. So, it’s important to keep this in mind as a writer, too, that the lawyers are on this but also they’re still figuring out the best ways to handle this.

Craig: All true.

John: Yeah. All right. Here’s a great sort of framework question for us to tackle. Nathan asks, “So I just booked my first professional screenwriting job and it’s with a major studio. I’m grateful and excited but also a bit scared about one important detail. They want the first draft in ten weeks from the official start point of writing. Now I know this isn’t a particularly short professional timeframe, but it’s the shortest I’ve had to execute.

“Putting aside fears of failure, how do I budget time for the writing process with the time I’m given? What self-imposed schedule would you give yourselves with that deadline for a first draft? How much time do I give myself to break the story versus actually scripting it?”

So let’s talk about estimating time overall for a writing project and how to fit writing into a prescribed time, like the ten weeks that Nathan is given.

Craig: Yeah. It is not a short amount of time, Nathan. But it may be a short amount of time for you. Everybody has a different speed. So the question is a little bit of a trap. Some writers are faster than others. It doesn’t mean that the ones that are moving faster are worse than the ones that are moving slower, nor does it mean that the ones that are moving slower are lazier than the ones moving faster. We just sort of have speeds.

But generally speaking your speed needs to roughly be around what they’re looking at there.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: They can tell you they want the first draft in ten weeks. This is where the first job is always tough. Because nobody knows what you’re doing. You can’t say to them, look, the last one I wrote, the one that you loved so much that made $100 million at the box office opening weekend, yeah, that one took 12 weeks. You don’t have the ability to say that.

John: No.

Craig: You want to try and hit that ten weeks number, or earlier. And there are some very simple ways to budget your time.

John: Talk us through how you would budget time, Craig.

Craig: Well, first things first, like you say you want to break the story. Now, some people don’t. Some people just start writing the script, see where it goes. If you’re a break the story kind of person, sounds like you are, then you do want to give yourself a good amount of time to break it. The clearer you are with that and the more you can suss out the potential inefficiency points, those points when you’re writing where you suddenly stop and say I don’t know what to do next, and then say oh my god I realize that the last 20 pages I wrote are wrong, and then solve it, and then realize the last 30 pages are wrong. That all is the stuff that expands your time.

And if you can save yourself some of that time by planning through and fixing the problems, the big problems first early. That’s good. Sometimes you can take three weeks doing that.

John: Now, one thing I should bring up here is that if Nathan has booked this job very likely a lot of the story is actually broken because you probably had to pitch to get this job, if it’s your first professional one.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So you probably do have some of this work done. But it may be expanding that out and looking at sort of like what did you sort of like wavy hands pitch, like OK this is how I’m going to do this thing, because inevitably pitches are sort of skipping over those details. And really fleshing out how you’re going to do this. How you move from A to B to C to D. I would spend maybe a week on that. I wouldn’t spend three weeks on that. But it’s really – you’re going to have to learn what works for you.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I’ve spent four weeks on that. It depends on the nature of the particular project. But then what you pretty much get to immediately is a very simple math equation. Pages divided by days. It’s as simple as that.

Once you know, OK, I’ve got my rough outline here. I have a sense of how I’m supposed to proceed. You have an amount of days and you have an amount of pages. I personally don’t like to kill myself. I think that the writing suffers. So, you know, start by just imagining a typical five-day-week. So each week – let’s say you’ve spent two weeks breaking a story. Now eight weeks. That’s 40 days. A typical screenplay is 120 pages. Three pages a day my friend. Doesn’t seem that hard anymore, does it?

Now, I will say that three pages a day is the average. Generally speaking, for me, and I think for a lot of people, the first 30 pages you’re not necessarily writing at the same clip that you will later. The end, because it’s inevitable, and because everything has led to it, often does go faster than the beginning where so much is being set up and created. So give yourself a little bit of flexibility and expandability there.

But basically divide the days up and you’ll see like, OK, you know what, and if you hit a day where you just didn’t have it, just OK well tomorrow I need to write five pages.

John: Now, Craig, by your division there Nathan would have finished his last three pages on the day he has to turn it in. So, I would urge that Nathan give himself some buffer for like, OK, and you actually have to make sure your script makes sense and works. Give yourself permission to – if that’s a week, if that’s a few days, whatever it is, some time to actually reflect on the script and see is this actually making sense. Is this script ready to hand in?

Craig: Yes. And, again, this is also part of the function of how you function. So, if Nathan you’re the kind of person that likes to write and move forward inexorably, and John is more like that, then you might need some time at the end to go back and review and tighten up some screws here and there, fix some thingies.

I do the opposite. I kind of go back over everything. That’s the first thing I do in the day is go back over what I did yesterday and rewrite what I did yesterday. If you’re doing that, well then odds are by the time you get to the end you’ve pretty much tightened all the screws up. So you might not need as much time to go through that polishing process. It just depends on how you function.

John: And there are also writers who are very much vomit drafts, just the absolute quickest version I can get on paper is what I’ll do and then I’ll just back and refine and refine and refine. And at this point, if you’re being hired to write a studio feature, you probably have a sense of what kind of writer you are. So I think Craig and I are both talking like we are fixers along the way more than that. And so I’m ready to turn in my script shortly after finishing the last scene.

Craig: Yes.

John: But that’s not some other people.

Craig: Correct.

John: Now, looking at sort of how other stuff gets estimated, this last week I was reading this article by Jacob Kaplan Moss on software development and he was talking about how when you’re tackling a software project you look at sort of what are the small, medium, large, and extra-large areas of complexity. How certain are you that you can design these elaborate plans for these things? And I was thinking about my career as both a software developer and as a screenwriter, and a screenwriter it’s really ultimately just sort of butt in chair time that is ultimately the factor. How many pages are you getting written?

And a thing I did a lot early on in my career is I would barricade myself for five days to a week at the start. I would get a hotel room and just sit and handwrite pages until I’d broken the back of it. So I would write like 50 pages in just a few days. And when I knew that, OK, I understand this script. I’ve written all these scenes. I’ve proven to myself that I know actually how to write this script.

And in those initial scenes I would write I would not let myself go back and edit them. I would just only keep plowing forward and writing the new scenes. That’s maybe an approach that works for you. It’s not a thing I do right now, but it’s a way that you may need to think about achieving a critical mass of pages.

A thing I still do to this day is I will try to write those last scenes earlier on in the process. So I’m writing towards the middle rather than writing towards the end. That just gives me a sense of like, OK, I know I can actually finish this because I know what those last scenes are that I’m writing towards.

Craig: Yeah. Everybody goes about this in their own way. All you need to do Nathan is know your own way. Listen carefully to your own rhythm. Don’t judge it. Just accept it for what it is.

John: Yup.

Craig: And then divide days into pages. It’s as simple as that. And you come up with a number. And that number is pages per day. And you’ll get it done.

John: And it may help to promise your script to some people a little bit early. I always find that deadlines are great. And so you have a hard deadline at ten weeks. But if you had a softer deadline at eight weeks to show it to a trusted reader friend that can be great. Because that can give you the feedback that you need to sort of bring it from the it’s an OK first draft to, oh, that’s a great first draft you’re handing into the studio.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Nathan, could you write back with an update in 10 weeks to let us know what happened with the script that you turned in? We’d love to hear it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s time for Megana Rao to join us to ask some listener questions. Megana, what do you have for us this week?

Megana Rao: Hi guys. All right, Sawyer asks, “When writing an odd couple two-hander do we have to choose which of those characters will be our eyes into the world? I’m having trouble with this and could use some examples. If you take a look at say Lethal Weapon, who would you say serves as our entry to the world?”

Craig: Those are two different questions actually Sawyer. You’re asking who are our eyes into the world and then who serves as our entry into the world. But those are two different kind of things. Because sometimes you use somebody to get in there, but really the perspective of the movie sits with the other person. To be honest with you, you have to do both. You need both of them. You can’t have just one of them be the sole perspective because then the other one just becomes luggage.

John: Well, Craig, let’s think about Identity Thief. That’s an odd couple two-hander.

Craig: Sure.

John: The Jason Bateman character is our window into the world. But does the Melissa character, she still has storytelling power when Bateman is not in scenes, right?

Craig: Yeah. I mean, she gets her own introduction without him, prior to her ever meeting him or knowing him. And in fact that was actually, of any arguments that I had about the development of that, one of them was that everyone seemed to want to take that away from her or limit it. And what we had there was much less than what I wanted.

What I wanted was a much fuller exploration of who she was and why she was doing what she was doing. But both of them had – they existed independently of each other and they both had a point of view. And then really it’s about the relationship. So, the question implies that these two characters are actually two characters, when really when we watch these movies, whether they’re on television, or in a theater, what we’re actually coming to appreciate is the relationship between the two characters, meaning that’s the thing you should be servicing. Relationship. Not so much which one of them is eyes in, or which one serves as an entry.

John: Yeah. I’m working on a project that’s essentially a two-hander right now. And it is interesting how whoever we see first we tend to sort of give more credence to like oh they’re the person who is actually driving story. But in some cases it’s the wilder character who is actually creating more of the incidents, that is pushing stuff along. So, there’s always going to be a push/pull between these two characters and in theory you’re writing a story that can only exist because these two characters are together.

So, it becomes a little bit moot to say which character is really your principal character, which of the characters is the eyes into the world. It tends to be the less wild character, you can sort of relate to them more, we can sort of sit in their point of view a little bit more, but it’s not especially helpful when it comes down to really doing the scene work.

Craig: Agreed.

John: What else you got for us here?

Megana: OK. Hans asks, “A few weeks ago a producer/friend of mine asked if I would be interested in working as a writer and maybe direct one of the episodes on the TV series she’s putting together. From the conversation I assumed that it would be a paid gig where I would be joining a group of professional writers. Last week I went in on a meeting thinking that I would hear the terms and details of the project. However, the meeting was two to three hours of brainstorming on the characters and the storyline. Participants of the meeting were the producer-friend, an actor friend of hers, and myself.

“So only one writer, which was me, in the room. When I asked what the plan is for the project the producer-friend asked us to meet every week for a meeting like this for at least a few weeks. After our first brainstorming session she gave us research homework for our next meeting.”

Craig: Aw, did she?

Megana: “Is this a general process for preparing a TV series idea? What do you think I should do? I’ve written and directed a small feature film before, but I don’t have experience working on other people’s projects. I don’t want to ruin the relationship with the producer, but I also don’t want to spend too much time and energy without getting some kind of compensation.”

Craig: I swear to god if we had a nickel for every time someone said, “I don’t want to ruin the relationship with the blank.” You know who is not worried about ruining relationships? The blank. They never worry about it. They have no problem sitting there going like, “Oh you know what I’m going to do, I’m going to exploit the hell out of a friend of mine and have them work week after week on something that’s some vanity project for me and an actor. And we’re not going to even tell them if they get paid, or not. And we’ll be in charge of the whole thing. And who knows who will own what. And that’s fine. I don’t mind ruining my relationship with that writer.”

It’s so frustrating.

John: Now Hans you’re being exploited. And this is not a real thing. This is not going to become a real thing. They’re asking you to do free labor. Don’t do it. It’s not helping you. This thing will never become a thing.

So, let’s imagine a scenario where the three of you really did genuinely come up with a great idea. Like you came up with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it’s like let’s figure out what this is and then if you were sort of voluntarily spending these hours to come up with this approach for how you’re going to do this and how you’re going to make this thing that’s awesome. But that’s not what this is.

This is a producer, who maybe has credits, you don’t say, an actor who maybe has credits, we don’t know, and you, the only person who can actually write the thing. And you’re supposed to somehow be the person to make this thing come to life. No. Just stop. It’s not real. You have our permission to tell them that they need to listen to this episode. You can give them this episode and tell them they have to listen to this and say like, no, this is not an acceptable thing to be doing.

Craig: Hans, in television the person who should be in charge is definitely not the non-writing producer. And it’s definitely not the actor. Non-writing producers are incredibly important when they’re great. I appreciate the ones that I work with deeply, because they provide enormous amount of value. But they’re not ultimately in charge of the series.

So when you say this one is pulling together a series, you’re supposed to be pulling together a series. That’s the way television works. The actors, you obviously need great actors. They’re essential to the success of the work, but again also generally speaking they aren’t the people that are pulling together these series. The writer is. Because the writer is the person that is going to be generating the content and the vision over many episodes and ideally many seasons.

The bottom line is you’re getting used here.

John: Yeah. In terms of getting people together to form an idea for a TV series to pitch out, yes, you could go in for a meeting with a producer, a general meeting with a producer, and really spark, OK, let’s work on a pitch for something we can take out on the town. That does happen. That’s real and that’s true. So you go in for a meeting at Berlanti’s company or wherever and say like, OK, let’s figure out what this is we want to do and we’ll take it into the studio to pitch it. That’s real and valid.

What this is is not real and valid. This is an idea that they had and they’re looking for some good writer to work for free on this thing and see if they can get it set up. So, no, stop.

Craig: Yeah. Just the fact that you didn’t even understand how speculative this was. And be aware. If you haven’t written anything down that two to three hours of brainstorming you did, that belongs to everybody and nobody. They can just go and pitch that to somebody. Yeah, this smells bad.

Megana: Do you guys think it’s worth him asking for compensation or should he just walk away because this seems like a fishy situation?

Craig: If you have to ask then the answer is…

Megana: Got it.

Craig: No. Like if you come to someone and you’re like, “Um, can I please be paid?” And they’re like, “Oh, you know what? Yes.” That never happens. Never happens. Nah, they’ll be like, “Oh, you will be. You will be paid. When we sell this for a billion dollars.”

John: But Megana in your question I hear another important question. What should Hans actually do or say next? Because what is that conversation that he has next with this producer? And I think it’s that you say, “Listen, it was great talking with you. I’m not interested in pursuing this as a non-paid gig. And I don’t see where this is going next.” And it doesn’t have to be any more acrimonious than that, but just make it clear that you’re only looking to do paid stuff, otherwise you’re going to focus on your own stuff. That’s fair.

Craig: You could even be less forthcoming and just say, “I’m so sorry, I loved meeting you. This sounds like a good idea. But the stuff that I’m working on right now that I’m buried in is just taking up too much of my time. I didn’t quite realize the extent of the commitment here. So I apologize, I have to withdraw.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: And that’s that.

John: Nice.

Craig: God, it’s amazing how we care so much about our relationships with these people and they just don’t care about us at all.

John: Not a bit.

Craig: No.

John: Megana, thank you for these questions.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thanks guys.

Craig: We care about you, Megana.

John: We do.

Megana: Aw.

Craig: God.

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a special I saw on Netflix this last week, Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Craig: Oh yeah. People loved this.

John: It’s really good. And so Bo Burnham is the writer and director of Eighth Grade. He’s a standup comic and obviously mostly known for that and started on YouTube. This is a comedy special filmed entirely at his guest house during the pandemic. Just him. And just him setting up cameras and lights and doing stuff. And the first half of it is really funny in the way that his specials have always been funny. But it morphs into something very unusual and special. And so it’s not even like a standup special. It’s just sort of a film made by and starring only him and what he’s going through.

So just really so well done and so inventive and so remarkable. And so I recommend people check out Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Craig: Well my One Cool Thing I got from you, John, on Twitter. Megana, have you seen this? Jack Plotnick’s video Disney Made a Tiki Room?

Megana: Oh, yes, is this the one with the women and the birds?

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Yes, I also saw that on John’s Twitter and laughed so much. It’s wonderful.

Craig: It’s amazing. So there was this old television show called, what was it, the Wonderful World of Disney, which would air on whatever it was, ABC, or something. And it would always begin with Walt talking to you about, you know, whatever things they were working on or the park or something. And then some movie or show would begin.

And it looks I guess that this is from one of those. And Disney had the Tiki Room. I don’t know if it still exists. But it was not one of their better attractions. It was kind of known as the thing you would go into because it was really hot and you didn’t want to wait in line.

And he’s talking and in the background there are just four women in very ‘60s/’70s clothing working on building these animatronic birds. And Jack Plotnick sort of puts himself in all of their wardrobe, plays all of them. And through the magic of editing, and brilliant acting, like very subtle shades.

John: Really good acting.

Craig: He manages to make all those women their own person and you know them instantly. And it is brilliantly funny. It’s just so well done. And it even has its own villain. Its own unlikely villain. And it just – we know the song. We know the song.

Anyway, you’ve got to see it. It’s wonderful. Jack Plotnick is a very funny, very talented guy. Disney Made a Tiki Room.

John: So I’ve known Jack peripherally for like 20 years. I think I probably know him through Melissa McCarthy and a whole bunch of those friends. Just so talented. And obviously what we’re seeing here is not even really drag, because the character work is so specific.

Craig: No, it’s acting.

John: It’s just acting and really small subtle details. So if you like this the good news is it’s not just this video. He has equivalent things for the Plaza restaurant. And the Small World ride. And basically all the stuff that’s happening. And so he’s playing all these women who are around Walt Disney while he’s doing these things and their side conversations. It’s just so smartly done.

Craig: It really is. And like, yeah, I would watch a movie of these women together.

John: And actually very much a good match to the Bo Burnham because like he is somehow doing this all himself and is just a remarkable writer and filmmaker in addition to being such a great performer.

Craig: He’s a really good editor. I’ve got to say.

John: Yes.

Craig: Or if someone is working with him and editing, apologies, but the editing was outstanding.

John: The jokes are working because they’re cut so perfectly.

Craig: Brilliantly. Speed. Tempo. Rhythm. All of it. Lovely.

John: Good stuff. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

Craig: You know it is.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Always.

John: Our outro is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you can send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. The folder is getting a little bit thin, so we would love some more outros coming in please.

ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on UFOs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

Megana: Thanks guys.

Craig: Thanks guys.

[Bonus segment]

John: So, So Craig a lot of news about UFOs this last week. So, I’m linking to a New York Times story here. US Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects But Can’t Rule it Out Either. There’s a bunch of navy footage, including naval video footage, of navy fighter jets seeing this stuff and like we don’t know what that is, but it’s moving fast.

Craig: Why don’t they just title this People Still Can’t Prove a Negative? That’s what this article should be called. I liked it. Can’t rule it out. Yeah, of course, can’t rule anything out.

John: No. Craig, let’s break this down granularly. So these navy pilots are seeing things in person and on their screens. What do you think these unidentified flying objects they are encountering are? What are some possibilities in your head for what they’re seeing?

Craig: Possibilities are things that are very close to the cameras but through distortion appear to be far away. They could be video artifacts. They could be things that through optical illusion appear to be in different places when they’re really in one. Distortion of something. Or they could be aliens flying around in such a way as to be seen, but only by fighter jets, and only vaguely. And never landing or doing anything. Just flying around.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: So those are the choices.

John: Yeah. I have friends who have seen UFOs in person. And they’re not telling me they saw alien spacecraft. But they saw, like at a lake. A bunch of them at nighttime saw this thing that like what the hell is that. And they could not understand what it was they were seeing at a distance.

My inclination is it is something like that. It is something like how mirages form and distortions of things. Stuff that is not where it’s supposed to be. It’s understandable that there’s a real phenomenon that you’re encountering, but that does not mean that it’s an alien out there.

Craig, do you believe that there is other intelligent life in the universe?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. And do you believe that intelligent life in the universe has at any point visited earth?

Craig: No.

John: I am not so certain of that. I think it’s more plausible that an alien civilization would have visited earth at some time during our whatever billion years the earth has been around. I don’t know that they’re ever encountered our civilization or would even be curious about our civilization.

Craig: I mean, yeah, it’s possible that they stopped over, looked around, said this is a real shithole. It’s full of large lizards and plants and it’s very humid and let’s go. Because humans have been on this planet for a blink of an eye in terms of the planet’s history. Yeah, so it’s possible that they did that. In the way that we landed a rover on Mars and then we die and four billion years from now there are Martians and they’re like I wonder if anybody from another planet got here. Yeah, OK, well we did, but who cares? It was just a rover. It doesn’t matter.

But, no, I think that if you have the technology to fly across massive distances, enormous hard to comprehend distances, and bring your ships here, then you would do so with a purpose. And you certainly would not be doing this, which is just taunting pilots by zipping around weirdly and doing sort of circus aerial tricks. It just doesn’t make any sense.

John: Now, one of the things on the list of possibilities which I don’t think you included was that these actually are aircraft but they’re not aircraft that we are currently aware of. That they could be other countries’ drones, or things like that, that we’re just not aware of how they work.

Craig: Unlikely. Unlikely that other countries have built something that is so spectacularly superior to what we have that we can’t even believe our eyes. And yet still are flying it around in front of us. It’s all very, very unlikely. Doesn’t quite add up.

UFOs, particularly wonderful term for what these things are. They are unidentified flying objects which would cover alien spacecraft, bugs, dirt, drones.

John: Blimps.

Craig: Blimps. Everything.

John: Albatrosses.

Craig: Correct. So, the fact that we can’t explain what our eyes just saw, I know we want to say listen to these pilots when they’re talking, listen to how amazed they are. Well, OK, now go watch Harrison Ford see David Blaine pull a card out of a piece of fruit in his house. It’s the same face. But it doesn’t mean that it’s magic. It just means we got fooled by something. And sometimes we’re fooled by things that we can’t believe. Optical illusions alone, we’ve said many times, just the existence of optical illusions should give us enough doubt about the value of our own eyes.

John: Now, you are a skeptic at this moment. But at any point did younger Craig Mazin like UFOs? Because I remember going through a period, six, seven, eight, maybe all the way up to ten, where stuff like the Power of the Pyramids, loved it. The Bermuda Triangle. Loved all that stuff. And, yes, I outgrew it. But did you ever have that phase?

Craig: Never.

John: Never?

Craig: I never believed any of it. I never believed in god. I never believed in pyramids.

John: You never had Santa Claus.

Craig: No, I mean, I believed in the story of Santa Claus. I mean, I knew that there was a narrative. So like he existed the way that the Grinch existed. They’re characters. But I never believed in angels, demons, devils. The Bermuda Triangle is obviously nonsense. What’s the point? That’s really what would happen is I would read this and go why? Why would there be a thing there where ships go through a hole in the world and land somewhere? What’s the point?

John: Because the City of Atlantis has to be somewhere Craig.

Craig: It really doesn’t. [laughs]

John: It only makes sense that Atlantis would be in the Bermuda Triangle.

Craig: Sure. And that it would need ships to get pulled through? None of it makes sense. None of it ever added up. There is no Sasquatch. None of that crap. There’s no Loch Ness Monster. It’s all nonsense and it’s always been nonsense.

And, yes, I’m aware that I’m lumping God in with Sasquatch. But it’s all the same to me.

John: Hmm. Do you think we will find another cool mammal somewhere on earth? Like a big cool mammal?

Craig: Yeah, that is very possible. In certain remote regions we can discover. Will we discover a mammal that has never been seen before? That is unlikely to me. But will we rediscover one that we thought was extinct? I think that actually has happened a few times. I could see that happening again.

John: It has. Certainly with mammals and also with fish. I feel like the oceans are so vast and we’ve explored so little of them. I think there’s probably very interesting stuff down there that we’ve not even begun to explore.

Craig: Yes. The depths of the ocean. There are fish down there we have not yet laid eyes on.

John: Craig, if an alien spacecraft were to visit earth, let’s assume you’re president of earth. I think that’s a fair assumption. What do you do?

Craig: Oh, well, if an intelligent life form visits the planet I would treat them as visitors. And welcome them to the planet, and tell them how excited that we are that they’re here. We presume they’re here to have an exchange of ideas, cultures, learn about each other. And if they’re here to destroy us, well, I guess we’ll find out if they can. Because if they can, they will.

But I would also just wonder why. Now, of course, I’m sure that a lot of the people who are sitting around in countries that got colonized by the British were also like why? Why are you doing this? And then they’re like, oh, you need stuff that we have. So it’s possible. That’s the standard plot of the movie.

John: They’re going to use us as food or to work in your mines.

Craig: We’re not great food.

John: We’re not great food, no.

Craig: For instance, we have a lot of a certain mineral that they really, really need. It turns out you know what’s incredibly rare in the universe? The rarest element in the universe is iron. And we have all of it. Then I could see that being a huge problem. But short of that I would hope that they were just like, hey, just as we would. I mean, it seems like if we were flying around and we landed a rover on Mars and a Martian came out and said hello that we would be like, “This is amazing. Hi. Don’t watch Fox News. But look at this. Look at this. Here’s a John Lennon song.”

John: So, all right, Craig, I’m a little saddened to not believe in these UFOs, but also I get it. I understand. I don’t want to be a pessimist. I don’t think human beings in our form will ever leave the solar system. I think our bodies are just not meant to be in space that long.

Craig: The solar system is very hard to leave. Yeah, that’s really hard to leave. Just traveling to Mars would be very difficult. Grueling and lengthy journey of many, many months and quite a number of dangers. All to land on the closest planet to us.

John: Yeah. The most hospitable planet.

Craig: Correct. The closest and most hospitable. Exactly. But, yeah, getting out of the solar system. Unless we have our Star Trek First Contact moment where someone invents the hyperspace drive. Oh, I’m going to get yelled at because it’s not called that. The Hyper Warp Drive. I’m sorry.

John: Warp Drive.

Craig: C’mon guys.

John: I predict that within maybe not my lifetime but my daughter’s lifetime we might find the equivalent of a Dyson Sphere or something that’s out there that indicates like, oh, there is actually a huge engineered project out there that shows that OK there’s some other civilization out there.

Craig: My concern is that we routinely underestimate the vast nature of what is out there. That we are essentially an atom inside of an elephant. And we are imagining is there another atom like us somewhere near the tail, or by the toe. Hubble has seen quite, quite far for us. And they ain’t seen nothing yet.

John: But it’s also easy to underestimate our kind of logarithmic progress in computing power and ability to sort of look, look, look, look, look, and as it increases we might actually start to make a dent in our visible area of space.

Craig: John, you know how they say that the universe is endlessly expanding?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Doesn’t that remind you of when you’re walking around in a videogame and the background just keeps filling in on you?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know what I’m saying?

John: I do. Yeah. When there’s a little lag, a little latency. Like, oh, it’s pixilated now. It’s filling in.

Craig: There it is. The better the telescope, the more nothing it will see because this isn’t real.

John: Oh no. Getting back to that.

Craig: It’s not real. What are the odds that we’re the only, I mean, come on. We’ve been around here. We’ve got all this stuff and telescopes and things and, nope, not even one little tiny thing after all this time. It’s because this is a big show. It’s not real. Simulation.

John: Yeah. And now it’s over.

Craig: Wait, now?

John: [laughs] At least this episode of the show is over.

Craig: Oh yeah. And boy, talk about lack of free will.

John: Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you John and thank you Megana. Megana, I hope I didn’t bum you out too much.

Megana: I hate when we get to the simulation point.

Craig: Excellent.

Links:

• Alamo Drafthouse out of Bankruptcy
• Speculation that AMC may buy our beloved Arclight
• Warner Brothers Discovery Logo
• CAA Sells wiip
• Screen Compensation Guide for Streaming Services
• Screen Deal Tips
• 32 year old passes for 19 for TV contract
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss on estimating software development
• Bo Burnham’s Inside
• Jack Plotnick’s Disney Made a Tiki Room
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 500 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll revisit what we learned in our first 499 episodes with some of the folks who know it best. We welcome back Scriptnotes producers Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan McDonnell, along with longtime editor Matthew Chilelli, and our current producer, Megana Rao.

We’re going to be enlisting them to help answer listener questions, plus we’ll play a game with two Scriptnotes super fans. Craig, you love games.

Craig: And I love Scriptnotes super fans. Are there are only two Scriptnotes super fans? Or did we select them from a number of Scriptnotes super fans?

John: I put out a call on Twitter asking for like who has listened to every episode of Scriptnotes. And these are people who raised their hands and said like they listened to every episode of Scriptnotes, so we will see if they were listening carefully.

Craig: These are the most damaged of our fans.

John: And in our bonus segment for premium members we’re going to turn the tables and our producers will ask Craig and I if we remember a damn thing about what we said over these 500 episodes.

Craig: I mean, the answer is no. I’m just going to tell you right now. It’s no. I mean, well we’ll see how we do. I’m just so happy to see all of these – so we’re looking at them on Zoom. We can see their fresh faces. It’s nice. I saw a very tiny mini Friedel walk by. That was wonderful to see. And I’m also, obviously I’m happy to see Megan and always happy to see Matthew. But particularly happy to see Megana today because there was a weird Twitter rumor that she was just leaving. And I don’t know if they meant leaving the show, or leaving the world. Did you see that Megana?

Megana Rao: Oh my god.

Craig: Yeah. Like on Twitter. Someone was like, oh, it was like what will happen in the 500th episode? And one of the choices was Megana Rao leaves. And then, you know, it’s Twitter. That’s all they needed. And they were off and running.

Megana: I’m going to be here for 500 more. Sorry Twitter.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: So Stuart Friedel has our longest history. He has over 200 episodes of produced Scriptnotes. So Megana has been doing it for a good long time, but she’s got a lot of runway ahead of her if she wants to beat that. But I think the reason there could have been speculation on Twitter is because we had promised that there was going to be a big announcement in today’s show, and so we should get to the big announcement, the big news. Because for nearly 10 years Scriptnotes has only been a podcast that Craig doesn’t listen to.

Craig: Correct.

John: And soon Scriptnotes will be a book that Craig won’t read.

Craig: Right. Right. And this is wonderful. Like all of the ideas that we have on the show, I didn’t have this idea. I like to say we had ideas because technically we had them. If I and you together have ideas, and you come up with all the ideas, we had ideas. This book is one of them.

John: There’s been talk of doing a Scriptnotes book for a long time and we ended up doing a Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide a while back just because it was a way to sort of get that out there. We have transcripts going all the way back to the very start of the show, but we looked at sort of like well what if we were to just bind the transcripts and it would be like 100 volumes. There’s like no good way to do this.

Craig: Oh, I think we should have gone that way actually. I think we should have done a full 100.

John: Just take up a whole library. It should just be Scriptnotes.

Craig: Yeah. Scriptnotes Volume 78.

John: You pull that out and flip through it. Little codecs.

Craig: And I want it to look like those books that Gandalf was looking through when he was trying to figure out if the one ring was really the one ring.

John: Mm-hmm. Or the Game of Thrones libraries where the books are all chained up. That’s another way we could do it. You have to go to a place to get to the Scriptnotes information.

Craig: The Citadel, obviously.

John: The Citadel. So instead we are going to have a book that is properly edited. So Chris Sont who does our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting is doing the editing on the book. It’s going to have interviews with many of the fantastic guests we’ve had on the show. Plus sort of the best of on different topics, nicely condensed and compressed. So it will still be me and Craig talking but sort of an optimized version of us talking about all the things we talked about over these 499 episodes.

Craig: This is our 500th episode.

John: And I did not predict we’d get to here.

Craig: No, well first of all there was a while there where I didn’t think anyone was going to get to here. So, things are a little more stable out there in the world. But 500 episodes, it’s not quite 10 years of Scriptnotes, but it’s freaking close.

John: We’re getting close. Yeah. So we made a list of our previous Scriptnotes guests and there were so many here and Megana this afternoon was like, “Oh, what about Ice Cube?” I forgot there’s a bonus episode with Ice Cube that hadn’t made it onto the list. So, Craig, let’s quickly run through who our guests have been, because there were surprises here for me as well.

Craig: Oh, in terms of who we’ve had in the past?

John: Yeah. All right, so just in the Bs we have Jason Bateman, Noah Baumbach, David Benioff, Alec Berg, Rachel Bloom.

Craig: OK, then we have one C. Ice Cube. Which I don’t know if that – I guess Cube is the last name there. But we have Ben Falcone, Kevin Feige of Marvel, and we also have Dana Fox.

John: Greta Gerwig, David Goyer, Mari Heller, Lisa Joy, Mindy Kaling, Lawrence Kasdan.

Craig: I mean, that’s pretty good. Continuing with our final K, David Koepp. Lawrence Kasdan to David Koepp is strong. And then it goes to Jennifer Lee, very strong. We also have Natasha Leggero, Damon Lindelof, Riki Lindhome, Phil Lord.

John: Yeah. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was here in our little recording studio.

Craig: How about that? That was pretty awesome.

John: Kelly Marcel, a frequent guest. Of course she moved to England. Christopher Markus. Melissa McCarthy. Rob McElhenney.

Craig: Stephen McFeely, Aline Brosh McKenna, Chris McQuarrie. Just the MCs alone is impressive. Chris Miller. Chris Nee. Ashley Nicole Black.

John: Jonathan Nolan. BJ Novak. Ryan Reynolds was on the show.

Craig: Ryan Reynolds.

John: Dailyn Rodriguez. Seth Rogan. Dan Savage. Do you remember we did a Dan Savage episode?

Craig: The Dirty Episode. Of course.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And then finishing off we had Justin Simien, Malcolm Spellman, Rawson Marshall Thurber. David Wain. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Dan Weiss. And Rebel Wilson.

John: And that’s not all the guests. That’s just sort of the big names we’ve talked to over these–

Craig: Those are the ones we liked.

John: Those are the ones we liked.

Craig: No, we liked them all.

John: We liked all of them. But we’ve had a lot of other people come through here and share what they knew. So I’m excited to make a book. If you want more information about the book go to Scriptnotes.net. Basically all that you will see there is a little place for a mailing list, because we send you sample chapters/information about it.

We’re not quite sure how we’re doing it. We’d love the book to come out in 2022. We could go through a normal publisher. We could publish it ourselves. We’ll see what makes the most sense. But people have asked for the book for a while now and we’re going to try to do it.

Craig: I’m excited. I think this will be the hottest Christmas item of 2022.

John: Yeah.

Craig: 2022.

John: 2022.

Craig: 2022.

John: A safe bet for 2022.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right. So usually on this program we answer listener questions. And so our producers go through the questions and pull them and put them in the outline and we answer those questions. Today I want to flip those a bit. These are still listener questions, but you and I will ask the questions kind of of our producers. Because these are folks who are out there working in the industry and may actually know things that we don’t know about these things.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: Let’s start with a question from Sarah. Sarah writes in, “I had a question for you all about how you met and started the podcast. You sort of addressed it in a season one episode where you basically explained that you weren’t friends beforehand, but you didn’t say much else. If you covered this in a later episode I will find out soon enough, but if you did not I’d love to hear more about how this partnership came to be and how your friendship has evolved over the years.”

So, Stuart Friedel was the very first Scriptnotes producer. He was working as my assistant. Stuart, what can you tell us about the early days of Scriptnotes?

Stuart Friedel: About how you and Craig met?

John: Or just what Scriptnotes was like. Because Scriptnotes was I think just kind of a “hey I think I’m going to do a podcast” idea. I kind of remember having the notion of doing it. And, here Stuart, do this work. So talk to us about what the early episodes felt like.

Stuart: I mean, you pretty much nailed it. I remember I joined, and within maybe two or three weeks of me starting you had this idea. It may have even been like an inkling of a notion before I joined. But pretty much right away.

If you look at the number of episodes per week you can break that down and that’s almost exactly the amount of time that I worked for you. And so Craig had a blog that was not quite as active as yours.

Craig: Right.

Stuart: By the time you were talking to me about it you already knew that Craig was going to be your partner on it. I remember like drilling a hole in your desk so that we could install this microphone arm. And going to some weird, the sort of electronics shop that doesn’t exist anymore.

Craig: Fry’s.

Stuart: To get windscreens and get microphones and figure all that out.

John: Or Amitron.

Stuart: But if you listen to the early episodes, I mean, I edited them to start and you can really tell the jump in quality when Matthew joined. And also frankly if you look at episode length they started at 20 minutes and I think they pretty quickly got up to about where they are now. I think that you guys really – it became second nature pretty quickly, but there certainly is an early batch of episodes where you’re not quite the well-oiled machine yet.

And then from there, I mean, in some ways the bulk of my job for the next bunch of years was getting Scriptnotes at first edited, but then just everything in place for Matthew to do his work. Getting everything in place to upload it to the blog. And over the years it really evolved about how it went onto the blog and what the blog looked like. And that’s all technical stuff. Yeah, you had a pretty good handle on it.

John: So Matthew, let’s segue over to you. Because you took over the editing reins from originally me and then Stuart and sort of just did a much better job of it. You came to Scriptnotes kind of in a weird way, because you just started writing outros for it. So when did you find out about Scriptnotes and when did you start deciding to become more involved?

Matthew Chilelli: I found out about Scriptnotes through your blog. It was something where I went to school at Ithaca people would talk about you’ve got to check this out. It’s just a really easy way to find a quick answer if you’re trying to write a screenplay or if you have some question about moviemaking. And then I started listening to the show. And when you asked for outros somewhere around Episode 98 or so I was I guess first through the gate. And that I think was our introduction was through music, not through editing.

John: I was trying to figure it out today. I think you took over editing on Episode 152. It’s the first one I see you credited as the editor. And weirdly the job of producer and editor are kind of fungible in podcast land. So when you hear credits on a lot of podcasts you won’t hear as editor as a description because it will say produced by and that person actually was cutting the audio. Really we tried to keep it very separate here. So our producers are sort of organizing the show and getting all the material together, but you are the person who is fixing all of my mistakes and making it sound good.

Matthew: Yeah. And there were fewer and fewer of them as time goes on. I think you’ve both gotten very good at editing yourselves.

Craig: Yeah, you know, try and not stick you with too much trouble when we mess up. But am I allowed – can I answer the question also a little bit?

John: Please, please.

Craig: Just to get a little sappy for a second. Because Sarah is asking how our partnership came to be. Just because John called and said do you want to do this and I was like D’OK. Because I didn’t want to write a blog anymore. But when you ask how our friendship has evolved over the years, you’ve kind of all heard it. This is it.

This is how we became friends. It’s not like we were friends-friends when we started. We were really just like podcast partners. I don’t know how else to put that, you know. And we got to know each other through doing the show. We got to understand each other through doing the show. And we became friends by doing the show. And I really do believe that – if I may use the word “love” if I may – that love is a function of time and commitment.

And John and I are both married people, so we obviously get the value of commitment and time. And that’s I think what you hopefully have heard over almost 10 years is the function of time and commitment to each other. So, in a way John this is like our anniversary.

John: Yeah, it is like our anniversary. We were acquaintances beforehand. And we were friendly beforehand, but we weren’t really friends. And I remember on some episode I said, some early episode, we can find the transcripts, I said like, “Well, it’s not like we’re friends off mic.” I said something like that. I could hear your heart breaking there a little bit.

Craig: Oh, oh, I see.

John: It was a mean thing for me to say.

Craig: Well…

John: But also we’ve become better friends because we play Dungeons & Dragons. We do things that are not the podcast now, too, in ways we didn’t before. We were just two guys who did the podcast before.

Craig: Exactly. And I think we trust each other. When you do a show like this there’s a certain amount of trust that happens. You rely on each other and you trust each other. And that trust over time is rewarded. Sometimes with people you trust them and over time it’s punished. And that’s how you know things are bad. Your trust was punished. And that has not happened. So it’s been just a very, I mean, for me it’s been incredibly easy.

Obviously I don’t get paid. Everyone knows that. That I’m being ripped off on the daily. But, it’s very easy for me to just show up. I don’t have to do anything. You do everything. It’s so nice. It’s so nice. It’s worth the money I lose. Now I’m saying that I’m losing money, by the way.

John: Like it’s costing you. Although, it did cost you in the early days because originally we were actually hosting the files on Amazon.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And it was costing us like $200 or $300 a month, just the storage fees for it.

Craig: Yeah. But it was a nice expense because it meant people were listening. By the way, how many people listen now? Every now and then I’ll ask you. This is how clueless I am. Where are we at?

John: Megana, what’s our weekly listenership right now?

Megana: I would say weekly we have about 30,000 listeners.

Craig: Wow.

John: And our premiums are in the 3000s now.

Craig: Every time I hear a number I just say wow. It doesn’t matter what it is. Honestly, if it were 12 people. You hear like 12 people listen every week I would be like wow.

John: I will say that it’s great to see the total numbers, but when somebody who I really respect in the industry says they listen to the show that’s incredibly gratifying to me as well. When you find out you have some fans out there.

Craig: It certainly is well listened to here in town. And I don’t mean Calgary.

John: All right. Let’s go onto Brett in Los Angeles. He writes, “Your podcast really helped me after Covid destroyed my industry and I had to take a mind-numbing overnight job to pay the mortgage. Now I’m considering moving away from Los Angeles because it is just too difficult to stay afloat here with a house and a pregnant wife, while also chasing the dream of being a working writer. So my question is pre-Covid you guys have discussed the difficulties of living outside Los Angeles. But now with Zoom has that changed? What about writer rooms? Would it be impossible to be staffed if I were in Dallas or Nashville?

“I don’t have a lot of traction now, so maybe it’s a moot point. Still, I believe in my work and I worry there might never be traction if I leave.”

So, Megan and Stuart, you guys have both done a lot of work this last year on Zoom. Stuart, you’ve been in writer’s rooms. Megan, I think your WandaVision experience was mostly pre-lockdown. But what do you think about Brett’s situation and how viable would it be for Brett to be working mostly remotely? Megan, we’ll start with you. What do you think?

Megan McDonnell: I think definitely while writer’s rooms are still over Zoom I don’t see why not. I feel – and like meetings and stuff. I feel like the trick about living in LA is just making friends in LA and that’s such a big part of how you hear about stuff. I want to believe that it’s becoming more inclusive as far as where you can be living and find your way in. But I just don’t know. What do you think, Stuart?

Stuart: Yeah. I mean, we have no idea what the – first of all, how long this tail is going to be, the end of Covid, and second of all what things are going to look like as we get out, come out the other side even. But I am currently in a writer’s room with six people. Two of those people left LA when lockdown started and as far as I know don’t have plans to come back any time soon. I don’t know how right that is.

But I also know that as our show in general moves back into an office the writer’s room is the last and least urgent group to move back into an office. I think we’re probably going to stay on Zoom for the foreseeable future. I don’t see why we wouldn’t. It works really well for us.

I don’t know that it works really well for every writer’s room. I’ve heard friends that really don’t like it and they’re eager to get back into in-person in LA. So I think there’s just so many moving parts. But I think you hit the nail on the head that it’s more about getting the jobs. And it helps to be in those social circles, in those conversations in LA. Also though just being relevant and being seen like in offices. I think you make such a stronger impression when you shake somebody’s hand than you do over Zoom. And I’m kind of eager to get back into that.

I can’t say for a fact that it’s impossible, because it currently is possible. I just don’t know if any of my friends who have moved away would have gotten the jobs that they can do from far away if they weren’t in LA when they got the job in the first place.

John: Now, Megan, I know you’ve been pitching on some projects during Zoom and having to do that. How do you like that versus doing it in person? Congratulations on your Marvel movie which is about to start shooting. When you got that that was an in-person situation. But the stuff since then has been a lot of sort of Zoom stuff. And how are you finding the difference? Are you able to land those jobs doing it on Zoom?

Megan: Great question. I have not thought about not getting jobs because of Zoom. [laughs] I think that it’s nice to be in person because it’s easier to communicate excitement in person. I feel like that’s half the battle of pitching is this idea is so exciting, don’t you think? And they’re like, wow, I guess it is. I don’t know. I haven’t minded the Zoom stuff. It feels more casual or something. There’s something nice about it.

But I do think in-person is helpful, too, if you have a complicated idea that requires a lot of like – I pitched something that involved a lot of like John’s artboards. He does these boards when he’s pitching, and so I stole that. And did a lot of acting with the boards and with pieces and stuff. And if it’s like a visual thing I feel like, I don’t know, people do it over Zoom, too. I don’t know.

John: Yeah. I’ve been able to do it on Zoom, too. I think you’re right in the sense of like when you’re in those meetings when you have to get a sense of like are they really getting it, are they responding? Is this the right vibe? Or should I throw everything else out? That’s really hard to gauge on Zoom. But those initial meetings or just like “hey how are you,” happy not to do it. We said this on the podcast a bunch of times. If I never have to drive to Santa Monica in the afternoon I’ll be just delighted.

Craig: Seriously.

John: It’s a beast.

Stuart: Takes away your podcast commute time where you can really listen. I do think like assuming there is a concrete number of jobs, which I don’t think is a fair assumption, but it’s the same advantage and disadvantage as everybody else has. I have found though that anecdotally it seems like people expect a deck.

Decks I think were rising in popularity, like PowerPoint presentations precipitously even before this, but now it seems like everybody seems to want that or be doing that. So, I’ve kind of gone the opposite and for the pitch I’m doing now I have tactile maps and props and I start just looking at you and then throughout my pitch I turn my camera and there’s a map on the wall. I don’t know whether that’s been good for me or not, but at the end of the day it feels a little bit like more and more the job of a screenwriter strains towards you also have to be a PowerPoint maker and you also have to be a song and a dancer. And I think Zoom has made that even more so the case. So I’m eager to get back in a room.

John: Cool. Emily in Los Angeles wrote, “I recently brought a script to a new writer’s group I joined and it got decimated. This was the first time this group had seen any of my writing and we spent about two hours going through each scene and pretty much talking about all the reasons it sucked. I’m always open to criticism and have received constructive feedback on the script from other writing groups I’m in. But at the two-hour mark my feelings were hurt. The notes didn’t feel constructive or actionable. They felt mean-spirited and based on personal preference.

“I took a break from the script and have recently come back to it, but I can’t get their notes out of my head. Now I’m doubting every scene and choice I’ve made. It’s making me want to abandon this script forever. How do I get these notes I disagree with out of my head and get back to writing the movie I want to make?”

So Megan and Megana, you guys have the most experience of anyone on this call in writers groups and sort of like groups of writers who are coming together voluntarily to talk over their work. So first let me start with it sounded like something went wrong with this writers group. What you diagnose what’s happening here? Megana, why don’t we start with you – what’s your reaction to what Emily is experiencing?

Megana: It kind of sounds like maybe there was somebody who had a bad vibe and everybody jumped on. And maybe the negativity was infectious. Something that I’ve learned through writers groups is I think they should be like your midwives of your story, like very supportive and coaching you along the way. And I’m very lucky to have that in my writers groups which have included Megan who is awesome.

I think the other thing is like whenever I get really just harsh, horrible feedback I usually come to the conclusion weeks later that the person is actually just not the right audience for this material. And I’ve also found that it’s usually coming from someplace of insecurity.

For Emily I would advise you like this is not about you, or your script. It sounds like this is a weird group dynamic thing and maybe you should find a new writers group.

Craig: Mmm.

John: Megan, if this were happening in a group that you were leading would you have tried to – is there a way to sort of stop that from happening? Is there a way to head that off with the pass?

Megan: I agree that sometimes it can get negative. And it’s easy to just find good things about it to say, even if it’s just to like recalibrate the tone of the room. You can always find something cool that’s working, or that’s good, or that is interesting. Or ask questions. Like, wow, this choice, this is a choice. What was that about? And then that can be helpful.

I think for being a writers group participant I think part of it is also so much like, OK, what is this writer going for and how do I help them get there instead of how do I make this the script that I would have written.

Craig: I have umbrage. I have so much umbrage over this.

John: Craig, go for it.

Craig: I think that Megan and Megana are showing how lovely they are, and just how instinctively nice and empathetic they are. But I am instinctively not. And I think that regardless of what Emily wrote, maybe what Emily wrote was bad. It happens. Sometimes you write bad things. But two hours of kicking around something like that? Two hours? That’s toxic.

And that point I worry about the writers group dynamic where everybody is just using feedback to puff themselves up. They’re just kicking somebody because they feel important. It makes them feel like they’re in the business or something. I don’t know what it is.

I went to one writers group once, many, many, many, many years ago. And I left and thought I will never, ever, ever go back to that group again because it just felt like somehow this group had organized itself into like, you know, there’s like the alpha personality that is like everyone just agrees that person is the best. Like in acting classes everyone just knows that person is the best. They’re not. They’re not the best. They’re just the most whatever. You know?

So, Emily, I would say if you’re in a writing group and they spent two hours going through every scene and talking about all the reasons it sucks that’s not a good writing group. That’s not a writing group. I don’t really know what the point is.

It’s hard to write things. And the fact that you felt like you’re doubting every scene and choice you made, of course you are. I would. I don’t think I would be able to come back to that script. I would feel so bad. We are emotional creatures and to be damaged like that for two – you say at the two-hour mark my feelings were hurt and I’m almost like at the two-minute mark I’m sure your feelings were hurt.

I mean, for two hours? What’s wrong with those people? How could the notes be constructive or actionable after two hours? I would run. I would run from that group.

John: Now, do you guys have any suggestions for, like ground rules for a writers group. Do you guys talk at the outset like this is how we’re going to do things? I see some nodding there. So Megana what are some ground rules you’d like to have?

Megana: Sure. When we first start meeting with a writers group I feel like we talk about how we’re doing it for fun and to encourage each other. And just constructive feedback. So if there’s something you disagree with, like Megan said, asking questions, bringing it up as this is a choice that you made, where were you going with this, so that you can give them the benefit of the doubt if something is not working for you.

But we try pretty hard to just set some ground rules that negativity or criticism that is not actionable, please do not bring that into the writers group.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Megana: I really appreciate when people, because you guys said it in the notes meeting with execs that you don’t really like pitches, but I love whenever somebody is giving me a note if they just pitch, so I get a better sense of what they’re talking about. I feel like it helps me get momentum.

Craig: Well it’s certainly better than just kicking something for two hours. Sometimes when I read things I really only have a negative criticism. And the negative criticism is “this is bad.” You know, now I can dress up bad nicely by saying, “It just feels like none of the characters seem real to me. The dialogue isn’t feeling real and it’s not quite sounding like the way people talk.” That takes ten seconds. What is the point of going on and on about it? That’s the part that I don’t understand.

I don’t recognize the value of that at all.

Megana: Two hours seems ludicrous to be spending on one person’s script.

Megan: Yeah. In any case, like that’s so long to be talking about one person in the group’s script.

Craig: It’s long to be talking about anything. You know? It’s so hard to talk about anything for two hours, but much less – and you know the person is sitting there and you’re like everybody – somebody had to get up and pee and come back and continue criticizing her. That’s too long.

John: It is.

Megan: I also can see, sometimes if that’s the case where maybe you don’t like a script and maybe it’s just generally not appreciated in the group, then sometimes you can be like, OK, pitch us the idea and then you can kind of get a sense of like, OK, what is exciting to you about this script? And that can be helpful in reframing what notes you give.

Stuart: Yeah, if you have two hours of micro notes then you should be giving five minutes of macro notes.

Craig: Correct. And you can’t have two hours of micro notes. You can’t. You can’t. It’s outrageous.

John: Yeah. If you’re producing this movie and it’s going into production and you have to sort of do it last thing. I imagine you’ve had two-hour meetings with Lindsay Doran.

Craig: I’ve had two-hour meetings with Lindsay Doran about two pages.

John: Yes.

Craig: But they were these conversations that were predicated on the fact that she was happy. And I was happy. And so the question wasn’t why is this bad. The question was well what if, or OK, here’s a thought. And so it was creative and constructive in the best way. But, OK, now here’s the problem with this scene. Because you know every time they turn the page she was like, “OK, we got over that.” And then they’re like, “OK, now let’s start why we hate this new season. And it’s like, “Oh god.”

And it never stopped. I just want to hug Emily and buy her lunch.

John: Craig, do you want to ask the question here from Austin?

Craig: Here we go. Austin asks, or says, “I had a realization about myself and my writing the other day. I don’t write the people in my life into my work. I realized this the other day after having a disagreement with a friend. I was angry with the person and I began to really analyze why I thought they were acting the way they were. In that moment of analysis I realized that even though I’m an observant person I’m never endeavored to use the people closest to me, even people I dislike, as characters in fiction. I sat with that thought for a little while and asked myself even if I thought I could. And the answer I felt coming back was a resounding no.

“It felt like the betrayal of an intimacy maybe. I’m not totally sure. I come from a background in nonfiction in the social sciences, so observing and presenting the lives of others isn’t new to me. But fictionalizing them for my own work feels odd. I was just curious if this is an issue you,” I guess he meant John, “or Craig ever deal with.” Or you, Godwin. “Or if using individuals in your own life as the bases for characters is something that comes totally natural to both of you? Am I missing a major tool in my writing by not doing this? Do you have any suggestions on how to work on this?”

Godwin, boiling all that down, what’s your feeling about taking the people you know in your real life and using them as inspiration for the characters in the work you write?

Godwin Jabangwe: I think it’s a great thing to do. What I would suggest is to combine three or four different people into one. Pick what you need from that one person and then you build a character. Don’t make a facsimile copy of that person. So if you have like three or four people that you know, or you want one specific thing, then you take that one specific thing and then you build a whole other character that’s not a direct mirror reflection of that person. I think that’s how I would go about that.

John: Megana, I was also thinking about you because having read your scripts you are very specifically portraying a kind of, because of your history, people I feel like you know very specifically. Are any of those people based on specific people in your own life? Do you feel like you’re asking permission? Are you sort of taking them in? What’s your relationship to some of the characters you’re portraying in your scripts?

Megana: That’s a great point. I feel most comfortable taking from my own life and sort of making fun of things that I personally have done. And if anything is inspired by – like I have one script inspired by a bunch of Indian aunties that I grew up with. And that I feel like I am doing with so much love and it’s not exact things that they’re saying.

But I had a friend who actually wrote a script with dialogue that we had had together lifted.

Craig: Ooh.

Megana: And, yeah, I’m curious to hear your guy’s thoughts.

Craig: What about you, John? Do you do this? Is it part of your tool box?

John: I do to some degree. And so I was even just this morning on a Zoom and I was thinking back to an early script I’d done that got made and it was like, oh yeah, I wouldn’t want to say that character is based on this real life person, but it was important that I actually knew that this person could exist. It was sort of an extreme character. And it’s like, oh no, no, no, there’s a real person who is that person who can do those things. And so I think it’s important that you should be able to imagine somebody in real life being those characters. So if you don’t even have the exact – it’s not based on one person that that person could exist.

This comedy that I’m doing right now I’m writing for some very specific actors with very specific voices knowing that we may not get those actors. But I know my sense will be at least one person in that role. And so then if it makes sense in the script with that person it can make sense with other people, too. So that’s the kind of appropriation of not real people, but actors you’re sort of casting in your movie at the start.

Craig: So, Austin, I think what you’re hearing is that everyone is different. And some people do it and some people don’t. And you start with a realization about yourself. I think that’s good enough. You can stop right there. You don’t write those people into your life and are you missing a major tool in your writing? I don’t think so. Because you don’t instinctively feel like you should do it.

I don’t do it. I know that. I never do it. Not out of moral reasons. It’s just not the way my mind works. I tend to daydream and you know like in your dreams there are other people. And those other people say things. And they’re not you. And you don’t know what they’re going to say before they say them, but they all came out of your brain, because you’re dreaming it. So we can do it. So I just try and do that when I’m awake. I do a lot of daydreaming imagining people and what they would do, and think, and feel. And putting myself in their shoes. And that’s how I do it. Everybody is different.

I would – trust your gut on this. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, you’re not missing out.

John: So we have one last question on the Workflowy here about open writing assignment and I’m going to actually just skip the question and just ask the folks on this Zoom about their experience with open writing assignments over the last few years. Because you guys have all pursued them. And so I think I might start with Godwin. We also call Etai. So, it’s confusing we’re calling Godwin Etai. We call him both.

Godwin, what’s been your experience pursuing projects that are out there in the world over the last couple of years? How much prep are you doing when you’re going out to try to land one of those jobs? What does it feel like?

Godwin: It’s a lot of work. And most times it’s frustration because it doesn’t go your way. I’ve had one where I prepared a pitch and by the time I went to the meeting to pitch and I got there and they told me that they weren’t doing the thing anymore. Because Disney had bought…

Yeah, like they didn’t bother to tell me all day. And I drove all the way to Burbank. And they’re like, “Oh, you’re here. We should let you know that we’re now longer doing this thing anymore.” So, you know, it’s like that. And then there’s some way you learn to pick the ones that you actually want to do, but in the beginning you’re just going for everything, because you’re like, ooh, I really want to do this.

And so over time I’ve learned that sometimes it’s OK to say I’ll pass on this. There’s nothing in it that I can give to the story. So, but then that takes time and a little getting to know – you will find one that works for you eventually. So, yeah, that’s been my experience. It’s a lot of frustration.

John: Megan, you’ve pitched on these kind of projects, too. How do you decide when something is something you’re really pursuing versus you know what that’s a fishing expedition? I’m not going to try to get that one.

Megan: I think upon reading whatever it is, an adaptation or whatever, I feel like there’s a pretty quick thing of like, ooh, this is something I’m interested in. This is something that excites me. And I feel like you got to have that kind of right away. And maybe not. Because if you do get it, you’re going to be on it for a long time. And if you’re not excited about the beginning, like you’re going to do a better job on something that you are genuinely excited about.

John: Yeah. Stuart? What’s your feeling on OWAs?

Stuart: Yeah, I mean, by the time I am pitching I have to kind of know the whole thing. The difference between prepping for a pitch and writing the project is one more step. So, the work that goes into that pitch is considerable. And I’ve had the same experience as Godwin where like you do weeks of work on something, you love it, and then you find out they killed the project, or somebody else already got the job. Or you go in and you do the pitch, you think you nailed it, you don’t hear anything for three months, and then a Deadline article comes out about some mega celebrity has been signed on and it’s their pet project.

And these days I would say I’m a little bit more protective of my time. But you have to love it. You have to want to do it. You hear about it and immediately it’s like clear my schedule, I’m so jazzed. And otherwise I’m probably not doing it.

John: Yeah. My organizing principle for 2021 has been hell yeah or no. That basically everything has to fall into one category. Either I’m absolutely so excited to do it, or nah. And to say no more often.

Craig: What about Matthew? He’s so quiet and I want to know what he thinks.

Matthew: I haven’t done any open writing assignments, but I’ve done a comparable thing for music a lot. And it is kind of funny, I suppose, how similar those two things really are. Because you’re competing with a lot of other people and there’s so much work that goes into something that you’re probably not going to get. And I’ve had such more rewarding experiences when, you know, you just know that you’re the one. You’re the one they’re going with from the beginning, which is like, of course – of course that would be more rewarding. But it’s tough to go up against a bunch of other people because you don’t know what everyone else is submitting.

And I imagine that’s probably what open writing assignments are like, too. It’s like you’re fighting against this imaginary foe that’s making all the right moves.

Craig: Well, it always struck me about open writing assignments that the only reason they were open writing assignments is because the people who were offering it also didn’t know. I mean, that’s why you do that. Right? They all sit around a room and go, what, who? Who should do this? What kind of person? I don’t know. Well, I guess we’ll just put an ad out in the paper. And everybody at CAA and UTA and WME and all that stuff will just start sending people over.

And so you’re already in a bit of a hole because you’re working hard to try and imagine something, but you’re talking to people who don’t quite know what it is they want either.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the trick of it.

Stuart: And there’s no feedback usually at the end of the tunnel.

Craig: Correct.

Stuart: Was I the worst you’ve ever heard? Or was I like a coin flip away from getting this?

Craig: They have no time for it. And I know that for myself when we go through casting I would love to be able to call every single person and talk through all of that stuff. I just can’t. I can’t do it. And I imagine that if they did nine out of ten writers would receive that information gracefully, and one would throw a tantrum and then go on Twitter. And so it kind of makes sense.

John: All right, so it is time for a game show segment. When we do our live shows we always love doing our game shows. So this is not a normal live show, but we have a small audience. We have a small audience of former Scriptnotes producers. So let’s welcome on two self-identified super fans who have listened to every episode of Scriptnotes to see how much they actually remember about what we said on the show. Probably more than we do.

First let’s welcome Kate Hadley from Los Angeles. Welcome Kate.

Craig: Welcome Kate.

Kate Hadley: Hi.

Craig: Hi.

John: And Dion Bardeau – where are you living right now Dion?

Dion Bardeau: I live in Los Angeles as well.

John: All right. So we are all LA ringers. Sort of like how Jeopardy! this season has all been LA folks.

Craig: Yup.

John: We’re pulling on very local. We could go anywhere, but we are focusing on our LA folks. When did you start listening to the show, Kate Hadley?

Kate: I started listening in October 2011. So Episode 7, but I listened to all the back episodes in an afternoon.

John: Wow.

Craig: Wow. That’s awesome.

John: And Dion when did you start listening to the show?

Dion: So I started, it was in 2012, and it was maybe around Episode 40. It was the episode where you guys talked about how do you get an agent. And then I went back and listened to all the previous ones. But that’s where I started.

Craig: I’m still – I’ve listened to maybe three. [laughs] I’ve heard about three of these. They were good. They were all right.

Dion: You’re missing out, man.

Craig: I know. Believe me, I know. On everything.

John: All right. So we have cameras turned on. We’re going to ask a question. If you know the answer raise your hand and then we’ll call on you. And so we’ll try to be fair judges here, but we also have the other producers here who can be our jury if it comes down to it.

Craig: Do I get to also try and answer? Because I will not win.

John: Well, you can also see the answers though in the Workflowy though. So that’s not fair.

Craig: Oh, tht would be cheating.

John: That would be cheating. Craig, why don’t you ask the first question?

Craig: OK, here we go, guys. Are you ready?

Dion: Let’s do it. Good luck, Kate.

Craig: Good luck to both of you.

Kate: Good luck to you as well.

Craig: So you’re just going to raise your hand and John will call whichever one goes first. Here we go. And it’s not like Jeopardy! You don’t get locked out. But you don’t hear the rest of the question. Over the years we’ve done 15 deep dive episodes where we spend the entire show discussing one movie. What was the first movie to receive this treatment?

John: Kate.

Kate: I believe it was The Little Mermaid.

John: That is not correct. Dion?

Dion: I’m going to go with Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Craig: Raiders of the Lost Ark is correct. That is one point for Dion.

Kate. That was my other answer.

Craig: Of course it was. I think I would have gotten that right. .

Kate: That and Ghost.

Craig: I think I would have gotten that right. I think. All right. John, should I just keep–

John: Honestly, keep being the host. This is your Jeopardy! hosting try out.

Craig: This is my audition for Jeopardy! OK. Here we go.

Dion: Well, folks, this has been a good show. I’ll just take the W right there.

Craig: No sir. We are still in the first inning. Here we go. While the show has many amazing guests, the visitor first appeared by name in Episode 136 and was asked by John never to return. Guess if you have to guess. I have a guess. OK, can I do my guess?

John: Yeah.

Craig: My guess is Sexy Craig.

John: Sexy Craig is correct.

Craig: Yes, Sexy Craig. Yes!

John: So Sexy Craig’s first appearance was in Episode 135 by a voice. My name is John August, my name is Craig Mazin. And that was disturbing. But the next episode you labeled that voice Sexy Craig.

Craig: And Sexy Craig – the thing is he really doesn’t show up much.

Dion: I know. I can’t imagine a world without Sexy Craig.

Craig: Neither can I, exactly. Thank you.

John: I can and it’s glorious.

Craig: Yeah, John lives in that world.

John: It gets so uncomfortable. All right.

Craig: So it’s still 1-0. Here we go. Question number three. Scriptnotes Episode 235 was a live show featuring Jason Bateman and creators of Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Weiss and Benioff were last minute replacements. Who was supposed to be the guest? That’s a hard one. That’s a hard one.

John: We’re stumping the super fans. I like this.

Craig: Yeah. This is great. Stumping the supers. I think we’re going to go–

John: Actually, no, we’ll go to the producers. Stuart Friedel, tell us the answer.

Stuart: I think I know the answer. I might be wrong. Is it Lawrence Kasdan?

Craig: It was Lawrence Kasdan.

Kate: I would have never gotten that.

Craig: He was not feeling well.

Kate: Like me, right now.

Craig: Scrambled up and got ourselves the GoT guys. All right, here we go. Question number four. Let’s get some redemption guys. In Scriptnotes 187 Live from New York John and Craig both sing songs. Who was their guest for that show? I was told these were super fans. [laughs]

Dion: I think now, right? Kate, what are we doing?

Kate: I’ve listened to every episode exactly once.

Dion: Every episode.

Kate: Once.

Craig: I know. Well there you go. By the way, I’ve got to tell you something. I don’t know who the guest was. I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t. I remember that Andrew Lippa was there, but he wasn’t our guest-guest was he?

John: He was our guest.

Craig: Oh, he was the guest.

John: That’s the correct answer. Yeah.

Craig: Oh, Andrew Lippa. OK, great. I thought he was sort of like, oh that’s right, Andrew Lippa.

John: The bonus would be if you could figure out what songs we actually sang. Craig, do you remember what song you sang?

Craig: Yes I do. I sang What More Can I Say from Falsetto Land.

John: Yeah. And I sang a song from Yank, which was a musical that never transferred to Broadway.

Craig: That was it. That was my big Broadway debut and final performance.

Kate: We’re going to get ourselves cut from this episode.

Dion: Yeah.

Craig: No, this one, one of you is going to get for sure. Here we go. Of course, the most famous Scriptnotes music is the opening jingle. How many notes are in it?

John: Kate.

Kate: Five.

Craig: Yes. I did the same thing you did. We all did the same thing. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Five is the answer. So I believe we are tied. We are tied at one a piece, which is exactly the way I like things. Here we go. In Episode 212 writer-director Mari Heller talks about her experience making Diary of a Teenage Girl. Craig said her film was better than this film written by Heller’s husband.

John: Dion.

Craig: Yes.

Dion: The Andy Samberg movie. I can’t think of it. Kate for the steal?

Kate: Hey Siri…I have no idea.

Craig: I’m pretty sure that I said it was better than MacGruber.

Dion: Ah, MacGruber.

Craig: By Jorma Taccone and MacGruber is actually the second best movie ever made. Diary of a Teenage Girl apparently was the best movie. OK, here we go. Speaking of movie power couples in 2020 John hosted separate deep dive episodes with each half of this duo, each of whom had made movies in awards contention. So we’re looking for – Dion.

Dion: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.

Craig: Yes!

John: Correct.

Craig: That’s right. For Little Women and for Marriage Story.

Dion: That’s right.

Craig: So it’s 2-1. Dion with two. Kate with one.

Kate: Oh, it’s 2-1. I thought it was like 3-1.

Craig: No, it’s 2-1.

Kate: Cool, so I can still—

John: You can still win this.

Dion: You’re stealing it, Kate.

Craig: Absolutely. Everyone is in it. Here’s another marriage question. John and Craig have mentioned their spouses many times over the 500 episodes. What are their names?

John: Kate.

Kate: Mike, Melissa.

Craig: Yes! And we are tied at 2-2 and here’s the best part, there’s only one question left.

Dion: Here we go.

Kate: Oh dear god.

Craig: How can you not be romantic about baseball? Here we go. Oh my god, this is so hard. [laughs] Oh my god. I don’t know the answer to this. What are John and Craig’s Myers-Briggs personality types? Bonus points if you can answer with John’s newest personality test result too.

Dion: Oh god.

Craig: This is brutal. I’m with you. I’m with both of you on this.

Kate: I’m going to have to have to just guess.

John: It’s worth a guess. Worth a guess.

Craig: Listen, it’s the final shot. The clock is counting down. Go for it.

Kate: INFP and can I remember, I think it’s the other one.

Craig: Yeah, I think at this point this is just a fishing expedition.

Kate: Oh, it is. It’s completely–

John: It’s like the open writing assignment of personality types.

Craig: The one you mentioned wasn’t one of them. I think we can say it ain’t happening here.

Kate: Oh no. It’s not happening.

Craig: Apparently both of us were the same Myers-Briggs personality type, which I didn’t realize. We are both ENTJ. Otherwise known as the mad lunatic. But however in Episode 437 John revealed that he had evolved. I don’t like evolved because that makes it seem like you got better than me. You devolved into an ENFP. Oh, you actually flipped two of the things there. So, you’ve changed quite a bit.

Here’s the good news, folks. Because it’s a tie you’re both winners.

John: You’re both winners. So thank you for listening to all those episodes and to give you a chance to listen back to all those episodes we are giving you free lifetime memberships to Scriptnotes Premium.

Dion: How about that? That’s awesome.

Craig: It’s real money.

Dion: That’s fantastic.

Craig: And it’s not costing me anything, I know that much. [laughs]

John: So thank you both very much for listening to the show. It really means a tremendous amount. And thank you for coming on the show and playing this dumb game with us.

Craig: We are nothing without you.

Kate: Thank you.

Dion: Thank you for having me.

Kate: It was wonderful.

Dion: Thank you guys so much. You guys were Master Class before Master Class. You have no idea. Well, you probably do have some idea. I’m sure you’ve helped Kate. You’ve definitely helped me and thousands of others. So thank you. Really appreciate it fellas.

Craig: Thank you, Dion. That’s so nice.

John: Thank you, Dion.

Kate: You guys are my One Cool Thing.

Dion: There you go. Always and forever.

Craig: Thank you, Kate.

Dion: Appreciate you guys.

Craig: Thank you. All right. Keep listening guys. Thank you.

Dion: I will. Take care guys.

Kate: Bye.

Craig: See you later. That was exciting.

John: That was nice.

Craig: That went right down to the wire there, you know, because they were tied and we were going to that last question. I don’t know, I felt the tension of championship on the line. Those were hard questions. Who came up with those?

John: So I came up with most of them. Megana threw in the Myers-Briggs things at the end. And I don’t know if I would have gotten that one right.

Megana: I really thought that was going to be super easy. You guys are both ENTJs.

Craig: I don’t even know if I would have remembered my own.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Wow. You know what though? That’s what you want for the last. That’s what you want a tiebreaker to be. It’s got to be a real skull-cracker, you know.

John: I really thought they would have gotten the Lawrence Kasdan. That was a big deal and then he actually came back on in Episode 247 to sort of make good on–

Craig: That one felt like more of a gettable one. But you know the one that I was impressed with was Dion getting Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. That was pretty good.

John: Because those were episodes you didn’t listen to.

Craig: I don’t listen to any of the episodes. You could just say those like all 100, all 499 before this.

Megana: Also, if you guys thought those were hard, just wait for the premium segment because I wrote all of those.

Craig: Oh boy.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Here we go.

John: Before we get to the premium segment Kate did a great job of setting up our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing this week – I may have had it on a previous episode, but it’s so good I want to make sure everybody knows about it. If you are not sleeping with a white noise machine you should try sleeping with a white noise machine. It genuinely will help you.

And, yes, you can do it off your phone but then it just loops and it’s not as good. The best white noise machine is this Electro-Fan White Noise Machine. It is a little electronic device you plug in. Wirecutter ranks it the best. It is genuinely terrific. So good that we actually travel with it rather than using the one on our phone.

So you probably need a white noise machine. You should try it. It just shuts out the outside world completely. So the best one is this little $49 white noise machine. You should get it.

Craig: OK, great. I do use – I use an app on the iPad, I admit it. But I also use ear plugs, so I think the fancier white noise machine value would be lost on me. Also, the nice thing about the app is it gives you pink noise, white noise, brown noise, purple noise.

John: This gives you a choice of sort of what kind of sound you want.

Craig: I like the brown noise. That’s my jam. Here’s my One Cool Thing. I don’t know if we have this in the United States, but I’m here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We’re working on The Last of Us. We have a fairly large facility for the production. And we have all sorts of people working on it. And every day there is lunch. And the old way of doing things was somebody would come around, typically a poor, aggrieved PA to say, “Oh, we’re taking lunch orders. What would you like? We’re ordering from these two places. Here’s a menu.” And everyone is like, what, I don’t know, eh. And it takes forever.

And then you go and something went wrong. And everyone has got like a million little changes. So what they do here is they use something called Hunger Hub. And the night before you go on and it shows you there are two restaurant choices and there are a bunch of menu options for each restaurant. And you pick it. Pick it that night. And then it all just happens magically. And I was like what a smart way to streamline a miserable process.

So when we all get back to our writing rooms and real life, once Covid is gone, maybe some enterprising service if there isn’t one already will be doing something like this in the US. Hunger Hub.

John: So like Mythic Quest doesn’t do that for its lunch orders?

Craig: No, I mean, I haven’t been in the room, you know, physically for Mythic Quest since well over a year ago. But, no, it would be the–

John: Old-fashioned way.

Craig: Pass around a sheet and write down what you want from the menu of the thing, and the thing, and the thing.

John: Progress. Canadian progress.

Craig: Progress. Or as we say in Canada, progress.

John: Progress. So if you are a person who has listened to many of the back episodes we would love to have your help. We are coming up with the 500 Episode Listener Guide, so this is an update to our 300 Episode Listener Guide. Megana is actively reading through people’s submissions for what they think are the best episodes, the ones you cannot miss.

She also spearheaded this week this drive to get an index of all the episodes, which has been so helpful, so we can see actually what episodes have Three Page Challenges, or How Would This Be a Movie, who our guests were. So if you are looking at which episodes should I go back and listen to, or I really want the craft episodes, this index will be available to you as well. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to that. But also tell us what you think should be in the Listeners’ Guide. So you go to johnaugust.com/guide and there’s a little form you can fill out to tell us which episodes you think people should really listen to. So do that if you could.

And that is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Dustin Box, Nima Yousefi, Chris Sont, and Amy August for their help this week.

Craig: Oh, Amy August.

John: Amy August helped with the index.

Craig: Oh, are you paying her?

John: I am paying her. I pay people.

Craig: Everybody gets paid.

John: Here’s how this came to be. Mike and I went out to a restaurant for the first time, like an actual restaurant to have our anniversary dinner.

Craig: Nice.

John: And it’s owned by this chef whose son was in preschool with Amy. And when Mike went to the bathroom he’s like oh my god I saw Bruno was working back, he was washing dishes in the kitchen. And I was like, oh, the kitchen of our family business is really tedious data entry. And so Amy did the tedious data entry.

Craig: Nice!

John: Yeah.

Craig: All right. I hope you paid her well.

John: I paid her minimum wage. I paid her $15 an hour.

Craig: OK. I mean, we did have a series of episodes about how we were aiming for $20 an hour, but OK. I guess if it’s your kid.

John: It’s my kid, yes, so it’s the kid discount. I’ve paid for everything for her entire life.

Craig: You did provide her with everything else.

John: Our intro this week was by the amazing Matthew Chilelli. Our outro, Matthew if you could please play us an outro, the very first outro you ever did for Scriptnotes. That feels like a good bookend for us.

Craig: Ooh.

John: If you have an intro or an outro, just an outro actually, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts, and they’re great. So you should show your pride of 500 episodes with a new t-shirt. They’re 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. That’s also where you can hear our producers make fun of me and Craig for not understanding the show that we’ve done 499 episodes of in this segment we’re about to record.

So thank you to all of our producers and Matthew for coming back for this special 500th episode. And thank you everyone for listening.

Craig: Thanks guys. 500 episodes. Amazing.

[Bonus segment]

John: Megana Rao, you are in charge of the podcast from here forward. So take it away. What do you want us to do?

Megana: OK. So we have a trivia game for you.

Craig: Oh boy.

Megana: And it is a mix of Scriptnotes trivia, but also as we talked about in that discussion on your friendship there’s a little bit of The Newlywed Game. So it’s a little bit also of how well you two know each other and have been listening to each other. And then we have a sprinkling of Stuart-written, Stuart-centric questions that are also in here.

Craig: Oh. OK.

Stuart: I thought I specifically didn’t want to get too Stuart-centric.

Craig: Well, no one cares, Stuart.

Stuart: Stuart-ed it out. All right.

Megana: I feel like Stuart lure is a big part of Scriptnotes.

Craig: It is.

John: Totally.

Megana: So I felt like it had to be in there.

Craig: It is. OK, well I’m very excited. I hope I lose. I’m going to lose. I don’t have to hope.

John: I’m nervous.

Megana: So there’s certain questions that are just specifically targeted for one of you. But for the other ones you guys can raise your hands.

Craig: I see. We will raise our hands if there is a competitive question.

Megana: Cool. And then the producers and Matthew each have three or four questions that we will ask and I wish you both the best of luck. So, we’re starting with Stuart.

Craig: Oh, god.

Stuart: What location does Craig frequently refer to as his sacred place?

Craig: I’ve raised my hand.

Megana: You can answer that one.

Craig: The shower.

Megana: Correct. I wanted to start off easy.

Craig: Thank you. I have a feeling that that’s a set up. A total set up. I’m going to go down in flames now.

Stuart: Question two. You’ve done 17 episodes where you dissect one movie and nine where it’s just the two of you analyzing a movie. Can you name seven of these deep dives?

John: I’m going to try this first. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Aliens. The Little Mermaid. Unforgiven. Die Hard. If we’re going to count Marriage Story and Ghost.

Craig: Yes. See, we help each other.

John: We help each other. What were the other ones? What did I miss?

Stuart: Raiders, Little Mermaid, Groundhog Day.

John: Oh, Groundhog Day, yeah.

Craig: Of course.

Stuart: Ghost. Whiplash. The Addams Family. Unforgiven. The Princess Bride. Clueless.

Craig: Right.

Stuart: And the Christmas bonus episode on Die Hard.

Megana: Wait. I don’t believe that we’ve done an Aliens deep dive.

John: I think we’ve always meant to do one and we didn’t do it.

Craig: Yeah. I was thinking, man, I really don’t know this show very well because I don’t remember that at all.

John: It was a dream I had. A fugue state.

Craig: It was a dream.

Stuart: Question three in the highlighted Stuart section. In the Scriptnotes Wikipedia article it says that Stuart’s voice was never heard on the show except for Episode 259, The Exit Interview. This is in fact incorrect. When else was Stuart heard on the show?

John: Huh. Well you probably said something during a live show. I feel like there was going to be some moment at which you stood up in the audience where I acknowledged. So I bet we’re going to hear your voice there. But I’m trying to think of another example of – I don’t think you read any questions aloud or anything.

Craig: I would have said at the Christmas show I think we might have made him say something. Like I’m Stuart. But I can’t remember.

John: Or like, no, I’m Stuart, or I’m Stuart.

Craig: Oh that I’m real or something.

Stuart: You’re conflating a few things but you’re definitely on the right track. At one point – there are a few Stuart doppelgängers in Los Angeles and at one point we had the idea to get all of them in a row and to all stand up at the live show and wave. I think only one or maybe two showed up, but still we had the effect of three bearded redheads.

But there was an episode, according to this it was the 124 Q&A from the Holiday Spectacular. And I got on stage and I know that because my parents have a photo from that.

Craig: Of course they do.

Stuart: On their living room table or whatever.

John: You know, really we should have brought on Stuart’s parents as the Scriptnotes super fans because they are–

Craig: I know. Up until the point where Stuart stops producing it. And then we never listened to it again.

Stuart: They’re fans. My dad. My dad certainly listens.

Craig: He’s a dentist.

Stuart: He’s dedicated.

Craig: He’s a dentist.

Stuart: And maybe the rest of you have had the same experience, but my parents know nothing about what I do for a living. And Scriptnotes has been a very nice – they can speak some of the language now.

Craig: My parents have never listened to it either. So it’s genetic.

Stuart: I will point out though that my wife has been a voice on the show many times. More than me.

Craig: Ah, reading questions? Or–?

Stuart: Originally back in the day when you would have an article you were talking about or discussing and you wanted to do the reenactment, she would be the female reenactment voice.

Craig: Right. She was the only woman we knew. Those were different days. All right. Well we kind of bombed out on that one. All right, what’s next?

Megana: Next up we have Matthew asking the questions.

Matthew: Question four. Which two guests have come on to specifically talk about sex on screen?

John: Craig had his hand up.

Craig: I think it was Dan Savage and Rachel Bloom.

Matthew: That’s correct. That’s correct.

Craig: It is correct. See, John doesn’t get it.

John: What about Rachel Bloom? Rachel Bloom came on specifically.

Craig: I said Rachel Bloom. Dan Savage and Rachel Bloom.

Megana: Can you do episode numbers John or Craig?

John: No.

Craig: Oh wow, really?

John: So, yes, Dan Savage. But I was thinking actors. So I was thinking it should be Rebel Wilson and Rachel Bloom. That would be my answer.

Craig: Rebel Wilson was part of the dirty show. So she didn’t really come on to talk about sex.

John: That’s fair.

Craig: She just came on to be a bit bawdy.

John: She was bawdy. She was mostly talking about shitting in a beret.

Craig: Correct. Which is the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life. But Dan and Rachel very specifically we were talking about all the fun bits and parts.

John: All right.

Craig: I feel great.

John: You’re actually beating me. So you should feel great.

Craig: That’s not why I feel great.

Megana: I mean, well John this one is specifically for you.

John: All right. Let’s see if I can get it right.

Matthew: Question five, John. What scene does Craig frequently refer to as the hardest he’s ever laughed?

John: Wow. What’s the hardest that Craig has ever laughed. Maybe it’s MacGruber where he’s offering sex to get out of something?

Craig: That’s a great scene. And happens multiple times in MacGruber. But that is not the answer.

John: What is the answer?

Craig: Well I have two that I refer to. I don’t know which one I refer to more than the other. But one is the naked fight in Borat and the other is the puppet vomiting in South Park Team America.

John: That’s the right one, right?

Matthew: Yeah, it’s Team America, the puke scene.

Craig: Yeah. Just the funniest thing.

Matthew: 286, 481, and 387.

Craig: Nice.

Megana: I just got tired of citing the episode. It’s multiple episodes.

Matthew: Possibly more.

Craig: Possibly more.

John: Great.

Craig: I mean, it’s amazing.

Matthew: And question number six for Craig. What is the first project John pitched on?

Craig: How to Eat Fried Worms.

John: That’s impressive.

Craig: I know my guy. I know my guy.

Stuart: Wow.

John: Bonus if you can answer what did I bring to that pitch meeting?

Craig: I don’t know, so I’m going to guess that you brought – because I believe it was in like a sandwich. Maybe you brought a sandwich with worms on it.

John: I did bring a Styrofoam container of worms that I dumped out on a plate for that.

Craig: Did you eat one?

John: I did not eat one. But they were worried I was going to eat one.

Megana: Did it go over well?

John: It went well. Yeah.

Stuart: Like living worms?

John: Yeah. Living worms. From a bait store. I had to drive to Santa Monica. There’s not a lot of bait stores in Los Angeles. So.

Craig: And when you got there they were like pitching on the open writing assignment for How to Eat Fried Worms?

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: The ninth nerd that came in here this morning. Exactly. We know you’re not a fisherman. We know that.

John: No. You can just look at me. I’m not a fisherman.

Craig: Yeah, you’re in the Writers Guild. OK, feeling good. Feeling good.

Megana: All right. And next up we have Godwin.

Godwin: My first question is what is the name of the sandwich Malcolm Spellman ate after recording Episode 185? And I can give you a hit. It’s from Mendocino Farms.

John: A sandwich study in heat?

Godwin: Yes.

Craig: Wow. I would have never in a million years. Wow.

John: The only reason I was pretty sure about that answer is because the Malcolm Spellman episode is titled A Study in Heat.

Craig: Ah. Do you know I once watched Malcolm eat an entire sleeve of Mint Oreo cookies? And the best part of it was while he was eating them, this was at my house, he was halfway through the sleeve. He said, “I hate these. I hate Mint Oreo cookies. I hate them.” And I’m like but why are you eating them? He goes, “I don’t know.”

And then he gets to the bottom of the sleeve and I’m like, dude, you’re going to be sick. And he goes, “No, it’s not even as much as you think. It’s like 250 calories.” And I’m like no it’s not. And he goes, “Yeah it is.” And I’m like, no, no, that’s per serving, not per sleeve. And he’s like, “What?” You have to imagine deeper, “What?”

And so he had eaten essentially like 2,000 or 3,000 calories worth of Mint Oreo cookies that he did not like. We talk about that a lot in my house. It was a great day.

Godwin: All right. Next question. Who were the first two Scriptnotes guests? John?

John: I think it was Aline and Derek. Derek Haas.

Godwin: No.

Megana: Craig, are you going to steal?

Craig: Give me a moment. Momentito. I’ve got nothing.

Godwin: It’s Franklin Leonard. And Aline.

John: And Aline, OK. That I guessed.

Craig: Franklin. Oh wow. I thought maybe Aline would have been like a trick, like a trap to fall into. But, all right, interesting. We both whiffed.

John: I very much believe that. But I’m also mesmerized by the idea of what if Franklin and Leonard were different people.

Craig: Oh, Franklin and Leonard.

John: Yeah. Wow. The power they would have.

Craig: The world of people with two first names is funny.

Stuart: Were they on one episode together or was it?

Megana: Episode 60. They both came together.

Craig: Wow.

Godwin: The next question is for Craig. What was the marquee feature of the Highland software?

Craig: I believe it was to melt PDFs.

Godwin: Correct.

John: Nicely done.

Godwin: And for my last question. There was a short-lived segment called Change Craig’s Mind. What was the first and only topic discussed? Yes John?

John: Ventriloquism.

Godwin: Correct.

Craig: Oh my god. That’s amazing. So, first of all, I wish we would bring that back.

John: We have to. Megana, please, put that on top of the Workflowy. We’ve got to bring that back.

Craig: That’s amazing because it’s such a challenge to change Craig’s mind. It’s a challenge. And I have – my feelings about ventriloquism have only deepened. My anger about it, my just general resentment that it’s considered–

John: An art form.

Craig: Entertainment. An art form? [laughs] I just get angrier about it by the day. OK, we have to bring that back. That’s a wonderful idea.

John: What’s so good about that segment is that you’re basically an anti-vaxxer when it comes to ventriloquism. Like the more facts we give you the deeper you dig into your bunker there.

Craig: Yeah. Because it’s like if vaccines actually were boring and pointless then I would be an anti-vaxxer. But they’re amazing and they save lives. Unlike ventriloquism, which is boring and stupid.

Stuart: Is it topics that you want your mind changed on?

Craig: I don’t come up with them. That’s the thing. I didn’t come up with that. It just happened.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

Megana: Do we have a score count? So we’re moving on to Megan and–

Craig: Oh god. Was anyone keeping score? I wasn’t keeping score.

John: I wasn’t keeping score.

Stuart: Is there a prize for the winner?

John: I think Craig may be slightly ahead though honestly.

Craig: Do I get a free lifetime, because I pay the $6 a month, I do. I get charged $6 a month, so I’m hoping I get the free one.

Megana: We’ll think about it.

Craig: Fair enough.

Megana: All right. Megan, you’re up.

Megan: Question 11. On September 13, 2014, Stuart Friedel wrote an email based on a discussion in Episode 108. On September 10, 2018 at 3:02am, five years later, that email came through to the ask@johnaugust.com account. What was the discussion that you wanted to check in on?

John: Huh. I think the dates might be meaningful. But I don’t know.

Craig: The first date was what year?

John: 2014?

Megan: 2014.

Craig: And the second date was what year?

Megan: 2018.

John: Wow.

Stuart: Something there, it says five years later.

Megan: It does say five years later.

Craig: OK. That’s why I was asking.

John: So five years happened.

Craig: It was a five year checkup. This feels like something that the initial, my gut tells me that the initial email was something he was angry about. I don’t know why. I just feel like he was indignant and was thinking to himself you guys, five years from now, you’ll see. And he was probably right. But I don’t know what it is.

John: It could have been a situation where we may have asked on the show for – let us know five years from now sort of what happens. But I can’t think what the specific scenario was.

Craig: We don’t know this.

John: Tell us. We don’t know this.

Megan: It said, “Dear John’s current assistant. Please look back on Scriptnotes Episode 108 where John and Craig discussed the future of iPads in movie theaters and remind them that this next episode is to address the five years later of it all. Sincerely yours, John’s current, 2013, assistant.”

Craig: Yes, that’s right. Got it. So this wasn’t about Stuart’s indignant. This was a disagreement that John and I had about whether or not iPads and the use of them would become prominent in theaters with children. And what we didn’t know was that nobody would be in theaters. Not only would there not be iPads, or there wouldn’t be humans.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s right. I forgot that one. That was a good one.

John: I’m happy there are not iPads in theaters. I could have envisioned a scenario in which that happened and it would have been worse. But not worse than a pandemic.

Craig: No. No.

John: So if I had to choose iPads in theaters versus a global pandemic that killed millions.

Craig: I don’t know. [laughs] I’m on the fence.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I’m on the fence. OK. Next question.

Megan: Question 12. In Episode 240 who do you decide would win in an all-out brawl to the death, John or Craig? And why?

John: I said that Craig would win just because he would be just savage and he would not stop.

Craig: I think I probably said the same thing about John. That John would win because he would clamp down or do something really like vicious that I wasn’t expecting. Maybe like a neck bite.

Megan: Per Megana the answer is Craig, because he’s angry and heavier, but most importantly because he would not hesitate. There would be no pause.

Craig: That’s true. That’s true. You don’t have any advantage if you don’t use your advantage. That’s the thing. You’re right. So I got to get him on the ground fast is the key. I got to get John down on the ground.

John: If we were in a Zombie apocalypse scenario and needed to say like, OK, if I get bitten you need to kill me, I would tell Craig to be the one to kill me because he would do it.

Megana: Oh.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: Do it for the good of the group. Yeah. He’s the one you want to pick.

Craig: No, I would do it even before. Even before you got the sentence done.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I always joke like that with Melissa. Because you know that Michael Haneke movie where he has to kill his wife with the pillow because she has Alzheimer’s? It’s the most beautiful Oscar-y movie ever. And I’m like I’m going to do that to you. And she’s like–

John: That’s how much I love you.

Craig: When she walks in she’s like, “I cannot remember where I put my keys.” And I’m like pillow time. That’s enough. [laughs] That’s all I needed to hear. Let’s go. Come on.

Megan: Question 13. Who is the credited producer on Episode 17 of Scriptnotes?

Craig: Ooh. OK. Well, so the implication is that it’s pre-Stuart, so I’m going to say Nima?

John: I’m going to guess Carlton [Miniacus] who was – it was a pseudonym that was being used.

Craig: Who?

Stuart: Did we fact check this one?

Megana: We did.

Stuart: Because I wrote this question, but I wasn’t certain of the answer.

Craig: I can’t wait to hear what the actual answer theoretically is.

Megan: The answer is there’s no credited producer, because it was before Matthew, and so Stuart was credited as the editor.

Craig: Oh, so it was a trick question.

Stuart: I actually thought you guys would get this because of the spoilers. We discussed this in the opening.

Craig: Well that’s the thing. I thought that maybe there was some random person.

John: Being so specific, because we didn’t start crediting you until what episode?

Stuart: I don’t know. But this was the exact – if you read in the Google Doc this is the exact discussion we’re having. It originally was Episode 5. We decided that it would be more of a red herring if we used a more “random” sounding number.

Craig: I see.

John: Clever.

Craig: So this was just a set up to humiliate us. I understand.

Stuart: Exactly.

Craig: Fine. Done. Achieved.

Megana: OK, final round. John, what recent meme shares a name with Craig’s family member?

Craig: That’s great.

John: I don’t know what the recent meme is. I can’t think of a Jessie or a Jack or a Melissa.

Craig: Can I steal?

Megana: OK, Craig, you can steal.

Craig: My sister’s name is Karen.

John: Ooh, that’s right.

Craig: My sister’s children call her “a Karen” all the time. It infuriates her. It’s wonderful. She’s never asked for the manager, by the way, ever. Not once.

Megana: So in an early episode, Episode 2, you both declare blank as the death of all screenwriters.

Craig: Both declare blank as the death of all screenwriters? Ooh. Go ahead.

John: So like lack of limitations, or freedom in a way?

Megana: Craig, do you want to do a guess?

Craig: Wildly different guess. Focus groups. Movie focus groups.

Megana: The correct answer is children.

Craig: Oh, we said it before.

John: Obviously, yeah.

Craig: That’s correct. Yeah. Stuart gets it now. It’s the death of all screenwriters. They just hollow you out from the inside.

Stuart: I like my kid personally.

Craig: Just wait. [laughs]

John: Just wait till that kid can get out of the crib and actually find you.

Craig: Just wait. Oh, the places you’ll go.

Megana: OK, we are at our last question.

John: Oh.

Craig: Buckle up.

Megana: I want you both to close your eyes, meditate on your lives, your careers, almost a decade, 500 episodes of Scriptnotes. What is your favorite quality in Megana Rao? Just kidding. I’m just kidding. You guys can email me afterwards. OK, the real question is what is your favorite quality in your cohost?

Craig: Ooh.

John: Aw.

Craig: This is, now it’s just going to be about tears.

John: Yeah. I would say that Craig is just remarkably good at winging it and just speaking extemporaneously about whatever topic without any real preparation at all. And so it’s not that he hasn’t thought about these things before, but he can just actually articulate clear, cogent thoughts without any preparation and make it seem so effortless. And with me I feel like I’m Taylor Swift where all I do is try, try, try.

Craig: [laughs] But Taylor Swift is hot. You know? And super successful. So I think that works out great.

John: So it works out well for me, too.

Craig: It works out well for you. I would say that I think the thing that I appreciate the most in John and have for a long time is that he is empathetic in a logical way. Because there’s this mushy, weepy spirituality empathy and I’ve said many times on the show I literally don’t even understand what spirituality is. I don’t know what the word means. Any time people try and explain it to me I’m just like religion right. And they’re like, yeah, but no. And I’m like nah, it is.

But John has a very logical kind of empathy and that has I think – it’s rubbed off on me. I think I’ve learned from it. Because I respect it. And he makes the idea of kindness and acceptance and making your first choice the benefit of the doubt choice in a rational way. I’ve learned from that. And I’ve definitely – he’s been a good model for me because my first choice typically was just to destroy.

It’s my second choice. I don’t want people to think that it’s not there anymore. It’s right there. It’s right behind it. But, yes, I would say that for sure.

John: Aw. Thank you Craig.

Craig: You’re welcome.

Megana: Well thank you both for playing. You’re both winners.

Craig: I feel like a winner. I’m so glad I got anything right. I was terrified.

Megana: I guess Craig is kind of the winner because he had the upset a bit.

John: Yeah, he did. But still.

Craig: Kind of the winner is the best I’ve ever been. Kind of a winner.

John: I think we were the winners to have such amazing producers and editor.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: Here with us today.

Craig: Yes, we are the beneficiaries of all of you. And your hard work. And you make us sound good. You make us look good. Definitely make me sound and look good, because I don’t, you know–

John: And I’m always just so happy and proud to see your smiling faces and to see you guys kicking ass out there.

Craig: Exactly. That’s awesome.

John: So thank you for being so awesome.

Craig: Yeah. And there’s been like marriages and children and all these wonderful life changes that are happening. Look, we do another 500 of these.

John: Another 10 years. Wow.

Craig: At that point I fully plan on being in the hover chair from Wall-E. But you guys will still be vital members of society. [laughs]

John: And I’ll be begging Megan to get me a job working on some Marvel project.

Craig: Yes. And my wife will come to me with the pillow and be like. It’s time. It’s you that gets the pillow, my friend.

John: All right. Thank you all so much.

Craig: Thanks folks.

Stuart: Great seeing you guys.

Megan: So nice to see you.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

• Find out more information about the The Scriptnotes Book
• Review the past 500 episodes at The Scriptnotes Index
• Stuart Friedel on the web
• Godwin Jabangwe on Twitter
• Megan McDonnell on IMDb
• Matthew Chilelli on Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, and the web
• Megana Rao on Twitter
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro (and intro!) by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 501 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we look at what patterns we’ve noticed in successful writers and perhaps more importantly what things tend to derail careers. We will also have follow up on genres and typos, plus a listener question that I suspect will become a storyline in this, our 11th Season of Scriptnotes. 11 Seasons Craig. This is our season premiere.

Craig: I only found out from you yesterday that we have seasons.

John: Yeah. So seasons are 50 episodes a piece, so this is our 11th season we’re starting.

Craig: Oh, OK. I thought that maybe we were just midseason, mid-season one of a thousand episodes. Are we going to get to a thousand episodes?

John: I don’t know, Craig. That’s a long–

Craig: That just seems stupid, right?

John: That’s 10 years.

Craig: How could you possibly say something 1,000 times?

John: Yeah. You could though.

Craig: That said, 500 is a lot, yet here we are.

John: It is a lot. We started working on the book and we talked about the book last week. It’s really exciting, but gosh darn we have just a lot of text there. A lot of stuff to go through.

Craig: Yup. And, you know, I don’t want to pat ourselves on the back or anything, but I think we have a decent signal to noise ratio also. We don’t do a lot of empty patter like the kind that I’m engaging in right now.

John: We cut all the empty patter out of the book which is so much fun. So, this week we’ll be sending through sample chapters, or at least one sample chapter, to people who’ve signed up at Scriptnotes.net. That’s where you can sign up for the back episodes, but you can also sign up for the mailing list for the book. And the sample chapters look just great. So I was just working on one, a sample one with Greta Gerwig’s interview, and we also have a Craig Mazin special chapter that you can proof before we send out.

Craig: Excellent. Oh my.

John: Oh my.

Craig: Oh my.

John: And in our bonus segment for today’s episode we’re going to talk about books, but not the Scriptnotes book, but just what we like in books from physical books, to fonts, to bindings. What we look for in books, not as text but the actual objects themselves. Because I want the Scriptnotes book to be a good book, so let’s talk about what we like in books.

Craig: Oh, OK.

John: Yeah. Because you like a book. You like the Art & Arcana Book, that D&D book. That was great.

Craig: By Kyle Newman. Yes. I enjoy – it’s not the only kind of book I like. [laughs]

John: I know. But you like a well-made book.

Craig: Oh, sure. I mean in terms of just the quality of a book being put together, yes. Absolutely. No question.

John: So we will talk about that. But before we do any of this, Craig we have to start because apparently you have a big thing to apologize for.

Craig: Yeah, apparently. I didn’t realize I blew it. I totally blew it. A couple of episodes ago I was talking about how passionate Europeans are about their football and particularly folks in the UK. And I incorrectly assigned the singing of You’ll Never Walk Alone to Mancunians when in fact it is the folks of Liverpool, the Liverpoolians. I’m probably saying that wrong, too.

But it’s Liverpool. The folks of Liverpool are the ones that sing You’ll Never Walk Alone and so what I basically did was award their bitter rivals with their beloved song. This is just a tragic mistake, born out of utter ignorance. Sometimes you know just enough to be dangerous as my father used to say. And in this case I knew just enough to be dangerous. So I do apologize to all of the fans in Liverpool. I did not mean to besmirch your beloved song or your beloved football club.

And similarly I apologize to the folks of Manchester for suggesting that they were like Liverpool fans, since they all apparently hate each other’s teams. But we’re all friends.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So anyway I do apologize for that. That was just a blunder. It was just a huge blunder.

John: And a thing which we talked about before on the show is that one of the most important parts of an apology is accepting an apology, so the many people who have written into the show to point out this error hopefully will accept the apology and then we can move on and try to make another 500 episodes of the show.

Craig: Yeah. It would be kind of weird if they didn’t.

John: No. We’re going to continue to be angry.

Craig: Yeah, you know, I mean, there are worst things in the world. But it was – if somebody, I don’t know, talked with some sense of authority about how the Yankees play at City Field I would have been incensed. So I get it. And I apologize. I am sorry.

John: Great. That same episode we talked about in How Would This Be a Movie these professional breakup artists. And so these are folks in Japan who do this for a living. I said that is a good idea for a movie and I would not be surprised if this movie exists somewhere out there in the world. And two of our listeners wrote in saying like, yes, those movies do exist.

Paul wrote in to say that there is a French film called Heartbreaker which is about this idea. And then Fred in Chicago said there’s already an Australian feature about professional breaker-uppers called appropriately The Breaker Upperers. He says it’s pretty good. They go the broad comedy route. It’s sort of like Bridesmaids. It’s produced by Taika Waititi. So I want to see this movie. The trailer is actually great.

Craig: I’m not going to do it.

John: You’re not going to watch that movie. You don’t watch movies.

Craig: Not really. [laughs] I don’t watch stuff anymore.

John: But you know the movie now exists out there in the world.

Craig: Totally. Breaker Upperers.

John: Yeah. But the fact that it was a French and an Australian version does not preclude an American version from being made.

Craig: Quite the opposite.

John: It’s going to get made.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Do you want to take Frank’s question here about typos?

Craig: Sure. Frank in London wrote in about typos and our decision to stop using Three Page Challenges with typos.

John: Now do you remember Frank’s situation here? So Frank had a life experience that made it very difficult for him to read and to write.

Craig: Yes. I remember. Frank wrote in and basically said, “Hey, it’s hard for me to write things without typos. You’re being unfair.” And let’s see, it looks like Steve had a comment back. Steve said, “While I also sympathize with Frank’s struggles, I agree that unfortunately in the end those are hurdles he has to overcome. I wanted to add that there are tools to help him that are free or inexpensive, Grammarly for one, that he can Google. There are a ton of them specifically for his particular hurdle, but I like Grammarly because it works with almost every program automatically. You don’t have to open it or copy and paste anything. For the most part it’s just there working.”

John, I want to like Grammarly, but I detest it because of those freaking ads.

John: Yeah. I detest it because of the ads, too. So, there are people who really like Grammarly and I think it’s maybe worth someone like Frank in London to consider a tool like that to help him out. But also there’s real people who can do this job, too. So, other listeners suggest that you could go on Fiver or one of these sort of hire a person for a quick little job thing and proofreading is a thing you can get through there. But even our listeners reached out to say like, “Hey, I’m happy to proofread if Frank needs help.”

Craig: That’s nice.

John: So I would say have faith that there are some humans who are out there to help you do your best writing.

Craig: Writing is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Is that what that lady says?

John: I think that’s what it is.

Craig: Something like that. And then I just immediately – the red mist descends.

John: Now, a few episodes before that in Episode 497 we talked about the hierarchy of genres. So my friend and friend of the show, Matt Byrne, wrote in to say, “I wonder if we’re seeing the relationship between suffering and art/genius here. Van Gough. Sylvia Plath. There’s a trail of examples that goes back to Jesus and the Odyssey, up through De Niro fattening up for Raging Bull. We as a society love and celebrate those bits of suffering. They add value. We see the labor. In comedy the labor is mostly invisible. So while a comedy may delight us more, the artistry seems to come at less of a price. I don’t know if it’s specific to our puritanical roots, or if it’s more global and timeless, but that value on labor and suffering seems to be hardwired into our DNA and certainly ingrained into the awards PR narrative machinery.”

Craig: Well that’s a really interesting notion. I appreciate that, Matt. I think you might be onto something there. It is absolutely true that we associate self-torture, or a tortured personality, with great art. And I don’t think that’s good.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I don’t think we should. I think it encourages a kind of romanticization of what is actually just, you know, unfortunate mental illness. But that’s a really interesting observation. Well done.

John: Do you want to take Spooky from Florida here?

Craig: Well, of course I do. OK, Spooky from Florida writes, “I often find that people look down on horror, or if it’s a good horror film they deny that it’s in the horror genre altogether. William Friedkin famously said that he didn’t consider The Exorcist to be horror, which seems ridiculous to me. Using Craig’s own criteria there is only one film that definitely fits in the horror genre that has won an Academy Award for Best Film, The Silence of the Lambs.

“Parasite and The Shape of Water each also recently received Best Film, but might take a Friedkin-esque stance and argue they aren’t horror.” Well, I have a suspicion were Jonathan Demme with us today he would also argue that Silence of the Lambs was not horror, either. So this is an interesting parallel. What do you think about Spooky’s point here?

John: I think it’s a really good point and it also reminds me of what Tess Morris told us about romantic comedies is that when a rom-com is incredibly successful suddenly it’s not a rom-com anymore. So like Silver Linings Playbook is not considered a rom-com, but of course it is a rom-com. It’s just that they sort of broke out of that bubble and it doesn’t count as that. Or when a man makes a rom-com it’s not considered a rom-com.

Craig: Right. Exactly. So Let the Right One In is considered an arthouse film, an independent arthouse film, but it’s a horror movie.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s a really good horror movie. Yeah, I agree. I think Spooky what happens is people have this feeling that genre is somehow a negative.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But I would say drama is a genre. Weepy Oscar drama, right? Like, you know, Oscar Movie, that’s a thing. We all know what it is, right? If you say, OK, what do you think an Oscar movie is I’m immediately in my mind it’s Sophie’s Choice. That’s what’s happening. It’s a genre.

John: Or you look at a movie like The Artist. The Artist didn’t have all that sort of award season movie kind of stuff around it, like the period film and it’s about Hollywood.

Craig: It’s a comedy.

John: Yeah, it’s a comedy. It’s just a comedy. It’s a very light comedy. But we don’t think about it as just a comedy because it’s an Oscar movie.

Craig: Well perception is a fascinating thing. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot lately only because it’s a rare thing in one’s own life to notice a dramatic shift in perception. And perception is – just a source of injustice, sometimes against you and sometimes in your favor.

You know, I think about the way people talk about things that I do. I think they used to be way too hard on me, and now I think they’re way too easy on me.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Now they’re like, “This show is going to be great because Craig is doing it.” And I’m like, you know, listen man. I’m going to do my best, but I wouldn’t say that. I’m hoping. I’m putting all I can into it. But there is that strange handicapping that occurs, like odds. They minus five points or plus five points depending on how they see you. It’s a curious thing.

John: Well speaking of awards and perceptions, the big news out of this past week was that NBC has decided it’s not going to be broadcasting the next Golden Globe awards. So that’s a pretty big shift. That’s a big televised – like the second biggest televised awards show that just goes away. And not just for film but for TV as well. And, see ya. I’m not going to miss it.

You know, some good things about the Golden Globes. I think they’re fun to watch because it’s a bunch of celebrities in a room slightly drunk. And the monologues from the hosts were actually kind of funny in general, had a good mocking tone. But it wasn’t important. It wasn’t meaningful. And the folks who were voting on it had no real skin in the game. So, I’m not sad to see it go.

Craig: There are a lot of award shows where the people voting don’t have skin in the game. The critics’ awards and all that. But this is sort of fascinating. The Golden Globes have always had a strange, well, you know, I remember controversy when I was a kid. I didn’t watch award shows when I was a kid, but somehow I heard about Pia Zadora winning the Golden Globe and everybody being like, “The Golden Globes!” But then again the Golden Globes I think were always like you say viewed as a little bit of the kind of chaotic slightly boozy cousin, where things were a bit more fun and casual and I can say from my own experience being there that it is pretty booze and fun and casual.

John: Yeah.

Craig: We had a great time.

John: Absolutely. You and Tiffany Haddish up on stage. It was a good time.

Craig: Oh my god. Tiffany Haddish was great and we had our table and we were sitting next to the Succession table and we were cheering each other on while we were all drinking. And so it’s a very different vibe than an auditorium based show like the Emmys or the Oscars where you’re sitting in a seat and you are observing a stage.

So it’s like a big, huge Sweet Sixteen/Bar Mitzvah kind of event. But obviously they ran into real trouble here and I’m curious to see what happens because this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing where someone else is going to pick this football up and resume running with it.

John: Well here’s a suggestion from Twitter. So this is Noah Evslin who tweeted, “I’m going to pitch this again…this is the moment for all the Hollywood guilds to come together and create a new awards show called The Guild Awards and use the money to help stabilize their health and pension funds. In 2019, the Golden Globes brought in over $60 million.”

So, I hear you laughing, so therefore let’s take the pro and con on The Guild Awards.

Craig: Sure. Well, should I do pro?

John: I can do pro because I think you have more cons. Is that fair?

Craig: I really have one con. I only have one. But it’s a massive con. So go for your pros.

John: OK, my pros is I think the guilds should continue to do their own awards for their own stuff and hold back on Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Comedy Series, basically the things that are actually televisable you can hold off on those and let those be sort of the Guild Awards, but do your own local awards for all of the other awards.

But I think there’s an opportunity to create that kind of boozy, smaller, less auditorium-y feel of The Golden Globes but actually have to be voted on by people who do this for a living.

Craig: Well, that would pretty much solve the big con. I mean, the strike against this notion which on its surface seems kind of a no-brainer is that the award show would be endless the Writers Guild Awards took I would say most of my life. I think I spent most of my life at that one Writers Guild award show.

John: You couldn’t do – and you wouldn’t want to do all the awards. So you should just do the big marquee things.

Craig: So then I guess the con junior there is that if you are someone who is not in one of those categories you’re going to – so like for instance the Emmys, there is a craft awards Emmys that occurs–

John: The night before.

Craig: It’s a week before.

John: The week before, yeah.

Craig: And they call it the Shemmy’s because it’s not the real Emmys. I mean, it is, you get a real Emmy, but they don’t want to spend time giving Emmys for editing or costume, which they should. Everybody deserves their moment. But, yeah, so I think people might get a little grouchy, like I’m at the WGA, mumble WGA awards.

But if what you did is essentially approximate the kind of awards that the Golden Globes gave out, because they don’t give out a lot of awards, then I mean–

John: Yeah, so let directors vote on Best Director. Let writers vote on all the writing awards. Let the actors vote on the actors. It would be great. Do I think it’s going to happen? I think it’s unlikely to happen. I think what’s more likely to happen is that the SAG Awards become increasingly visible, just because they’re actors and they’re famous. But I think the Guild Awards would be lovely and I would watch them and support them.

Craig: Yeah. At some point it all comes down to just math and people watch this sort of thing because they like to see the actors. And fewer and fewer people are watching any of these things.

John: Yeah.

Craig: The trend is not encouraging. So NBC, I can’t quite award them with the bravery of the year medal because the ratings for these things have just been plummeting. What was the most recent–?

John: Well the Oscars was not a huge–

Craig: Oh, god, yeah, the Oscars. I mean, I looked at the bar graph of viewers, that’s pretty scary stuff.

John: Also they had all the challenges of doing the broadcast, like no one had seen those movies at all. And so I think it’s a weird year to compare sort of the down drop. We’ll see what it is next year. If it’s that same number next year then televised award shows are just over.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I was looking, I don’t follow along, so I saw here is what the progress was even prior to the pandemic and that is a steep slow downward.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Yeah. Not good.

John: Not good. All right, let’s get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about patterns of success. And by this I mean that over the years you and I have seen many, many writers. And we’ve seen writers who become really successful and writers who haven’t become especially successful. And I wanted to sort of talk about what patterns we’ve noticed in both of those groups of writers.

So this is just sort of an open-ended conversation, but I feel like it’s something we could come back and visit again in future episodes. The things that we see that are markers of like oh yeah that person has got it, that person has not got it. Because you and I have both said that about people, but what are we actually identifying when we say like, ah yeah, I think that’s going to work for that person.

Craig: Well this is a really interesting prompt for a discussion, because longevity in our business is rare. It is rare. There are not many people who are consistently successful. There are people who have moments and then fade away. There are people who feast off of big hits for a while but eventually run out of runway, so to speak. And then there are people who we might put them under the category of their worst enemy.

John: For sure.

Craig: Where they had almost all the tools required. There was just one problem. So this is a good topic of discussion because I think people think that success in Hollywood comes down to writing that great script or directing that great film, but that’s the beginning of your success.

John: Often it is. So let’s talk about what we even mean by success, and this is something we talk about a bit in my other podcast series Launch. We talk about what is success for a novelist. But what do we mean as success for a film or TV writer? Do we mean the ability to make a living at it? Or for people to say like, wow, that’s really good writing? Does it mean winning awards? Does it mean making blockbusters? Is it the ability to make anything you want to make? Is it autonomy? Are you a successful writer if you are a mid-level staffed TV writer?

And for some people, yes, and for some people no.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, everyone can define it in a different way. But given the context we’re discussing here I would probably say the ability to make a good living. A good living. I think if it’s a subsistence living, if it’s just barely keeping my head above water it’s hard to argue that that is success per se. Because the people who are living that probably wouldn’t define it that way.

But the ability to make a good living and earn more than you spend and be able to save money, own a home, and save money to send your kids to schools and all that seems like a decent definition here.

John: It is, but I also wonder about people who see themselves as artists, people who see themselves as like I need to change the cultural conversation. They may not be so focused on just making a living at it. They may actually have another job that pays the bills but they feel like they’re making art that really matters, that they’re writing movies that matter to them.

So I don’t want to be so narrow in having to achieve a certain economic success as being the only thing that we’re looking at here.

Craig: Yeah. I guess if we put the word career in front of success here then it would help narrow that conversation. Because of course if you write a script that you love that means a lot to you and that was your purpose, that’s what you were going for, you win. If your goal is to have a lasting and productive career, then that’s different. So I guess maybe what we should be talking about is, well, I guess we can talk about all of the kinds of successes.

John: Absolutely. Well let’s talk about sort of aspects of the professional life and what we see being especially important or not so important. So we’ll start with work habits, because I think that’s the thing that can often be visible. It’s like this is a person who gets up at 6am every day and at their keyboard and banging away. And in your experience does hard work correlate with success?

Craig: Yes. I don’t necessarily define hard work as getting up at 6am, because you’re not going to catch me doing that. But at some point sooner or later a quantity of work needs to be completed. And obviously there are two axes you’re operating with. There’s quality and speed and people who are able to maintain a high level of quality at a decent clip are far more likely to have longevity than people who can’t.

John: Yeah. I do think of the silent evidence of all the writers who worked much, much harder than me who didn’t make it, and who didn’t break out and sort of weren’t able to have careers. And I can’t know to what degree the problem was quality or some other aspect of their approach that kept them out of what we are trying to define as success. But I think too often there’s this assumption that if you just work harder it’s going to all work out and that’s not been my experience. There’s some correlation of hard work and success, but I don’t think it’s a perfect correlation because there’s people who worked much harder than me who didn’t succeed.

Craig: I agree. I think that you cannot hard work your way to success. But you can un-hard work your way out of success, if that makes sense.

John: Yes. I think you and I both know people who just could never get the work done. They were talented when they could actually finish a script, but they just couldn’t finish enough scripts.

Craig: And that is more tragic to me. If you don’t have the quality then all of the hard work isn’t necessarily going to get you anywhere. But if you do and any variety of reasons sort of is between you and the ability to apply it, that’s a bummer. Because, you know, we are all missing out at that point.

John: Let’s talk about social savvy. Do you have to be good in a room?

Craig: It helps a lot, but I don’t think it is necessary. There are plenty of writers who were notoriously and perhaps are notoriously not good in rooms.

John: Yeah. I think that’s true. I think as things have moved more towards television from features the ability to get along with others and actually sort of have some emotional intelligence in terms of being in a space with others and communicating with others face to face or over Zoom is more important than for the feature writer, but it’s some part of it. It’s different than it would be for a novelist. You have to have some ability to communicate with a human being in front of you.

Craig: Yeah. I think that social savvy is required if you’re going to be at the top of the game. If you want to be – now we’re moving past success into just the people who work at the upper level of this career. Almost all of them have some sort of social savvy.

John: At the upper tier, yes. There were definitely jobs you and I got because we were the only people who could stand being in a room with some of those people, who could actually navigate those really difficult personalities. That’s just being honest. The rooms were it was like there’s five 800-pound gorillas and it’s just like, OK, I’m in gorilla city and I just have to be able to wrestle all of these gorillas at once.

Craig: Somebody has to do an animated version of that.

John: Gorilla City.

Craig: Gorilla City. And you wrestling all of them at once.

John: But let’s remember that an early part of your career is going to be finding a rep, going into those general meetings. The ability to do that stuff is not an unimportant part of how screenwriters get started.

Craig: No. Like they always say a pool doesn’t increase the price of your home when you’re selling it, it just makes the home sell faster. And I think that’s the way social savvy works, too. It’s not going to get you a career that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, but you’ll get where you’re supposed to go faster.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because early on what happens is these people are meeting all these writers and all of those meetings are boring. They’re boring for everybody and they’re particularly boring when you meet somebody and you just don’t feel anything. But if you do feel a connection with another human being suddenly if that human being was you, you are way closer to getting hired than you would have been otherwise.

John: Absolutely. I’m thinking to one of my very first general meetings was with an executive by the name of Jan Finger. She was over at Imagine. And they’d gotten the rights to How to Eat Fried Worms, but my meeting wasn’t specifically about that. But it was sort of a “hey, she read my script” and it was just a general meeting. And I liked her and we got along and she got me. And that’s kind of all it took for me to get in that next meeting to get that project.

So, yeah, those connections are important.

Craig: They are. And that reality, that human reality, is another reason why it’s really important that on the hiring side of things that there are all sorts of people.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Because, you know.

John: Because it’s not going to be two white people in a room all the time. And, yes, 100 percent.

Craig: It’s kind of the deal. It’s just important. Because there are certain connections that people have because they’re from the same place, or from the same background. I mean, there were so many times where I would sit in a room and say, “Oh, I grew up on Staten Island,” and someone was like, “Oh yeah, I grew up in Queens.” And you’re like, huh, great, we’re off and running. You know? Because there’s some sort of thing.

So it’s just good to have all that variety there. But that said, people with social savvy should and do find connections with just about everyone. That’s one of their skills.

John: True. Now, getting back to general patterns, let’s talk about originality and voice. We talk about voice in the Three Page Challenges a lot. Craig, do you think it’s more important to have a striking singular voice or to be flexible, the ability to sort of write a lot of different kinds of voices?

Craig: I think that you will get more work if you’re flexible and you have an ability to move between genres and also an ability to continue some sort of established voice or expectation. However, that is not necessary. And also I would argue that even if you are the kind of person who can do that sort of thing you then have to be individual and fingerprinted within that. So, I mean I did god knows how many sequels I had to work on. Had to, like somebody had a gun in my mouth.

But I chose to. [laughs]

John: I like the other person has a gun in your mouth. Not a gun to your head.

Craig: No, in my mouth. So much worse. Because in your head you’re like, eh. Mouth? Oh boy.

John: I wouldn’t even see the bullet, but yeah.

Craig: Right. So what happens is you’re like I get the drill here. I know what the tone is. I understand what’s been put out. And I can work within those lines. Also, I can do my own thing inside of that that is particular.

John: I would say that the people I’ve noticed who have broken out, who have really broken out hard and fast have had original voices. They were just like, oh wow, that is really good. I’ve not seen anything like that before. It feels specific and unique and new. Those people have not always been able to sustain careers because they could kind of do that one thing, or they only did that one thing. Ideally you want to have an original voice and the ability to do a lot of other voices as well.

Craig: That’s very helpful.

John: How important is copying? So we talk about visual artists. One of the big debates is how much do you need to perfect doing every tree individually versus understanding when it’s the right time to copy and just fill in that background with things you’ve done before? To what degree do you need to be making brand new original stuff all the time or understand what the genre is and just be able to deliver that genre?

Craig: Well, there are times where you realize you’re being hired to do a thing. I have always tried to add some sort of value regardless. I know there are times where I’m complicating, or in the past at least. Now that I’m pretty much working on things that are mine, so it’s all my fault now. But when I was working on things for other people I was aware at times that I was making it harder on myself than I needed to, but I have to believe that in the long run you are rewarded for that. That they ask you sometimes for counterfeits, but when they get them they don’t like them as much as things that feel original.

John: Yeah. I fully get what you’re saying there. It’s like they’re asking you to make the cheap knockoff and you’re like but it’s actually going to be easier and better if I just make something original here. Like, no, no, we want the cheap knockoff. And I can think of writers who basically all they do is just cheap knockoffs and at a certain point they stopped getting hired because everything that they’ve actually gotten made has been cheap knockoffs and is just clearly cheap knockoffs. It’s not good for your long term career to be doing those.

Craig: It’s not. And the bigger problem is there’s no path ahead. If you are in that lane it’s going to pay you pretty well for a while, but at some point they’re going to wise up and go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. We’re spending too much on the knockoff guy. The whole point of the knockoff guy was that we didn’t want to spend money on the original guy. Now we’re spending too much money on the knockoff guy. Find me a cheaper knockoff guy.” And they will.

John: Yup. How important is it to be able to embrace constraints? The phrasing I’m saying it actually is incredibly important. But I’ve noticed that the ones who succeed can kind of understand what the constraints are and thrive under those constraints. And the ones who tend to struggle, they struggle against the form of the constraints, or the budget, or whatever. They get paralyzed. They can’t do the thing they want to do the way they want to do it.

Craig: Well, this to me connects strangely to a necessary element of empathy. You are hired by people to do something. And what we’re asked to do is hard. It’s hard for us to do it. And we have all sorts of feelings when we’re doing it. And I think a lot of writers have tunnel vision where that’s all they see. And the other people, the people that hired them, aren’t really people or are far too comfortable, and their feelings don’t matter. Well they do. Part of that empathy is putting yourself in everybody else’s shoes and trying to see things from their point of view. So when they put these restraints down, or constraints I should say, and they have certain things they need, a little bit of empathy goes a long way. Even if you’re arguing against it. Because you’re arguing against it while acknowledging that it is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. That is helpful.

Maybe even more than just going along with things is taking the effort to see things from other people’s point of view. Then either accept the constraints as reasonable or talk about why maybe they should go a different way.

John: Yeah. I can think of an example of like, OK, I want to do a gritty crime show and they’re like, “We love your writing. Our mandate is now we want to do blue sky, happy, sunny. We want dark things in beautiful environments. So can you take your gritty crime show and set it in the Florida sunshine?” And you could say absolutely no, that’s not a thing I want to do at all, or you could say like sure, I get what that is, I get what your mandate is. I can make it work. And I can use the tension between those two things to step up to the next level. That is the kind of thing that tends to make people more successful and have longer careers is to say like, oh, yeah, OK, I get that, and this is a thing I can change that will let me make this thing happen.

Craig: And it’s important to have a realistic view of what it is you’re working on. Because if you’re working on a crime procedural for say a basic cable channel then certain things – you got to know where you are, right? You’re in a certain kind of restaurant, and so you’ve kind of got to go along there. I think that this discussion that we’re having will be viewed by some people as a justification for some kind of selling out.

I think if you want to talk about one of the things that separates successful writers from writers who burn out it’s that writers who burn out, or don’t get there at all, are obsessed with this whole selling out business.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: There is no selling out. Everybody is constantly making compromises. You don’t know how to make anything in this business without compromising. Directors know that, right? They know that. Every day is a war to limit the compromises. But they are constant because reality is reality. It intrudes.

Writers, because we have total control over what goes on the page, we have this delusion that there’s some pristine relationship between that and what comes out the other end. And any kind of compromise or negotiation is a failure of will and conviction, it is an indication of artistic failure, and it’s selling out. And that attitude gets your ass booted out of town faster than any other one.

John: Yeah. I feel like sometimes these writers they want to be both Charlie Kaufman and Greg Berlanti. They want the huge giant career, making thousands of shows, and to sort of be completely unyielding and singular in a vision at all times. And those aren’t compatible goals really.

Craig: I mean, I would argue, and maybe Charlie will come on our show. Because I suspect that Charlie as he’s making his films runs into moments most days when he’s shooting where he does have to kind of just adjust, or in the editing room he realizes he’s got to move a thing this way or that. Everybody is doing it.

John: Everyone is doing it. If you watched – you didn’t watch – I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we could watch that and like I don’t feel he compromised that much. I felt like he had a very singular vision and made that singular vision.

Craig: So here’s the thing. That’s because what he makes is unique.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It will always seem like it is the product of zero compromise, but it’s not.

John: That’s true.

Craig: When you read stories about what Francis Ford Coppola was going through and dealing with when he was making Godfather, it’s like well surely he didn’t compromise ever. Oh my god, yes he did. Yes he did. Quite a bit. You know, it’s what you do.

John: Let’s talk about taste. I think an important thing is to be able to understand what is good writing and what is not good writing, especially when it applies to what transfers to the screen. The ability to have good taste on the page and seeing how that taste applies to the screen. And that match between your taste and what an audience’s taste is is crucial.

Craig: Yeah. And that’s kind of magic. I mean, there’s no way to quantify that. It is an essential part of what we call talent, I think. There’s talent in creating something. There’s also talent in predicting with some level of accuracy how it will be felt by other people. Because that is the job. Anybody who is creating any art with no concern or prediction or thought about the audience’s reaction is, well I just don’t believe it.

Because that means there’s no intention. And there’s always intention.

John: I want to play this clip from Ira Glass where he’s talking about taste and how he finds that there’s often this gap between you have taste, but you don’t have the craft yet. Let’s listen to what Ira Glass says.

Ira Glass: Somebody had told this to me, is that all of us who do creative work, you know, we get into it. And we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. Do you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point they quit. And the thing I would just say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as what they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, you got to know it’s totally normal. And the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work.

Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

John: So I think back to when I was at USC for film school and one of the great resources that we had was a film library, so I could check out all of these screenplays and just go through and read these great scripts. And my writing was not as good as these scripts. And I recognized that it wasn’t as good as these scripts, but for whatever reason I wasn’t afraid of that. I aspired to hit that level and I kept working to get to that level.

People sometimes get crushed with self-doubt where they just don’t – they recognize that they’re not at that level and they don’t think they can actually get there. And so I like that Glass is pointing out that it’s often just to work to get yourself up to that level of polish.

Craig: If you had told me that that was an interview with Chris Keyser I would have believed you. They sound so similar.

John: They really do. That’s a good point.

Craig: So weird. So, yeah, this is a terrific observation and it’s something that somebody else had sent me a while ago, because it’s one of those things when you read it you’re like, or you listen to it and you go, oh of course, I mean, it’s so obvious and yet it had been kind of floating right there right under my consciousness.

I think that the reality of what he’s describing is one of the reasons I’m so angry all the time at critics. Because everyone who eventually gets to do something good is working through the gap. And while they’re working through the gap there are people who are brutalizing them in print and suggesting you’re never going to get there. Stop. Quit. You stink.

And I wish that would not happen. Because I do think there are probably people who left too soon who were one or two things away from kind of putting it all together. Scott Frank said something to me many years ago that seemed a bit dramatic at the time, but in hindsight was absolutely correct. And that was, he was reading something I’d written and he said, “The thing is you have yet to be really born as a writer.” And I was like well that’s very dramatic. [laughs] That’s a very, very dramatic statement. I’ve been working at this for 15 years Scott. I make a pretty good living.

But his point was that I hadn’t sort of become myself yet. And that maybe you could argue that that’s part of being in the gap. Not only is there a mismatch between your taste and your work, but also there is perhaps not enough of your own self in the work. Because the work that is available almost always has zero interest in who you are.

John: Absolutely. I hadn’t really thought about your career in terms of taste, but I would say that you’ve always had much better taste than the movies that we saw your name on.

Craig: Well, I mean, some of those movies I love. So my taste actually isn’t that great.

John: The breadth of your taste extended well beyond the movies, the kinds of movies that you were making.

Craig: Yeah. If you looked at the movies I was making it was easy enough and reasonable enough to conclude that I was a goof.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Some of those movies I really do hold close to my heart and some I definitely do not. And you know some were just work. But I at least for better or worse suffered through quite a lot of public humiliation, even as I was successful. And I really wish I could sit down one on one with each one of those people and explain to them why what they did was harm. And unnecessary, by the way. It’s totally unnecessary. You can absolutely not like a movie but the personal part of it is so anti-art is I guess how I would put it.

You don’t realize it, but you say you love film, you don’t if that’s what you’re doing.

John: Yeah. Let’s get back to the choices of what kinds of projects you’re working on and how many projects you’re sort of pursuing. Because a choice I’ve seen writers make is they have some success and they just take anything that comes their way. And there’s the temptation to never say no because you don’t know where your next job is, but I’ve also seen the opposite where people just say no to everything and then people stop asking them to the dance.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And so it’s that balance between saying yes enough that you’re still engaged as a writer, but not pursuing too much, or pursuing junk, or just becoming overcommitted and then just failing because we both know writers who just collapsed under that.

Craig: I was talking with Todd Philips about this. It was after he did The Hangover and it was a massive success. And maybe he was talking to Martin Scorsese. And Martin Scorsese, I’m just going to say he was, because that makes the story way cooler, but I think it was him. And he was telling Martin Scorsese that his world had changed because he had made The Hangover and suddenly he was getting sent everything, all sorts of things. And people were offering him the biggest possible things and he was sort of paralyzed and thinking that maybe he was just going to take time.

And then Martin Scorsese said, “The best advice I can give you is after you have a huge hit of any kind, a big success, jump right back on the horse, as fast as you can. Because if you don’t then the weight of that success grows and becomes almost an unbearable load. Because you’re never going to be able to beat that.” You can’t do that again. And so sometimes you actually have to just do something.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And maybe it’s the wrong choice, but doing nothing for too long becomes its own kind of dangerous addiction. And you’re absolutely right. Sooner or later people are going to be like, huh, wait, we forgot about you. And no one wants that.

John: Yeah. We should revisit this topic in a few episodes and I want to look at what we’ve noticed never works and sort of what are the pattern of like please don’t do this thing. Because even what you’re describing in terms of like the writer who has a big hit and then just like becomes paralyzed or fearful of doing anything else, or over-celebrates that one thing, I think we’re going to find quite a few of those things that could actually be useful for our listeners.

Craig: All right. I agree.

John: All right. Let’s get to listener questions and now over the last few weeks we’ve all enjoyed hearing from Oops and the romantic adventures of Oops. And Megana has another question for us today that is not an Oops situation. I’ve got to preface this by saying this is about as opposite of Oops as we could imagine.

Craig: Anti-Oops.

John: It’s anti-Oops, but I also feel like it’s a good season opener because I feel like we’re going to revisit this topic down the road. Megana, come on and tell us the story of Shocked.

Craig: Oh boy.

Megana Rao: All right. Shocked in LA wrote in about his friend. “Like many aspiring writers a close and talented friend of mine, a lady in her late 20s started her career at an agency. She quickly left and found work in production while pursuing her ambition of writing. She has a few great scripts under her belt and a couple we even wrote together. One of her friends from the agency was promoted this past year and agreed to represent her.

“A few months ago she gets a call from her boss from that agency, a 70-year-old man. He’s upset that she hid her writing ambitions from him. He asks her out to dinner to discuss her career. She was thrilled. He has a ton of industry pull and can really help her. But, he was a very difficult boss who put her through all sorts of inappropriate behavior, from commenting on her looks, to sharing sexual imagery in the office.

“Surprise, surprise, the dinner turned out to not be about her writing. He wants to explore their sexual connection. It was a stereotypical #MeToo moment. He told her that she shouldn’t have a boyfriend if she’s serious about writing and should have a casual sexual relationship with him instead. It was extremely demoralizing and degrading for her. He continued harassing her, basically chasing her out of the parking lot, but she was able to safely make it home.

“But here’s the thing. She’s still a baby writer, no credits or awards, repped at the same agency this guy works at. He’s her agent’s boss and seems pretty powerful. She’s afraid to even tell her agent what happened because of all the implications. However, I’m scared that he will have access to her if she stays at that agency. What if he terrorizes and sexually harasses her this way? Or destroys her career?

“My friend knows how hard it is to get represented in Hollywood. Although she has a manager, she doesn’t want to let go of her rep. But I think this baby agent has very little power anyways. He’s never even sent her on a general. My friend is also afraid to take on her powerful ex-boss/sexual harasser and certainly doesn’t want to be branded by this before anyone has even seen her work.

“What can I do to help her and what can she do to help herself?”

John: Ugh. All right. So much here. First off, we’re going to talk about Shocked. We think Shocked is a man. We’re guessing Shocked is a man, so we’re going to refer to this friend – the person who is writing this letter as Shocked. And the woman as the person who is going through this horrible situation.

This sucks. And so my first instinct was I don’t know what to do this, and so what I do in this case is I ask really smart friends. So I reached out to six of my smart female writer friends to get their take on what the right steps were. But before we get into that, Craig, what’s your first read on the situation?

Craig: Oh man. Well, so this is an interesting situation where I think while I want to tell Shocked’s friend to draw her flaming sword and slay the dragon, it’s so easy for me to say that. And it’s not so easy to do it. I do believe that in today’s day and age everybody has quite a bit more power than they used to. I mean, they used to have zero and now they have quite a bit in the sense that all she has to do is pick up the phone and call Deadline and this guy is in massive trouble.

But, she’s right to understand that that comes at some sort of cost. Given that the agent she has at this agency is not a bigshot. So Shocked describes this agent as a baby agent who has very little power and has never set this woman up on a general meeting, I don’t think there would too much lost if she walked from that agency and went maybe to try at a different agency, clean break, and see if she could find somebody else. That is I would call it the path of least resistance, because it doesn’t seem like you’d be losing much.

The path of greater resistance is to bring this incident to the attention of the board of directors at that agency.

John: So in talking with the six women yesterday one of the points that came up again and again is that the big moves are great in theory, but they don’t necessarily help the woman. So going out with a flaming sword or going to Deadline or one of those things, that’s not necessarily going to help her.

Craig: Right.

John: And so what we really want to do is help her. What is the thing that helps her in this moment? The thing that was universal across this was to write it down. And both Shocked needs to write down everything that he remembers about this conversation he had with her. He needs to encourage her to write this all down, so she has it on paper. So if she decides to do something she has it down on paper that this is what happened. And that she has evidence if she decides to use it at some point about what happened.

Almost everybody I spoke with said she should leave this agency, and that included an agent I spoke with saying that this agent is not getting you work, this agent is not powerful, this junior agent you’re dealing with. You should leave because if you don’t trust going to this agent necessarily with this issue, like how can you trust this rep? How can this person actually represent you if you can’t even tell them that their boss is doing this?

You have to leave that agency. And you already have a manager. Just leave. There’s no reason to stick around.

Craig: Yeah. I think so. And if there is a desire in a very pro-social way to prevent this man from doing this to other people by calling him out, that is something that Shocked’s friend should only do through a lawyer. This is also a moment where I think you want to lawyer up.

John: We have some resources on that as well. So you may want to lawyer up, but people I spoke with recommended Time’s Up is not the right place to go to. Women in Film may be the right hotline for your call. Because this is actually kind of what they do is people who had these situations to talk through, OK, let’s deal with the trauma that you’re actually encountering right now and let’s see if there’s other women who have had similar reports. Let’s see if there’s some grouping of action that could make sense here, so it’s not just you against this 60-year-old man.

You are at the start of your career, he’s at the end of his career, and just remember that through all of this is that he’s almost out the door and you’re just coming in.

Craig: Right. I think that even if Shocked’s friend doesn’t have an intention to launch missiles, it’s still good to talk to a lawyer, even if all you get out of that is an understanding of what you’re supposed to write down. What are the details that matter? What are you supposed to write down? What are you supposed to save? And what do you do if you turn a corner and here’s there? What do you do if he leaves a message or he texts you?

Having a lawyer advise you at least on some best principles there would be a good thing. But that is a good point. As a 60-plus-year-old man not only is he going to be out of the business while you’re still in the business, assuming that your career flourishes, you’ll be working and he’ll be dead.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So if you want revenge there is that one revenge which is you dance on their grave. But this really sad and infuriating. And it’s sad and infuriating that this guy still feels protected enough by the world that he’s pulling this crap.

John: That – I want to spend a moment here. Because this is a man, a 60-year-old man in 2021 who somehow has been able to – this person obviously opens Deadline. This person can see in the world like what has happened to a person like him again, and again, and again, and still thinks like, oh, I’m special, I’m different, this is not going to happen to me. The hubris. The arrogance of this guy.

I mean, in addition to the shitty behavior he’s doing to this woman, just that he believes the rules that have taken down all these other people do not apply to him drives me mad.

Craig: Not only that, but he believes that the rule that 20-year-old women generally aren’t attracted to 60-year-old men also doesn’t apply.

John: Yes.

Craig: So like he’s in a deep deluded state. I’m 50. I can’t believe that my 51-year-old wife still finds me attractive. [laughs] So I don’t know what this dude is smoking. I guess he’s just smoking his own ego, and his own arrogance. And, also, let’s face it. This business has entitled him. He doesn’t pull this crap if it hasn’t worked before.

John: Yeah. And so obviously it’s important to acknowledge that you are not the first person he has done this to, obviously. And so it’s not your responsibility to take up the sword for all the other people, but remember that you are not the only person. So there’s nothing special about you. This is his pattern of doing this that has gotten us into this situation.

Some other advice I got from the women I spoke to is for Shocked make sure you don’t infantilize this woman. She is a grown woman who can make her own decisions. And she actually has more agency in this situation than she may realize. So you can encourage her, but don’t box her into a situation. Don’t tell her she has to do something, because she doesn’t have to do anything. She can choose what is the appropriate step for her to take.

This person also said useful advice might be you don’t want to be a side character in someone else’s story. And so if she thinks of herself as the protagonist in this story, like screw this guy. This guy did a bad thing. And it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do about this next step. But the important part is it’s up to her and she doesn’t have to let him drive the narrative from this point forward.

Craig: Yeah. I think Shocked is being a good friend. I think good friends want to help and they want to find out what they can do to help. And maybe this is help. I don’t know. Maybe this is hurt. You know? Because the other issue is if this woman is like, wait, you put my shit on Scriptnotes? That would be bad. So hopefully this was something that they discussed. Obviously we’ve anonymized everything quite extensively here.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think at a minimum let’s get to super practical stuff. Super practical stuff makes absolute sense that she would leave the agency. And that when you leave the agency also, Shocked’s friend, lawyer. Don’t leave the agency by you calling and going through a weird, awkward conversation with your agent.

John: No. The manager can do this as well.

Craig: Yes.

John: Many of the women said your manager just tells the agency, “You know what? She doesn’t want to be repped there anymore.” And that’s it. It’s done.

Craig: I would actually still advise lawyer. And here’s why.

John: OK.

Craig: Managers cannot be trusted completely in this regard. They have a deep conflict of interest.

John: All right.

Craig: Lawyers are governed by a higher authority. The State Bar. And their attorney/client privilege. And ethics. And all that stuff. And a lawyer, you can tell your lawyer anything. Anything. And it’s confidential.

You can’t say that about a manager. They can blab your crap anywhere they want. So, I would say lawyer. Clean break. Have the lawyer communicate that. Make it nice and simple and final. And then, yeah, moving on.

John: So, the Women in Film hotline 855-WIF-LINE. Or it’s womeninfilm.org is the organization. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

Obviously, Shocked, if you want to keep us apprised to sort of what this person decides to do in the future we’d love to hear about it, and of course I’m sure we’ll get plenty of emails in from folks with their opinions what to do.

Megana, I’m curious to hear your opinion on this as a writer in her 20s. What was your first instinct on this and where do you see this shaking out?

Megana: Yeah, I mean, it was really upsetting to read. And I think last month when things started opening up after the pandemic we saw all of those horrible mass shootings. And this past week, or past couple of weeks I think as LA has opened up and people are returning to their offices I’ve just been reading so many horrible, and hearing these stories about women and assistants who are continuing to have these #MeToo type stories.

You know, it’s just like a very sad sobering reminder that these issues were not solved and they have not gone away. But we’re all just forced to be away from each other for a year. But now that the world is opening back up we have to figure out a way to fix them. The problems haven’t gone away and it’s just really disheartening to be reminded of these things that we were dealing with pre-pandemic and where we are now.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s such a good point. It pushed them aside because we were literally not in offices for them to happen. But now they’re back.

Craig: You kind of want to hope that it’s also not a case where there’s this weird pent up aggression that’s going to emerge and that we’re going to go through a period where it’s even worse. I hope that’s not the case. But one thing that we always have to keep in mind is we cannot applaud ourselves constantly for the progress that’s been made because the progress will never be perfection. And there is always going to be this stuff going on. Because we can’t pre-crime these things. We can’t get ahead of them.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They’re going to happen. And dealing with all of that and how we handle those situations, it is going to continue to put young women in particular in very difficult positions, put women of all ages in very difficult positions. That’s going to keep happening. We hope less and less. But no one should be surprised that this is continuing.

John: Yeah.

Megana: Yeah.

John: One last point I want to make, and someone brought up as I spoke to them yesterday, is that I think we still have this vision of agencies being super powerful and sort of like the Mike Ovitz model. And I think agents can help you. I really don’t think they can hurt you that much. And so I think her rejecting this guy is not going to hurt her. I don’t think agents actually have that power in 2021 the way we might have mythologized them before.

I don’t think her leaving the agency is going to hurt her career because it hasn’t helped her career.

Craig: Right. Yeah, from a practical point of view the agent that just got promoted from off a desk, yeah, that’s not necessarily the best person in the world. I mean—

John: Megana, I cut you off. What were you going to say?

Megana: Oh, I think I was just going to say to answer your earlier question, the thing that also makes me so sad about this is like this woman has had something really horrible and discouraging happen to her, and following up on our conversation about patterns of success, like she now has all this self-doubt and anxiety about the value of her actual work. And then she has to be the one to advocate for herself. Oh my god. It’s such a difficult standard for us to keep and for us to expect people who have been abused to be able to do that. It just breaks my heart.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It is one of the more insidious aspects of this that we don’t talk about enough. And that is that people start to question whether or not they’re good at all.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s something that Megan Ganz spoke about, well, with her typical clarity and intelligence when she had her experience being harassed and abused by Dan Harmon. One of the things that hurt that most was being unsure of whether or not her position on that writing staff was because of her skill. And that is crushing. That is a stomach-churning thing to think. The face I have? I’ve never had to wonder. If somebody was going to give me something it was because of the work. It certainly wasn’t because of my appearance, or how they felt about me romantically.

And I’ve never had to ask myself that question. I’ve never had to contemplate whether or not I was being hoodwinked and gas lit.

John: Yeah. Two of the women I spoke with yesterday they related so strongly to this story because they had had very similar things happen and their response from 20 years ago was just like, OK, well I’ll just move on and I’ll just suppress it and I’ll move on. And I do think there’s an opportunity now to – if this woman chooses to – to address this and stop it if she wants to rather than just having to say like suppress it and pretend it didn’t happen.

Craig: Well, we are certainly hoping the best. And if you can, therapy, and talking to a professional about these things now I think is always advisable.

John: Agreed. All right. It is time for One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. The first is an HGTV series called Home Town Takeover which sends a big HGTV crew to Wetumpka, Alabama to do a bunch of makeovers around the town. Wetumpka, Alabama is where we shot Big Fish. It’s where the house in Big Fish is. And one of the houses they remodel is the Big Fish house. And so it was so surreal and wonderful to see – our first day of shooting was at the Big Fish house. And to see them refurbishing and remodeling this house.

What they kind of say on the show, but they don’t make entirely clear, is that house is really kind of just one story and we stuck a fake second story on the top of it. But it was never really meant to stay. And we were supposed to take it all down and the owner said, “No, no, just leave it up.” But it was never meant to be livable.

And so the crew had to go through and jerry rig to sort of make it actually livable space. But it was so cool to see both that house but also that town and to realize if I hadn’t written the movie Big Fish that wouldn’t have happened. It was just a weird connection to like, oh, this series exists because I decided to adapt this book into this movie. So it was a really weird thing to see. But actually a really well done HGTV series. So I recommend you check that out if you like those kind of shows, or if you like Big Fish and you can see that.

My second One Cool Thing is Standard Ebooks. And so Project Gutenberg has the text of a zillion books that you can download for free which is great, but it’s not lovely formatted text. It’s not as good to read as a Kindle book might be or a printed book might be. What Standard Ebooks does is they produce a collection of these high quality really well-formatted, accessible, open source, free public domain ebooks. And they’re really good.

So, just go to their site, standardbooks.org/ebooks and you can download basically all the great classics, but really good versions of them. So if you’re looking for those try Standard Ebooks.

Craig: You know what? I don’t need a One Cool Thing. You had two.

John: I gave you two.

Craig: We’re good.

John: But, here’s a One Cool Thing you can do is on Episode 500 we said that we desperately need to go back to a segment called Change Craig’s Mind. But we need to figure out how we’re going to change – what’s a topic we can change Craig’s mind about? So if you have suggestions of things you’ve heard him say that you think, no, that’s wrong and we can get him to change his mind, we’ll see. And we can try over the course of this next season to change his mind about anything.

Craig: It’s possible. It’s possible.

John: Well, Craig, I know you hate mayonnaise. Could we change your mind about mayonnaise?

Craig: Oh my god, no. That would be just an utter waste of time. It would be a waste of a segment. That is disgusting.

John: Aversion therapy. But we need to find another mayonnaise, something Craig doesn’t really like–

Craig: It’s the word.

John: Maybe the sense that you don’t like it because you don’t kind of like get it. And then you get it and you’re like, oh yeah, it turns out I do like that.

Craig: I mean, it’s possible. Lately I have been watching more ventriloquism.

John: Yeah. Absolutely. Late at night he fires up the iPad by the side of the bed.

Craig: I make myself a mayonnaise sandwich and sit down and enjoy a fun evening of ventriloquism. Absolutely not.

John: My brother grew up on mayonnaise sandwiches. That was his go-to sandwich.

Craig: Oh god. Geez.

John: Wonder Bread and mayonnaise.

Craig: Ugh. Man, that is white.

John: Nothing else.

Craig: Good lord, that’s white.

John: So white.

Craig: White.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: White. That’s so white it’s white.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Brian Ramos. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lot of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. That’s also where you can sign up to get updates on the Scriptnotes book. And we’ll be sending out an update this week about where we’re at with the book. Craig, Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thanks guys.

Megana: Thank you guys.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right, Craig, so the Scriptnotes book, we think it’s going to be actually a pretty hefty book because there’s just a lot of material in there. And I’m curious what you look for in a physical printed book. What are things that excite you about books? What are printed books that you’ve especially liked over the course of your career?

Craig: Well, for most fiction I don’t care because I’m just reading. I just want to turn pages. So the quality of a paperback, or even a hard cover book is not particularly important to me. But when it’s a book about a topic, something real, or a book that’s meant to be educational, a few things stick out.

I like size. I like the book to be larger. Because I think it gives you more detail. I really like mixed media. I like the idea of images. There was a book I had as a kid that was more than just images of course. I think it might have been published by World Book. And it was about the universe. And there were plastic overlays and there were sort of grown up versions of popup book style stuff, where you’re moving tabs and turning wheels and things to actually accentuate whatever the value of the imagery was. And then photographs of real things.

I like to engage, feel like I’m kind of involved with the book. You know, play with it a little bit.

John: Yeah. I also really love books that I can sort of pick up and flip to any page. Like for nonfiction books, that I can just flip to any page and find something interesting. I think the reason why I loved my D&D books so much growing up is you could just flip to any page in there and it was interesting. And you didn’t have to read them from the start to the end at all. It’s just join at any point.

I also really loved – Peanuts had these great sort of encyclopedia things. They were these colorful things about space and the world. And I loved those too growing up because you just flipped to anything and you’d just find interesting articles. So you could join them at any point in the middle of the story.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there’s a kind of a book fetishization where people are really into the binding and the edges. You know, there’s like the ruffled edges.

John: Oh yeah. I hate them.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t like the ruffled edges. It looks like your book got stuck in something.

John: I hate gilded edges as well. Because they were sharp on my fingers.

Craig: Ah, yeah, nothing says luxury like gold-tipped pages. Uh-huh. I just want the book to not fall apart. That’s really all I’ve ever asked for. I don’t really care about that other stuff. I’m not a book fetishist.

A similar problem with NFTs where I’m really struggling just to understand why people are doing it. And like similarly when people – I have a first edition of this thing and I’m like, yeah, but the value of that thing is not the object.

John: No.

Craig: It’s like saying I have first edition CD of this – who cares? It’s plastic. It doesn’t matter.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s the content that matters. So I don’t get too wrapped up in the whole booked-y thing.

John: Do you like book jackets or the ones where it is printed directly on the cover?

Craig: Interesting. Ever since I was a kid, first thing that I do is take that off.

John: Yeah, I don’t like book jackets either. I don’t take the jacket off, because I don’t want to lose it, but I also don’t like it. I like them for being able to use them as a bookmark. I will use those to sort of mark what page I’m at.

Craig: I was a dog-earer. Still am a dog-earer. I know I’m not supposed to. It’s like wrong.

John: It’s a crime.

Craig: Crime, whatever, against this inanimate object. But ever since I was a kid I would – my fingers would be the color of whatever the cover was because the cover was often some sort of red or blue.

John: Yeah, cloth.

Craig: Right. And so when you take the dust jacket off your fingers – Megana, cover on/cover off?

Megana: No, no, no. I always do cover off. Because I always tear it.

Craig: Oh that’s interesting. So you’re reading violently.

John: She’s a violent reader.

Craig: Wow.

John: There’s an increasing trend towards the jacketless books where the artwork is printed directly on the book itself. And I just like that. Sometimes it doesn’t look as neat on the shelf, but who cares what’s on the shelf? What actually looks good in your hands and sitting on a table is more useful to me. And it’s one less thing to lose. I don’t want to lose a thing. I don’t want to rip it. I don’t Megana ripping my book covers.

Craig: Right.

John: Megana housesits for me. I don’t want to come back and all the book covers are ripped.

Megana: I also borrow a lot of your books, with your permission.

Craig: Oh. I thought you were just admitting grand theft bookery.

John: So Craig two recent books – and the Scriptnotes book will not be anywhere near this size, or epicness, but the Art & Arcana book, we talked about it in the opening, was really sort of a remarkable feat of history and all the artwork throughout the ages. That was a book that you want to keep and you want to sort of, you know, again, you can flip through it. I think I did read it straight through, but you could also just go to any point in the middle of the story.

Craig: Those are wonderful books, especially for people who are already into a thing. And there are areas like that where, you know, sports in particular. And I should have mentioned Michael Witwer who also worked on – it wasn’t just Kyle. But if you are into something then – and you know that other people are into it you have an opportunity to do something different.

I’m a baseball fan and every Christmas – I say Christmas even though it was boring Chanukah – I would get oh we got you a book about the Yankees. And there’s like 4,000 books about the Yankees. And most of them are just bad. Because they’re just the same old crap. And they’re literally made for stupid Christmas presents. They weren’t actually made to be loved.

So, try and make something that – if you’re a bookmaker–

John: Yeah. We’re bookmakers now. So we’re going to try to make something that people will love. Hey, what is your opinion of the ribbon inside books? The bookmark ribbon?

Craig: [laughs]

John: You don’t like it?

Craig: I hate it.

John: You do? All right. Because I’m a big fan. In our sample artwork we have the ribbon, so I guess you’ll have to rip that out.

Craig: Megana, if you say that your problem with the ribbon is that it tears then we know you are reading these books in far too aggressive fashion. Are you a ribboner or a non-ribboner?

Megana: I like the ribbon, but I’ve been reading books on my Kindle through the pandemic and I recently got a book in paper, or like a physical book, and I have so many papercuts on my hands. I’m like what is wrong with me?

Craig: Yeah. What is wrong with you? [laughs]

John: She’s both too strong and too fragile.

Craig: Normally I’m really supportive of your position, but I’m concerned that you’re reading books incorrectly.

Megana: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: What’s happening?

John: What is happening? I will say that I love a big book, but sometimes the book is just so big it’s uncomfortable to read. And so I just got the Ultimate Sandman, because I’d never read Sandman. And I was like I’ve got to read Sandman. So I read Ultimate Sandman which collects the first run of Sandman. And it’s great and it’s oversized so it’s actually much easier to read and you can see the artwork better. It’s just terrifically well done. But man it is heavy. So it’s a thing you cannot read – you can kind of read it on your lap, but you certainly could not read it laying down. It’s awkward–

Craig: That’s the thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen these, as we get older I see more–

John: Large print books.

Craig: –ads targeted to me that I’m like, oh boy. And they have these contraptions where it’s like suspend the book over your face in bed. And you’re like oh boy. But it’s true. If I have a heavier book that I’m reading after about 15 or 20 minutes if I’m in bed my elbows start to ache.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because, god, can you believe that, Megana? I mean, how old are we? Do any of your friends ever say, “Ow, my elbows ache?”

Megana: Wait, because you’re holding the book up?

Craig: See, she literally doesn’t understand. She’s trying to comprehend how that could happen. Just you wait.

John: Just you wait. A thing I won’t put up with anymore that I used to not have a problem with is cheap paperbacks. I find it just really hard to read cheap paperbacks at this point.

Craig: The print is too small. I can’t read it.

John: The print is too small and you can sort of read through the next line. So I’m going to read my Kindle. I’ll buy a hardcover, but if I can’t get the hardcover I’ll probably read the Kindle.

Craig: I mean, I must admit that if there is a Kindle version to purchase I’m purchasing it. It’s just – or an Apple iBook version. The one thing that I miss and I wish they could solve is page numbers. If they could solve that.

John: It’s nice to be able to refer to a page number.

Craig: Yeah, if they could just solve page numbers.

John: They get better at it.

Craig: That would be nice.

John: So, Craig, now that you’re moving to my neighborhood you will have Chevaliers as your neighborhood bookstore. It is terrific, so hopefully you’ll get back in the habit of buying some books.

Craig: Yes.

John: In print.

Craig: Yes. I do love a bookstore. I love to browse a bookstore. And inevitably if I browse a bookstore I’m going to buy a book. And the place that we have near you per square foot I think has more bookshelf space than any place I’ve ever been other than a library. There’s bookshelves – so many opportunities for books.

John: Excellent. We love it.

Craig: So we will purchase those.

John: And one of those books will be the Scriptnotes book that you won’t read.

Craig: Complete with ribbon.

John: Love it. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thanks guys.

John: Thanks Megana.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Bye.

Links:

• Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana Book
• Heartbreaker and The Breaker Upperers
• Noah Evslin’s pitch for Guild Awards
• Ira Glass on Taste
• Women in Film helpline for sexual harassment and misconduct in the entertainment industry:(855)WIF-LINE (855-943-5463) or reach out online here
• Hometown Takeover
• Standard Ebooks
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Brian Ramos (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.