Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Episode 403 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On today’s show, something we have never done before. It’s just me. No guest. No John. He’s off visiting family I believe in Colorado. So it’s just me today. And we’re going to do something that I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time. I’m going to be talking to you today about structure and character. I’m kind of giving you my whole theory on how to write a movie.

I know it sounds like a lot. And it is a little bit of a lot. It’s a talk that I’ve done at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival a number of times. I haven’t done it in a while. And I feel like their exclusive right to it has ended, so now I’m giving it to you. This is sort of my how-to write a movie.

But before we get into that we do have a little bit of business to go through. And it’s about our live show. Our next live show, we’ve talked about this before. It’s going to be on the evening of Thursday, June 13 here in Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel which is a beautiful venue. And it is benefiting Hollywood Heart. We do this every year. It’s a great charity.

We have probably the best guest lineup we’ve ever had. We have Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry. We have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We have Kourtney Kang, writer of Fresh Off the Boat. And we have Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. And by the way that’s – Melissa McCarthy and Ben – I’m not talking about other Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcones that you don’t know. I mean the ones you know. Those.

It is just about the most comedy firepower I think we can ever assemble on one stage for this show. You’re not going to want to miss it. Tickets I believe are still available but we’re getting close to running out, so take a look at the link in the show notes and get your tickets.

All right. Let’s get into it. So when we talk about writing a script a lot of times we’re talking about structure. There are, I don’t know, four million books about structure. I went online and I looked for just images based on screenplay structure and what I saw was kind of mind-blowing. There are these long narrow lines with little ticks on them and then there’s a pie chart. And then there’s a swirly thing that kind of looks like a snail shell. There’s a triangle. There’s a diamond. I think there’s a parallelogram. And if there’s not a trapezoid maybe one of you can get on that.

All of this is designed to help you learn how to structure a screenplay. Here’s the problem. All of it is done from the wrong end. All of it. It’s all done from the point of view of analysis. They look at things, they take them apart, and then they say, look, all these pieces fit into this swirly shape, or this diamond. The issue is that’s not going to help you actually write anything because when you write you’re starting from scratch. You’re not breaking something apart. You’re building something out of nothing. And when you’re building something out of nothing you need a different set of instructions.

I can think of a doctor who takes bodies apart. That’s a medical examiner or a coroner. That’s not the doctor you want to go to to make a baby for instance. It’s just a very different thing, right? So we’re going to come at it from the point of view of making babies and your baby is your script. Don’t worry, we’re going to keep this safe for work.

So, structure. Structure, structure, structure. Screenplay is structure. You need to know how to do your structure. Structure I’m here to tell you is a total trap. Yes, screenplay is structure, but structure isn’t what you think it is. Structure doesn’t say this happens on this page, this happens on that page. Here’s a pinch point. Here’s a stretchy point. Here’s a midpoint. Structure doesn’t tell you what to do. If you follow strict structural guidelines in all likelihood you will write a very well structured bad script.

Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Take a moment. Think about that for a second. I’ll repeat it. Structure is a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Structure isn’t something you write well. It’s something that happens because you wrote well. Structure is not a tool, it is a symptom.

When we think of rigid structural forms I have to tell you there’s nothing honest about them. There’s nothing true about them. They’re synthetic. There’s never been one single great writer who created one single great screenplay following a structural template. Not one.

What real writers follow are their characters. And what great writers follow are their characters as they evolve around a central dramatic argument that is actually meaningful to other human beings. Let me stop for a second and tell you that we are going to get into real practicals but for a bit now we’re just going to talk a little bit of philosophy. First, let’s consider what we call basic structure. There’s a Syd Field point of view. You have your three acts, your inciting incident, act break escalation, magical midpoint character shift, third act low point, and kick off to climactic action.

We also have the Chris Vogler Hero’s Journey, ordinary world, call to action, refusal of call, acceptance of call, and blah, blah, blah. Save the Cat is a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of what to do but where’s the why? Who came up with this stuff in the first place? Why is it there? Why are there three acts at all? Why is there a low point? Why do we like it when there’s an inciting incident? Why do we like it when there’s a low point? If we don’t know why those things are there how are we supposed to know how to write them? Because we process the world through our consciousness and our consciousness is sort of a natural storyteller, all of us are actually walking around doing this right all the time. We just don’t know it. We’re narrativizing our own lives better than most who try and do it on purpose on Fade In or WriterDuet, or Highland2. I don’t know any other software.

Right now you’re sitting there, you’re riding along in your car, you’re being passive. You are accepting this structure talk, wondering when I’m going to get to the practicals. And I will. But later if someone asks you about this experience you’re having you will naturally, without thinking, create a story. You won’t have to consult a graph or a chart or a swirly thing. You’ll just tell the story.

Here’s a story. I listened to a podcast. It was on the following topics. Reasonable people could agree or disagree. Anyway, I’m the same. That’s not a very good story, is it?

Here’s another story. I was listening to a podcast and it was OK, it was sort of a little boring, but then the person said this one thing and it reminded me of something else I’d heard once and that tied back to this moment in my life where something really interesting happened. And now I’m wondering maybe if I was wrong about that thing and I should be doing it this way instead. Huh. There you go. And that story has character, meaning you. That story is about you and maybe it’s about me. It’s about a relationship that we’re having right now through this podcast, for better or worse.

And if you were to relay this story, this experience, you might share some parts of this that you thought were interesting or some parts that you thought were stupid, but you will naturally contextualize it as such. This moment in time did or did not help you in your desire to change. We live our lives this way, but when we sit down to write we somehow forget. You know who never forgets? Actors. They have to get it because they are the characters and we are experiencing them as the characters.

So there’s that old cliché line: what’s my motivation? Well it’s not a joke. Believe it or not that is the key to structure. What is the purpose of all this storytelling that we engage in, all this narration? Well, narration helps us move through a changing world. And story is about a change of state. There are three basic ways your story changes. And this applies I think to every possible story.

The first way is internal. This is what is going on inside the character’s mind. This is the things they’re thinking, they’re feeling, their emotions. And this axis goes all over the place. It zigzags up and down. Then there’s interpersonal. That’s the main relationship of your story. It has a start, it has an end. It usually begins in a kind of neutral way. Then depending on how your story unfolds it can dip and then rise and then plummet and then spike. And finally you have the external axis. That’s the narrative, the plot, the things that are going on around you. And that generally is just a straight line. Start to end.

All of this is made up of scenes. And within scenes we’re doing something that follows the Hegelian dialectic. Calm down. You don’t need to look it up. I’ll help you out. The Hegelian Dialectic basically is a way of thinking about how we formulate ideas and thoughts and arguments. You take a thesis. That’s a statement. Something is true. And then you apply to that an antithesis. No, that’s not true and here’s why. Those things collide and in theory what results from that is a new thesis called the synthesis. And that starts the whole process over again. That synthesis becomes a thesis. There’s an antithesis. A new synthesis. That becomes a thesis. Constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.

And who is the person firing these antitheses at these theses? You.

So, as we go through this talk never forget this one simple fact. At any given moment as you begin a scene you have a situation that is involving those three axes and you are going to fire something at at least one of them to make something new. That is all story is. But what is the glue that holds all those changes together? What’s the glue that you the creator can use to come up with your antitheses and get your new syntheses and do it over and over again?

And that brings us to theme. Theme is otherwise known as unity. Unity is a term that was first used by Aristotle in Poetics and this is one you actually should read. I know you’re like, Aristotle? Hegel? Hegelian guy. Calm down. It’s fine. In fact, Aristotle was really a contemporary writer in his own way. Poetics is an easy read. It will take you about 30 minutes. It’s a pretty good bathroom book. And in it you’ll find a lot of things that we hear today, like for instance the worst kind of plot is an episodic plot. Well, that’s pretty much true.

What did he think of unity or theme? Well basically theme is your central dramatic argument. Some of those arguments are interesting. Some of them are a little cliché. And the quality of the argument itself isn’t necessarily related to the quality of the script. For instance, you can have a really good screenplay built around you can’t judge a book by its cover. That’s OK. The theme itself doesn’t have to be mind-altering or, I don’t know, revolutionary. It’s your execution around it that’s going to be interesting.

But the important thing is that the argument has to be an argument. I think sometimes people misunderstand the use of theme in this context and they think a theme for a screenplay could be brotherhood. Well, no. Because there’s nothing to argue about there. There’s no way to answer that question one way or the other. It’s just a vague concept.

But, man and women can’t just be friends, well, that’s an argument. Better to be dead than a slave. Life is beautiful, even in the midst of horrors. If you believe you are great, you will be great. If you love someone set them free. Those are arguments.

Screenplays without arguments feel empty and pointless. You will probably get some version of the following note. What is this about? I mean, I know what it’s about, but what is it about? Why should this movie exist? What is the point of all this?

Now, it’s really important to note you probably don’t want to start with an argument. That’s a weird way to begin a script. Usually we think of an idea. And that’s fine. But when you think of the idea the very next question you should ask is what central dramatic argument would fit really well with this? And ideally you’re going to think ironically. For instance, let’s talk about this idea. A fish has to find another fish who is somewhere in the ocean. Got it. The animators will love it. Water. Fish. Cool.

OK, let’s think of a central dramatic argument. How about if you try hard enough you can do anything, even find a fish? That’s a bit boring, isn’t it? How about sometimes the things we’re searching for are the things that we need to be free from? Well, OK. That’s an interesting argument. I’m not sure how it necessarily is served or is being served by this idea of a fish in the ocean. How about you can’t find happiness out there, you have to find it within yourself? That could work. That’s sort of Wizard of Oz-ish.

But let’s go really ironically. How about this one? No matter how much you want to hold onto the person you love, sometimes you have to set them free. Well, that is pretty cliché but it is a great central dramatic argument to pair with a fish needs to find another fish. Because when you’re looking for somebody out there in the deep, deep ocean you the writer know that what you’re promising is they’re going to find them and then have to let them go anyway. And that is starting to get good.

All right. Let’s get into some practicals, shall we? Because this is thematic structure. This is going to help you write your script. In thematic structure the purpose of the story – and listen carefully now – the purpose of the story is to take a character from ignorance of the truth of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. I shall repeat. The purpose of the story is to take your main character, your protagonist, from a place of ignorance of the truth or the true side of the argument you’re making and take them all the way to the point where they become the very embodiment of that argument and they do it through action.

So, let’s talk about how we introduce. We begin in the beginning with the introduction of a protagonist in an ordinary world. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times. But why? Sometimes movies don’t start ordinarily. You probably saw Mad Max: Fury Road. If you didn’t, do so. Well, there’s no ordinary beginning there. I mean, it’s crazy from the jump. Ordinary doesn’t mean mundane. Although sometimes it can.

What ordinary means here is that the protagonist’s life essentially exemplifies their ignorance of the theme, of the argument that you want them to believe eventually. In fact, they believe the opposite of that argument. That’s how they begin. Typically in the beginning of a story your main character believes in the opposite of the theme and they have also achieved some kind of stasis. There’s a balance in their life. In fact, their ignorance of that theme has probably gotten them to this nice place of stasis and balance. It doesn’t mean they’re happy. What it means is that without the divine nudge of the writer-god their life could go on like this forever. It’s not a perfect life. It’s not the best life they could live but it’s the life they’ve settled for. Their stasis is acceptable imperfection.

If we’re going to circle back around to my favorite fish movie, Marlin can live with a resentful son as long as he knows his son is safe. That’s acceptable imperfection. I get it. Nemo resents me. He’s angry at me. He feels stifled by me. That’s OK. He’s alive. I can keep going this way.

And then along comes you, the writer. Your job is to disrupt that stasis. So you invent some sort of incident. Ah-ha. Know we know the point of the inciting incident. The point of the inciting incident is not to go, “Oh god, a meteor!” The point of the inciting incident is to specifically disrupt a character’s stasis. It makes the continuation of balance and stasis and acceptable imperfection impossible. It destroys it. And it forces a choice on the character.

OK, but why? I’m just going to keep asking that question. But why? But why? But why? Why do you have to do this to this poor character? Because you are the parent and you have a lesson to teach this person, or animal, or fish. Your motivation is part of your relationship to your character. You don’t write an inciting incident. You don’t write push character out of safety. That gives you no real guidance to let something blossom. What you write is an ironic disruption of stasis. Ironic as in a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts that is, and hear me out, genetically engineered to break your character’s soul.

You’re going to destroy them. You are god. And you are designing a moment that will begin a transformation for this specific character so you have to make it intentional. It can be an explosion, or it can be the tiniest little change. But it’s not something that would disrupt everyone’s life the way it’s disrupting this person’s life. You have tailored it perfectly and terribly for them.

So, what’s the first thing your character wants to do when this happens to them? Well, it they’re like you or me they’re going to immediately try and just get back to what they had. They have to leave their stasis behind because you’ve destroyed it, but everything they’re going to do following that is done in service of just trying to get it back. Shrek doesn’t have his swamp, so he has to go on a journey so he can get his swamp back. The point here is that the hero has absolutely no idea that there is a central dramatic argument. They’ve made up their mind about something and their mind has not changed.

Your heroes should be on some level cowards. I don’t mean coward like shaking in your boots. I mean coward like I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the way things are. Please just let me be. And underlining that is fear. And fear, especially in your character, is the heart of empathy. I feel for characters when I fear with them. It is vulnerability. It’s what makes me connect. Every protagonist fears something.

Imagine a man who fears no other man. He doesn’t fear death. He doesn’t fear pain. But, ah-ha, fill in that blank. But the point is it has to be filled in. You can feel it, right? Like he’s going to have to fear something. Because fear is our connection to a character. And a fearful hero should have lived their lives to avoid the thing they’re afraid of.

You, are taking their safety blanket away. So I want you to write your fearful hero honestly. What do they want? They want to return to what they had. They want to go backwards. And believe it or not that is the gift that is going to drive you through the second act. The second act.

Oh, the thing that’s so scary. No. No, you should be excited about it. Let me take a break for a second and say that everything I’m talking about here is mostly to serve the writing of what I would call a traditional Hollywood movie. That doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean cliché. It doesn’t even mean formulaic. It just means it’s a traditional narrative. So, I don’t know, if you’re looking to be a little more Lars von Trier about things, well, I don’t know how interesting or helpful this is going to be. But I’m presuming that most of you just want to write a general kind of movie that conforms to a general kind of movie shape.

So this is how we’re going to help you do it. And the second act is the part that I think freaks people out the most. They get scared. But I think you should be excited about pages 30 to 90 roughly. Please do not quote me on those numbers. But first, are you getting it? Have you stopped thinking about plot? Have you stopped thinking about plot as something to jam characters into? Because when you do that that’s why you run out of road in your second act. You ran out of plot because it wasn’t being generated by anything except you.

Ah-ha. But when you start thinking of your plot as not something that happens to your characters but what you are doing to your characters that’s when you can lead them from anti-theme to theme. How do we do it?

First, we reinforce the anti-theme. That might sound a little counterintuitive but hear me out. You’ve knocked your hero out of their acceptable stasis. They are now on the way to do whatever they need to do to get back to it. The hero is going to experience new things. And I want you to think about making those new things reinforce her belief in an anti-theme. Because this is going to make them want to get back to the beginning even more. Oh, it’s delicious. We’re creating a torture chamber basically. Keep thinking that way.

Imagine your hero is moving backwards against you and you push them forward and they push back. Ah-ha. Good. Design moments to do this. You’re going to keep forcing them forward, but you’re also going to put things in their path that make them want to go backwards. That’s tension. That’s exciting. And more importantly when they do get past those things it will be meaningful. You want to write your world to oppose your character’s desires.

So, you’re going to reinforce their need to get back. Ah-ha. So, let’s see, Marlin wanders out into the ocean. His theory is the ocean is really, really dangerous. What should the first thing be? Maybe let’s have him meet some sharks. And actually, oh, you know what, they’re not scary at all. Oh god, yes they are. The ocean is in fact way worse than he even imagined. That’s what you need to do. He needs to get his son back really, really soon so he can return to stasis. And then when you’ve done that you’re going to introduce an element of doubt.

Something or someone lives in a different way. Someone or something in your story is an example of the life of theme rather than the life of anti-theme. So remember, your hero believes in one side of the central dramatic argument. It’s the wrong side. You want them to believe the other one. OK, but they believe the wrong one. They need to run into someone or something that believes in the right side of it. This element of doubt creates a natural conflict for the protagonist because of course I believe this, you believe that. But it’s also attractive to them on some level because – and again, really important. Your hero is rational. This is a critical component of a good hero. You are dealing with somebody that probably lives irrationally, fine, but they have to have the capacity to see that maybe there is a better way.

You’re living things maybe the wrong way but you need the capacity to see things going the right way. It is fear that separates the irrational hero from their rational potential. And because they’re rational when they get a glimpse of this other way of being they’re going to realize there’s value to it through circumstance or accident or necessity or another character’s actions. These are all things you’re inventing, but here’s why – the hero is going to experience a moment of acting in harmony with the right side of the central dramatic argument.

This could involve their own action or it could be something that they watch someone else do or something they experience passively. But this is why the magical midpoint change occurs. See, now you know why. You’re not just doing it because a book said. These things generally happen in the middle of the movie because our hero’s belief system has been challenged. There is an element of doubt. There is not a willingness to go all the way and believe the other side of the argument yet. They may not even understand the other side of the argument.

There’s only a question that maybe for the first time they have to wonder if their side of the argument that they started with, the anti-theme, maybe it doesn’t explain or solve everything. Have I been living a lie? That’s what’s happening in the middle of a movie.

So, remember in Finding Nemo there’s a moment where because Marlin has to rescue Dory from this field of jellyfish he invents a game. She forces him to do something that he normally wouldn’t do. Play. He’s doing it for the old Marlin reasons of neurosis, but it’s working. She’s following him. And as he’s doing it he gets a glimpse of what it’s like to live without fear. He gets a glimpse of what it’s like to be carefree. To not worry so much. To be, well, a little less conservative with your own life. And he loves it.

And then what happens? She gets stung. Oh, glorious. And that gets us to this reversal of theme. The very moment your hero takes the bait that you put there to think about maybe switching sides – maybe switching sides of the argument – you need to hammer them back the other direction. The story has to make them shrink back to the old way. Dory almost dies in the jellyfish. And why? It happened because Marlin decided in a moment out of necessity to have fun and then forgot himself, forgot his fear. And what’s the price of forgetting fear and not being vigilant? Pain and tragedy. The tragedy of the beginning is reinforced and the hero retreats once again.

Ah. It’s good stuff. And it means you have to be kind of mean. Sadistic really. But it turns out that these are the kinds of things we want out of our narrative. It’s the essence of what we call dramatic reversal.

I’m going to put aside the examples from Pixar for a second and I’m going to talk about somebody real. There’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. This is a true story. Jose Fernandez is born in Cuba and at the age of 15 he escapes Cuba with his mother and his sister and many others, all packed in a very small boat. And during the difficult village he is awakened to the sound of someone yelling. That someone has fallen overboard.

And Jose, 15 years old, doesn’t hesitate. He dives into the choppy water to save whoever it is. And it’s only when he drags this person back onto the boat does he realize he has saved his own mother. Wow.

Jose Fernandez grows up, he’s a hell of an athlete. He goes on to pitch. Major League baseball pitcher. And he’s really good. In fact, he is the National League Rookie of the Year. And he’s an All Star. His future isn’t just bright, it is glorious. Jose Fernandez is living the American dream and I don’t know how much you know about baseball but ace pitchers they get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

But at the age of 24 Jose Fernandez dies. He doesn’t die from illness. He doesn’t die from violence. He dies in an accident. But not a car accident. He dies in a boating accident. A boating accident. Now, do you feel that? Do you feel more than you would if I had said he died of a blood clot? Well, why? I mean, death is death. Why does this detail of the boating accident make you feel more?

Because it’s terribly ironic. Because this is a guy who saved his own mother from water and then he dies in water. It implies that there’s a strange kind of order to the universe even when that order hurts. And this is where we start to pull irony out of drama. This is essential to your choices when you decide how you’re going to push back against your hero. How you’re going to hammer them back. How you’re going to punish them.

Think about that Pixar Short, Lava. And I talk about Pixar all the time because it’s just pure storytelling and they’re really, really good at it. So he thinks he’s alone. He’s a volcano in the ocean. He thinks he’s alone. And then he discovers he’s not alone. But when he discovers that he also discovers that she’s facing the wrong way and she can’t see him. And he doesn’t know how to sing anymore. So she doesn’t even know he’s there. Oh, that’s terrible. It’s unexpected. It’s contradictory. And it’s ironic. And that’s exactly what you want to do.

So, consider the irony that’s involved with Marlin. Marlin is worried that he has lost his son. Every parent who loses a child, even for an instant in a mall, is scared. But that’s not enough. Let’s talk about what the people at Pixar understood they needed to do to this character from the very start to punish him so that his journey would be that much more impressive. It’s not enough to say, look, you love your kid, your kid is lost, you’ve got to go find your kid. Everybody loves their kid, right?

OK. But they go a step further. They say, you know what, there’s no mom in the picture. Mom died. It’s just you. You’re a single dad. You’re the only parent. You’ve got to find your kid. No, that’s not enough. How about this? How about your wife and all of your other children were eaten in front of you because you couldn’t protect them? And the only kid you had left out of all of that, the only memory you have of your wife and your happy life before is one tiny egg. One kid.

And that is still not enough. And this is why Pixar is so amazing. Because they knew that the further they went the more we would feel at the end. It’s not enough that he only has one kid. When he looks at that little egg he can see that the one kid that’s left is disabled. He has a bad fin. Now it’s enough. Now you have created the perfect circumstance for that individual, you cruel, cruel god of story.

Now I know why he’s so panicked that that kid is somewhere out there in the ocean. When you’re designing your obstacles and your lessons and the glimpses of the other way and the rewards and the punishments and the beating back and the pushing forward, keep thinking ironically. Keep thinking about surprises that twist the knife. Don’t just stab your characters. Twist the knife in them. If someone has to face a fear make it overwhelming to them. Don’t disappoint them. Punish them.

Make your characters lower their defenses by convincing them that everything is going to be OK and then punch them right in the face, metaphorically.

So, sorry to tell you that as a writer you are not the New Testament god who turns water into wine. You are the Old Testament god who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun. And when you’re wondering where to go in your story and what to do with your character ask this question: where is my hero on her quest between theme and anti-theme? Or I guess I should say between an anti-theme and theme. And what would be the meanest thing I could do to her right now? What would be the worst way to do the meanest thing right now? Then do it. And do it. And do it again until the hero is left without a belief at all.

So as the demands of the narrative begin to overwhelm the hero, the hero begins to realize that her limitations aren’t physical but thematic. Think about Marlin. I promised that I would never let anything happen to him. But then I suppose nothing ever would happen to him. That’s what Dory says. And Marlin knows she’s right. He knows that if all he does is basically lock his kid up to prevent anything bad from happening to his kid nothing good will happen to his kid. The kid won’t have a real life.

So, now what? Well, the answer is obvious, right? If you love someone let them go. And I’m sure that at that point in the movie if you ask Marlin that he would say, “I suppose that’s the thing that I’m supposed to believe.” But they can’t do it. Not yet. In fact, you’re going to want to have a situation where they have a chance to do it. And they fail at it in some important way because they don’t really accept the central dramatic argument you want for them. They just lost the belief in their original point of view. They’re trapped between rejection of the old and acceptance of the new. They are lost. Their old ways don’t work anymore. The new way seems impossible or insane.

Shrek doesn’t want his swamp back anymore. He wants love, but he is also not willing to do what is required to try and get it. He’s trapped. And this is why they call it the low point. It’s not random. It’s not the low point because the books say page 90 is the low point. It’s the low point because your character is lost and in a whole lot of trouble.

Their goal in the beginning, which was to go backwards to the beginning to achieve stasis, to re-achieve stasis, that goal is in shambles. Their anti-thematic belief, whatever it was that they clung to in the beginning of this story, it’s been exposed as a sham. And the enormity of the real goal that now faces them is impossibly daunting. They can’t yet accept the theme because it’s too scary. When your core values are gone and when you aren’t ready to replace them with new values, well, you might as well be dead. And this is why people go to movies.

So, granted, we love the lasers, we love the explosions, we love the ka-boom, and we love the sex, and we love the tears, but what we need from drama – and when I say drama I mean the drama of comedy and the drama of drama – what we need are these moments where we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost.

And that’s why the ending is going to work. Because without this there can be no catharsis. Catharsis comes from the Greek word for vomiting I’m pretty sure. So just think of a lot of your plot as shoving really bad food down the throat of your hero because that’s how you’re going to get to this catharsis.

Now, I want to say that these approaches don’t help you map out a second act. What these approaches do is help you develop your character as they move through a narrative. And that narrative is going to impact their relationship to theme. And when you finish that movement of this character interacting with story so that their relationship to the theme is changing from I don’t believe that to, OK, I don’t believe what I used to believe but I can’t believe that yet, suddenly you’ll be somewhere around the end of the second act.

And here is the big secret. John and I have said this many, many times. There are no acts. So you can’t really be scared of the second act. It doesn’t exist. It’s not some sort of weird wasteland you have to get through. It’s just part of one big piece. There’s one act. It’s called your story. And now we get to the third act, sorry, end of your one act. And this is the defining moment. Your character needs to face a defining moment. And this defining moment is their worst fear. It is their greatest challenge. This is the moment that will not only resolve the story that you’re telling but it will resolve the life of your character. This moment will bring them to a new stasis and balance. Remember synthesis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we are again.

But what are you going to do? You have to come up with this thing. This is the difference between what I’m saying to you now and what a lot of books say. Books will say, “Defining moment goes here.” And I’m saying, yeah, but how? What makes it so defining? You’re going to design a moment that is going to test your protagonist’s faith in the theme. They need to go through something where they have to prove that they believe this new theme. They have to prove it. It’s not enough to say, OK, I get it. What I used to think is wrong. There’s a new way that’s right. That’s not enough.

They have to prove it. And they have to prove it in a way where they literally embody the point of that idea with everything they have. But before you do that don’t you want to torture them one more time? Of course you do.

The relapse. A nice ironic relapse. You want to tempt them right before this big decision moment. Right before the defining moment. You want to hold that safety blanket up and say, “Go ahead. Go back to the beginning. You get it. The thing you wanted on page 15, I’m giving it to you. Don’t go forward. Don’t change. Go back.”

And what do they have to do? They have to reject that temptation. You design a machinery where they have to reject that temptation and then do something extraordinary – extraordinary – to embody the truth of the theme. And now you get acceptance through action. The hero acts in accordance with the theme. Specifically by doing so they prevail. They have to act.

So let’s go back to Marlin. It’s not enough for Marlin to say, “I get it now. I’ve heard the wise turtles. I’ve seen the way Dory is. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve got to let you live.” That’s not enough. What Pixar does is create a perfect mechanism to tempt and then force action. Dory is captured. And Nemo says to Marlin, “I’m the only one who can go in there and save her.” And this is a great temptation. This is where Marlin has to reject the old way. We’re saying go ahead, you’ve got your kid, we’re giving him back to you. It’s all you wanted. On page 15 you just wanted your kid. Here he is. Get out.

But he has to act in accordance with the theme. So he rejects that and he says, “No. Go ahead, son. And try and save her.” And that simple decision is how he acts in accordance with theme. And it is terrifying. And now you get one last chance to punish him. Briefly. Go ahead. Let’s see Nemo coming out of that net and let’s think that he’s dead. And let Marlin hold him. And let Marlin remember what he was like when he was in that little egg. And let Marlin kind of be OK with it. Because that’s what it means to live in accordance with theme.

If you say, look, sometimes if you love someone you have to let them go, that’s one thing. Actually having to let them go is another thing. Letting them go and seeing them get hurt is yet another. That is the ultimate acceptance of that idea, isn’t it? And that’s what he sees.

But then, of course, faith in the theme rewards. And Nemo is alive.

So then you get this denouement. What is the denouement? Why is it there? It’s not there because we need to be slowly let down and back out in the movie theater lobby. It’s there because we need to see the new synthesis. You have successfully fired a billion antitheses against a billion theses and come up with one big, grand, lovely new synthesis. Please show it to me. So we now see that the after story life is in harmony with theme.

And here’s the deal with the first scene and the last scene of a movie. If you remove everything from the story except the introduction of your hero and the last scene of your hero there should really be only one fundamental difference. And here it is. The hero in the beginning acts in accordance with the anti-theme and the hero at the end acts in accordance with the theme.

Now, this should all help you create your character. When you’re creating character I want you to think of theme. I want you to imagine a character who embodies the anti-theme. You can be subtle about this. You probably should be. It generally works better if you are. And I want you to think of your story as a journey that guides this character from belief in the anti-theme to belief in theme. Remember you’re god – angry, angry god. You have created this test. That’s what your story is. In order to guide your character to a better way of living, but they have to make the choices.

Oh, if you’ve heard, “The worst character is a passive character,” that’s why. They have to make the choices or you’re making it for them. And then, well, it just doesn’t count, does it?

If you can write the story of your character as they grow from thinking this to the opposite of this, and guess what, you will never ask well what should happen next ever again. You’ll only ask how can I make the thing that I want to happen next better. That’s a whole other talk. Maybe I’ll do that one in like five years or something.

I hope that you found this interesting. It was kind of fun to do. I mean, I’m not going to do it frequently because it’s scary. I mean, John really does run this show. But I’m all here all alone. But I kind of liked a chance to at least talk to you directly about all this stuff and I hope that you got something out of it. If you did, great. And you can let us know.

And here comes the boilerplate. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by, well, I don’t know. But it’s a surprise and we’ll let you know who it was the week following.

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

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

Some folks have also started doing recaps and discussion on the screenwriting sub-Reddit. If that continues, terrific. You can check there.

And you can also find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

And I get none of the money.

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

And with that, I bid you all good luck. Go torture your heroes.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets here!
• Aristotle’s Poetics
• José Fernández
• Lava, Pixar Short
• Finding Nemo
• Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks (Light) and (Dark)!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

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

Craig: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

John: You’re never wrong.

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

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

Craig: And power.

John: Power. Yes.

Craig: And love.

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

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

John: We need your physical bodies in that space.

Craig: Yeah, we need you.

John: So that we will feel together.

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

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

Craig: And our guests.

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

Craig: We’re always full of surprises.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh god. Come on.

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

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

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Sure.

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

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

Craig: Yeah.

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

Craig: I know. I know.

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

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

John: I don’t go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: It’s Aladdin from Disney.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It’s a collaborative medium. Yeah.

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

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

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

Craig: This is the life of the writer.

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

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

Craig: I need ten seconds.

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

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

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

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

John: Craigism?

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

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

Craig: My only disciple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Alarm timer sounds off]

Whoa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John, what do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.

John: And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide.

Craig: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It doesn’t matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yeah.

Craig: So it’s always there.

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

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

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

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

John: There’s money, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Sure.

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

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

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

Craig: I sure do.

John: They have to have–

Craig: Thesis.

John: The thesis and then you have to–

Craig: The examples.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Totally. Yeah.

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

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

John: I don’t know what they are.

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

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

Craig: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig, where are you at?

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

John: That guy, yes. That guy.

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

John: Apparently they’re talking.

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

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

Craig: Wait, what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Victory John.

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

John: Done.

Craig: Chris, get rid of your friend.

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

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

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

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

All right, John, dig in.

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

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

Craig, how do you resolve Garrett’s question?

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

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

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

And if you don’t like it, that’s OK.

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh my god.

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

Craig: What a cruel, cruel joke to play.

John: That would be pretty amazing.

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

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

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

John: That’s probably true.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Yes.

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

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

Craig: Lost. Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Like most things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Before being eaten.

John: Yes.

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

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

Craig: It’s his real name.

John: I reject the premise of Foggy Brume.

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

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

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

Craig: Whoa.

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

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

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

John: Great.

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

John: Oh yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

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

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE Buy your tickets here!
• Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks (Light) and (Dark)!
• Aladdin Trailer in theaters now!
• How to Invent Everything by Ryan North
• PANDA Magazine by Foggy Brume
• Find past episodes here, Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

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: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 401 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, a brand new feature. We asked you to record your brief pitches for movies and series. Today we’re going to listen to five of these and share our honest first impressions. We’re also going to talk about a development in the agency negotiations. And my most pressing question about Chernobyl.

But first we have to promote our live show which is coming June 13. It’s a Thursday night at the Ace Hotel. It is a benefit for Hollywood Heart, which is a fantastic charity. We can now announce two of our guests. Craig, who are two of our guests?

Craig: And this is going to dislodge quite a few tickets. I mean, I feel like people are going to start buying. So, number one–

John: Well, people have started buying. I think the rush on the box office will begin right now.

Craig: Correct. The Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts will begin right now. Our first guest that we can announce is Alec Berg, showrunner of Silicon Valley and showrunner and co-creator of Barry. Terrific show that I think is the most critically acclaimed show on television, of all shows.

John: After Chernobyl maybe.

Craig: No, no. No. New York Times did not like Chernobyl.

John: Oh, I’m sorry.

Craig: No, no, I can’t get The New York Times to like anything I do.

John: Ah, Craig, I’m sorry. I had no idea.

Craig: Well, listen, we’re doing really well. Don’t get me wrong. We’re like in the 90s, which for me is like in the billions because of where I’m from.

John: The logarithmic scale of Craig Mazin.

Craig: The New York Times review was bad. Not bad in the sense of they didn’t like the show, but bad in the sense that it was just a bad review. It was poorly written. I thought it was stupid. I’m not helping–

John: Let’s get back on topic. Let’s talk about how great it is that Alec Berg is going to be joining us on the show.

Craig: Exactly.

John: And I already have started writing questions for him because I watched this season of Barry and I have so many questions. Not even like plot spoiler questions, but how do you in a writers’ room figure out how you’re going to do that thing. So I’m excited to talk with him.

Craig: He’s a great person to ask those questions for because he does have one of those remarkable clockwork minds. And then we have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of longest running sitcom in history, It’s Always Sunny, and a new Apple show that is going to be out at some point. And, by the way, you know who is – I mean, I can’t talk about a lot of the actors that are on the show, but it’s a great cast. But do you know who is number 16 on the call sheet?

John: Craig is it you?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Ah, Craig. So not only are you making television shows, you’re now starring in television shows.

Craig: Just so people know, like on the call sheet every day there’s a list of all the actors that are in it. And number one on the call sheet means you’re the star of the show. And then it kind of goes down from there. On this show number 16 is really low. I’m barely in it. But, still, I’m in it. But I’m in it.

John: That’s going to be amazing.

Craig: And Rob is a great, great guest. A terrific guy to have on the show.

John: So he was actually on a previous one of these live shows that I was not at. So, you and Dana Fox hosted a show where he was a guest. I missed that. So this will actually be my first time meeting him. I’ve talked with him on the phone before, but this will be my first time asking him questions about all the stuff he’s working on.

So, we have two showrunners who are coming on. We have more guests that will be announced soon.

Craig: Oh yes.

John: I think they will fit along that same thing, but we don’t want to tease too much. So you should get your tickets now. There’s a link in the show notes for where you can get your tickets to this big event. Thursday, June 13, at the Ace Hotel here in Los Angeles. There will be games. There will be giveaways. You should absolutely come.

Craig: And, again, benefits Hollywood Heart which is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins is involved with and it helps kids who are at risk and kids with HIV. It’s a great thing. Come on, I mean, what else do we have to say? Alec Berg. Rob McElhenney. Us. Helping people. And more guests to come. Buy your tickets, folks.

John: You should buy your tickets. You should also buy t-shirts. T-shirts are up for sale now. They don’t kind of go down at any point. This isn’t one of those things where they’re limited times. You can buy them kind of whenever you want to buy them, but you should buy them now so you can wear them to the live show. These are the sort of VHS-inspired ones. They go all the way back to when Scriptnotes was distributed by tape, so sort of underground rings that would copy tapes and put them around.

Craig: Exactly.

John: So really it’s a celebration of the origins of Scriptnotes after 400 episodes.

Craig: Yeah. We’ve always been in our late 40s.

John: It’s remarkable how that works.

Craig: We’ve always been the caretaker. Yeah, that’s my favorite shirt by the way. I love that shirt design.

John: Last week on the show we were joined by Chris McQuarrie and we talked through movies that don’t get made anymore, movie genres that don’t get made anymore. And Ryan Smith tweeted at me. He said, “Hey guys, great episode. Loved the discussion. For the ‘sword and sandals’ or Christ figure against Rome features would it be a stretch to say we still make them, but just in the form of Star Wars?”

Craig: Sort of. I mean, there’s definitely elements of that in Star Wars, but Star Wars also has elements of pirate movies. Star Wars has elements of war movies. Star Wars has elements of, yeah, I mean it sort of meshes together lots of different things. But no question, I mean, if you watch – let’s go back to the original first Star Wars in 1977, you know, and you have a benign figure sacrificing himself to save others and so on and so forth.

John: Yeah, I mean, like a Tatooine and sort of like, you know, that feels like a desert world. It feels very much like that kind of sword and sandals kind of place that he’s in. So movies four and seven kind of feel that way to me. But also we have the pod races in the prequels. And you don’t have those pod races without the chariot races.

Craig: That’s right. Exactly. That’s basically Ben-Hur via CGI. And but I think it’s also fair to say that we’re going to see the Christ story in everything. I mean, it’s across all genres. Animated movies are that frequently.

John: Now, Craig, you often say that you root for the Empire in these movies. So, do you also root for Rome in the Christ figure against Rome stories?

Craig: Well, you know, I mean, Rome is holding things together.

John: They are holding things together. They are holding back the chaos.

Craig: The question is not how evil is Rome. The question is how evil would the replacement for Rome be. And we kind of know because after the collapse of Rome you have the darkest period in western history. It’s just a brutal ongoing disaster the dark ages. Disease. Superstition. Torture. Murder. Just unpleasantries.

John: Yeah. And important knowledge was forgotten. The book I’m going to get to as a recommendation later on, like they figured out how to make concrete and then they forgot. They forgot the recipe for concrete.

Craig: Just literally forgot.

John: So there were people who were living in structures that they could no longer build, which is just a fascinating thing to think about.

Craig: I feel like sometimes that’s where we are now.

John: Ah.

Craig: I know.

John: We want to make sure that institutional knowledge is not lost.

Craig: Yeah, man.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I think the Internet helps, but it doesn’t solve all of the problems.

Craig: No.

John: That’s why we keep the first 400 episodes of Scriptnotes always available for people to download through the app or to download seasons. We used to sell the USB drives. We want to make sure the institutional knowledge of Scriptnotes continues on.

Craig: Of course. And have we sent the USB drives over to the seed bank? I can’t remember if we did that or not?

John: So they’re stored in the vault. Unfortunately the vault flooded, but it’s going to work out somehow. Speaking of longevity and things going on a long time.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: So we’re recording this on Friday. So, I.M. Pei, the renowned architect, passed away as we’re recording. And Herman Wouk, The Winds of War. So I.M. Pei was 102. Wouk was 103.

Craig: Wow.

John: You know what? It’s sad that talented people have died, but come on, when you live past the century mark that’s awesome.

Craig: It is.

John: I want to live for at least 100 years.

Craig: Of course you do. And, oh, well you obviously will live until whenever your parts become obsolete and not replaceable. But I have to say every time someone famous dies now whatever twinge of sadness I have of their passing and the fact that we don’t have them anymore is quickly eclipsed by a larger twinge of sadness that they won’t get to see our current president not be president anymore.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They’re not going to see that. And I’m so bummed out. I don’t want to die before I see that.

John: Yeah. You want to go out at a good place, a good time.

Craig: And I don’t mind being political. I don’t care. [laughs]

John: [laughs] Craig doesn’t mind being political? I can’t believe it.

Craig: You know what? I’m going to speak my mind. How about that?

John: I would say when my dad passed away, this was when I was in college, I was of course sad to lose my father but in the years past that point I would say the thing that kind of makes me saddest when I think back about him is that he didn’t get to see sort of what the Internet became. Because he was involved because he was an engineer at AT&T. So he was involved in the very early stages of what became the Internet. And he would just be blown away by what sort of what it became and what it grew into. And so those are the conversations I miss having with him are mostly about the things that happened, how the world changed, and how excited he would be about the stuff that came.

Craig: I just had a vision of you waking up at night and there is the ghost of your father. And he’s looking at your phone, scrolling through the Internet. And then he just turns to you with a shocked, devastated look, and says, “John, it’s all porn.”

John: Ha!

Craig: It’s all porn.

John: Yeah. The Internet is made for that.

Craig: Internet is for porn.

John: Yeah. Let’s get onto our other topics. So, this past week I had two videos out. I had a video that was put out by the WGA about the Start Button. So it’s a little animated video. Matthew Chilelli did the music for it. Of course, because Matthew Chilelli is a genius.

I also recorded a video with Michele Mulroney where we talked about screenwriter issues. It looks like our audition tape for hosting the KCLM morning news because we’re seated side-by-side. It was my first time using a teleprompter. Teleprompters are fantastic. I love Teleprompters.

Even those two things were not the biggest news of the week, because on Thursday evening it was announced that Verve had signed onto an agreement with the WGA. Verve became the largest agency to sign an agreement with the WGA. So, folks who want to be represented by Verve can be represented by Verve again.

So the WGA in their statement said that, I always go back to what the WGA officially said so I don’t speak out of turn, but in their official statement said, “WGA and Verve representatives first met face-to-face on April 30 and thereafter exchanged counter proposals. The back and forth with Verve was the most substantive negotiation with an agency we’ve had to date.”

And that’s true. From my perspective, the ability to actually talk through specific things was great. And that’s been one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about this part of the process is to really get down to fine details on stuff.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I would put this in the category of not-insignificant. Because Verve is a legitimate agency that represents quite a few writers, what like 300 WGA members? That’s a lot. They are not part of the ATA, so that’s the one thing that I think a lot of people didn’t realize. This wasn’t a case where the WGA had a strategy of splitting off an ATA company and succeeded. But nonetheless–

John: Yeah, one small agency which was already an ATA member had split off, but it’s not something you’d heard of.

Craig: Yeah. So we’ll put that in the is-insignificant category. So, the other significant victory here is that there is proof of life in that at the very least even on the most entrenched people on both sides of this fight between the Writers Guild and the ATA there is evidence that an agreement is possible. Negotiation is possible. And so that’s promising.

John: Yeah. Well let’s talk about what is different between the original code of conduct, so we can put a link into so people can read it, but the basic things that are different from what other folks had signed before is that it’s a mutual agreement. So it’s not just here’s the code, take it or leave it. It’s an agreement that both parties are signing. Both parties have the right to open and renegotiate this agreement. It clarifies that agencies can represent producers who do not employ writers, which was a real question.

It gets around some of the reporting onus by just saying that agencies can copy the WGA on invoices and request for payments. So the WGA sees those records but they don’t have to file a whole separate listing of things. And it changes – it backs off on how often agencies have to list which films they are representing for sales and other stuff. So they don’t have to do it as often. So it backs off on some of their reporting requirements. Those are the big things that the WGA sort of specified or are different in this code of conduct.

Craig: Yeah. Now, so good news and bad news, right? So the good news is that the WGA was able to negotiate this with Verve and that, OK, the WGA was clearly willing to meet them halfway on certain things. Bad news is none of those things are the big issues that we have with the ATA. So one of the reasons that Verve was a good candidate for this is that they don’t do packaging. And they don’t have their own production company the way that say William Morris Endeavor does.

John: Let’s be clear on one thing. Verve has traditionally done TV packaging. And so even in Verve’s statement they said like this doesn’t mean that we are against TV packaging. And sort of saying like – which I took to mean like if the ultimate agreement that’s reached says that TV packaging is OK we want to be able to go back and do it.

Craig: Right. OK, fair enough. It wasn’t a large part of their business.

John: It wasn’t a big part of their business.

Craig: But that makes total sense. And I think one thing that was really interesting and smart by the WGA for sure, although to give into at the very least, although it was surely something that Verve insisted on, was a most favored nations’ clause.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: Essentially if you go make a deal with the ATA that is more favorable than the one you made with us, which is in the eventuality of the deal almost certain, that Verve gets lifted up to that as well. And that’s really important because it provides a relief valve. If that clause isn’t there the problem is then there is nowhere to go for negotiation between the WGA and the ATA. Because what you can’t do is then go and undercut what you just did with Verve. It makes no sense essentially.

John: Well, it also gets rid of the first mover problem where you don’t want to be the first person to sign on because you’re worried that people later on are going to get better deals. So you know you’re going to get the best deal ultimately.

Craig: Right.

John: So I think that’s an important thing. And that truly was in earlier versions of the code of conduct. So the people who signed that earlier thing, they can take this deal if they prefer this deal.

Craig: Great. So that’s great. That’s all good news.

John: But let’s talk about what’s not in there. So clearly a decision on what TV packaging looks like, this agreement says you cannot do TV packaging. You can’t collect fees on that. And you cannot be a producer. And so those are two big things that the big four agencies are going to really be focused on.

Craig: Correct. I mean, that is – those two things are where the battle lines are drawn. I think both sides can easily make more out of some other issues if they want. But the big ones, as you just said, packaging fees and agency-owned production. So, that still needs to be worked out if it can be worked out. And we are now I believe we have four weeks of this behind us, correct?

John: Yeah.

Craig: OK. So, you know, let me just say the following. I’ll be brief about it. But I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed in general. Because this is not what I wanted. When I supported this movement from the start and we had Chris Keyser on and I was pretty – I think I was pretty demonstrative as I normally am. I believe that there are real issues that make the way the agencies conduct their packaging fee business and their producing business untenable as they are moving forward. We cannot continue in that way. And I think excellent points have been made why.

I think, frankly, that most of the people in charge of those big four companies agree. I think they are also aware that the way it’s been going cannot continue as is. It has to change. OK. This is what has been so disappointing to me. For four weeks essentially nothing has happened because there has been a breakdown in communication. And I know that both sides essentially are pointing fingers at each other and saying you’re why. But I’m a member of the Writers Guild. I’m not a member of the ATA. So I’m going to talk about the Writers Guild.

I am confused and a bit exasperated by our strategy of not talking to them. I don’t think that talking to somebody is a capitulation, nor do I think it’s a sign of weakness. I don’t know how much more leverage we could possibly have. Because in this situation we have 100% leverage as far as I’m concerned. If we choose to not we don’t have to ever enfranchise them again. With that in mind, a lot of people – way more than 300 – thousands of writers, including myself, would very much like to get back to the relationships that were functioning if not perfectly, fairly well, and in a way that was good enough to say let us improve this and salvage this.

So, what I’m urging is that we figure out how to get back into a room that makes sense. Because the room we were in clearly didn’t make sense. Whether it’s their fault or our fault the problem is all either side heard was offense and hurt and anger. Neither side seemed to understand what the other side was doing. All intentions appear to have either been poorly relayed or poorly heard. So, we need to figure out something.

I don’t mind a situation where best efforts lead to a failure. I am growing angry by the fact that we are not engaging actively in figuring out how to find a way to talk to the other side so that we can try and get something that works for everybody. And we don’t have to take it. That’s the thing. If in our hearts of hearts we’re like, look, this is 100% of what we want and we’re not willing to settle for less than 98% of it, fine. But try. You know, to not be in a room for four weeks because, I don’t know, there’s some theory that we can get 150 or 200 or 4,000% by waiting another four weeks doesn’t make any sense.

And there’s a pressure here and the pressure I will relay is, as always, I will speak on behalf of feature writers. So in our last negotiation – I’m sorry, I’m monologuing but it will be over soon – in our last negotiation I swore to myself, Craig, you’re not going to do this again. You’re not going to just willingly go along with the guild as they put all of the membership at risk and leverage us and our work to get a better deal for one part of the membership, TV writers. You’re not going to do it again because feature writers are the ones that are really getting kicked in the teeth every single day. And they’re the ones who are losing money year by year and they’re the ones whose employment is going down year by year. Ugh. Don’t do it anymore. And yet I fell into the trap and did it again because this entire agency battle, this entire agency battle, hinges on these two major issues and really both of them impact television far more than features. Far more.

So there are a lot of feature writers who once again are being told by their union you’re firing your agent and also maybe – maybe – you can get them back if we can figure out something that’s better for TV writers. And the longer this goes on the more tragic I find that.

So, in short, I remain committed to the goal, which is to improve a system that cannot continue as it used to be, right? So the status quo, what was before, unacceptable. We’re not going back to that, no matter what. But we don’t have to. That’s number one.

Number two, I want us to actually now do the work to get there. Whatever it takes, do the work. If we can’t get there, at least we tried. And then that’s on them. But if we’re holding our breath I just don’t see the point.

Rant over.

John: I know. We kept you in a single that whole time. You were in a tight single. You maintained for your whole monologue.

So, obviously I’m on the negotiating committee so I can’t talk about some things and I can’t talk about strategies and tactics and other stuff. I’m a little bit disadvantaged in responding to some of it.

Craig: Acknowledged.

John: But what I will say is that as a screenwriter I feel that the producing function of all this is a thing that keeps me up at night. And it kept me up at the very start of this all. The idea that five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road if we don’t address this now we’ll be kicking ourselves because that move from being a client to an employee is devastating. We cannot let that happen.

And I hear you when you say that it’s more a factor for TV than for features. I don’t think the distinction between TV and features is especially meaningful five, 10 years, 20 years down the road. I think there will still be two-hour things written, but I think if we don’t address this producing function now we’re going to see these same places producing features or essentially forcing themselves onto things that should be studio features because they can. So those are my big concerns.

Craig: I hear you.

John: If we don’t address this producing function, you getting the rights to that book you are going to be fighting with an agency to get the rights to that book because they are owning property. And that to me is the thing. And so even stuff that you’re developing now, I do think that if this weren’t addressed you would have to take these folks on as your partners in order to get to any of that stuff. And that just can’t happen.

Craig: Well, you’re right that probably in five years or so the distinction will dissipate entirely, but for the next five years there are a lot of people who are trying to earn a living as feature writers who don’t have agents now. One of the things that the Writers Guild has encouraged is for those writers to seek shelter in the arms of managers, all of whom are entitled to ownership and production of their client’s work, and frequently do, and have done for decades.

So, there’s a little bit of an inconsistency there. We already have representation that does that. If we are committed to eliminating the production of client’s material, we shouldn’t be recommending anybody go to a manager, which by the way is something I say all the time. I’m not a big fan of managers for precisely this reason.

I completely agree with you and this production thing has to be figured out. I mean, at the heart of it there’s really only two things I want. I want to know that the more money a writer makes the more money an agent makes. That connection has to be there. It has to be preserved. And the other thing I want to know is that if an agent has any connection to any entity that has a connection to another entity that owns some of that client’s work it has to be some amount that makes it essentially a silent minority partner. We can’t be run by the people that supposedly are working for us to advocate our interests.

But we’re not going to get there this way. And there’s a real danger of not talking. And there’s a real danger to us just saying, OK, it’s a permanent divorce. For one, as a writer, I don’t like the idea that every writer going into a television show is going to be represented by someone at some agency but the director and the non-writing producer and the actors are going to be represented by these massive agencies. We will lose power.

And I’m a pragmatist. I don’t like all this talk of, you know, the agents are mafia. They’re not the mafia. They’re agencies. That’s what they’re doing. They’re agencies. And they became successful because they do what agencies do. I want them to do it for me. I just want them to do it for me in a way that’s fairer. And we can’t get there until we get back in the room. I’m the back in the room guy. That’s my new official name.

John: I hear you there. So, we can speculate a bit on what could be coming next. And this is just free speculation. We’re not committing to any of this stuff. Things that could happen in the near period. Some other small agencies could decide to sign that same agreement. It’s really for the same reasons that Verve did is that they’re not involved in those things that are the big issues and so they might decide to sign.

Agents could move around. I don’t think that’s going to happen a ton and Verve seemed to try to downplay that in their thing, saying like they only want to grow organically. So we’ll see if any of that were to happen.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And whether agents would move and take former clients with them. And we could come back to discussions with individual agencies or the bigger group. A couple different ways that could happen. Craig, what do you think is the way that discussions begin again?

Craig: Well, in a case like this where the initial method of communication and exchange of proposals was such a crater, I don’t think you would want to just say, “All right, well let’s just do that again.” It didn’t work. So, in my mind the ideal would be for someone at the guild to kind reach out through a neutral third party mediator, and there are some wonderful people out there that serve that function all the time in business disputes, to say let’s just begin by having a small discussion through a mediator about how to have the discussion. Let’s just begin with that and not throw ourselves back into a situation where we’re set up to fail. Let’s figure out how we’re supposed to talk to each other. And begin that way. Just gently get back in and start undoing a lot of the ill effects of the way this has all gone down. I mean, the current situation as far as I’m concerned is bad for writers.

What I want is a better deal than what we used to have with the big agencies. What I currently have is you can’t be at the big agencies. That’s not better for me. It’s not better for any of us. The good outcome is something that makes sense for us there. At least that’s my feeling. I don’t believe that there is a good outcome where no writer is allowed to be at those agencies, because they won’t cease to exist. Oh, far from it. And we will get hurt if we’re not part of that mechanism.

John: I’ve had a lot of conversations with writers who are either doing great or not doing great. And the ones who are not doing great seek me out and I have phone calls with them and I talk to them at mixers. And a question I sort of go back to, which is really helpful for me and I think also helpful for them to frame what they’re looking for, is let’s say this gets to some kind of new normal. Describe the new normal you’re looking for. And that has been really helpful for me to understand what folks are really looking for in the outcomes of these things.

A word that I just – I guess it’s because of Avengers, but man, “end game” comes up a lot. Everyone keeps talking about the end game. And I’m like I don’t know what the end game is. I’m not sure how far we are into the second act. So, I can’t talk to you about the end game. I can only talk to you about sort of what is important to you and communicate that through to everybody else.

Craig: I’m going out on a limb here that I think a lot of people are wondering about the end game because we were kind of presented a sense of how things could and would go and they haven’t gone that way. And so the next question is, well, OK, whether or not technically they have or haven’t gone that way there was an impression that this going to lead to something positive and I don’t think there are too many people in the membership who thought the day before this all ended that it was going to go on for four weeks without either party even talking to each other really.

So, there’s a question of is this like forever? Is this for a year? No one seems to know and people are growing concerned because what happens is as you approach month two, whatever was in the pipeline that was being worked on is being exhausted out and now people are going to have to deal with something new.

John: I hear you. And, again, there’s some stuff I can’t respond to just because–

Craig: Of course.

John: Of things. But the idea that no one is talking, I understand why it feels that way. It’s not as accurate as one might think. And so I’ll leave it at that.

Craig: At the very least that is encouraging. [laughs] And I hope that that, you know, obviously my hope is that that becomes the order of the day rather than something that we’re also kind of sort of doing. But rather the thing that we are focused on.

John: Well it sounds like you want a more concerted effort to–

Craig: Talk.

John: To talk.

Craig: To talk. And just so people know, it’s not like I’m just showing up on here after four weeks and going blah-blah-blah. I have been saying this privately–

John: Sure.

Craig: To David Goodman for the last four weeks. So I’ve definitely been sharing my point of view. I’m not sandbagging anybody.

John: That’s part of this process. Absolutely.

Craig: Yep.

John: Let’s move onto the next part of the process which is the pitch process.

Craig: OK!

John: So this is a thing we talked about doing on the show a while back. I had forgotten about it. Then Megana, our producer, reminded me that we have like 30 of these pitches sitting in her inbox.

Craig: Oh man.

John: And so went through them. So this is kind of analogous to our Three Page Challenge where we invited our listeners to record themselves doing a 90-second pitch. It could be for a series. It could be for a TV show. And they’ll send it in and we would take a listen to them. And so we’re going to listen to five of them today.

Now, Craig, you have experience doing this because you are often a panelist at the pitch panel thing at the Austin Film Festival.

Craig: Yes. I have been a judge at the finals of the pitch contest at Austin twice. Both times along with the great Lindsay Doran. It’s a fascinating event. It’s not really what we do.

John: It’s not what we do. And so I was thinking about that as I was trying to write my notes for this is that this 90-second thing is not actually a thing that writers do on a daily basis or even ever, kind of. But what I think is interesting about both the Austin version and what we’re going to do today is that it’s like writing a sonnet. It’s forcing you to think about your idea in a very specific form, in a very concentrated form. And the actual skill of doing that is analogous to what it’s like to go into a room and start pitching a project. Even though a pitch in a room is going to be longer, an elevator pitch is going to be shorter probably, it is a thing that is helpful.

And so I think the process of doing this obviously for these five writers but also for people listening, it does make you think about what does this thing I have in my head or this script I’ve written, what does it feel like to a person who is listening and what are the hooks I can use to keep someone’s attention as I’m describing it. So I think that is the valuable part here.

Craig: Yeah. It’s a little bit like debate, like formal debate societies.

John: Totally.

Craig: Vis-à-vis professional attorneys or legislators. It’s a strange side thing. It’s not irrelevant. But it’s not spot on. We don’t really walk around doing these things.

John: All right. So the best way to do this is to actually listen to the pitch. Each of these pitches is 90 seconds or less. We’re going to start with one from Karen Welsh. It’s called You’re What. Let’s take a listen.

Karen Welsh: This is a feature film. A 56-year-old woman, a failure at pretty much everything, discovers to her delight that for the first time in her life she is pregnant, to the dismay of her about to retire professor husband. You’re What is a dramedy aimed at the over-50 crowd. In case you’re wondering, yes, though very rare a woman in her 50s can naturally conceive. When the media get involved the absurdity of a woman that age pregnant is played for laughs, but the problem with having kids late in life? Baggage. A lot is riding on this baby.

Jill wants to give her agent mother the grandchild she’s never had. But Clara, brokenhearted over a family tragedy, and not impressed by Jill’s many failed attempts to compensate refuses to believe that her daughter won’t disappoint her again.

Then there’s Trevor. His two grown kids from his first marriage are back in his life, making demands, while the broadcast of a reality show upends his dignity, his career, and his home.

At the breaking point Trevor blurts out that he never wanted this baby and in fact he never wanted children, period. Jill is determined to be what she’s always wanted to be, a mother. But Trevor is the one with the emotional arc. Only a moment of emotional clarity will lead him to do the right thing. Happy ending? Nope. Bittersweet.

Craig: OK.

John: OK. So when you guys do this at the Austin Film Festival you get to talk to the person and ask them questions. Now, we don’t have Karen here to ask her questions so we can only respond to just what we heard. And my very first impression is that from the title I was thinking this was a comedy and so then when it was pitched as a dramedy I’m like, oh, really? And then when the dramatic moments happened I was less excited about them.

I think the premise of a 56-year-old woman having a baby for the first time and her older mother I think is really fun. I think the stresses of that and as you’re getting closer to retirement suddenly having a kid is interesting. I want to see all of that. But I think I want to see it in a comedy and not as a dramedy. Craig, what was your impression?

Craig: Well, you know, when we do these things we actually don’t really have any kind of back and forth with the people. We just sort of give them a bit of feedback that combines our sense of how interesting did we find their pitch in terms of content and also how did their pitching style help or hurt them.

In this case I found Karen’s style to be a little bit like newscasters talk. It was very formal. And sort of bleached out a little bit of what I would consider as normal human passion for the material. You know, sometimes it can sound really rehearsed and really canned in that regard.

Story wise, I don’t know, is a 56-year-old woman getting pregnant massive news? I don’t think so. I just don’t. I mean, it is a rarity. But I’m struggling a little bit with that part of it.

And I guess the other thing I would say is the way that she relayed her story, a lot of her sentences were complicated sentences, meaning there were clauses and additional clauses. Even the very beginning one, “That’s right, pregnant, much to the dismay of her.” You know what I mean? There’s a certain loss of punchiness because of the ornate over-comma style of the sentence structure.

John: Yeah. It feels a little written rather than spoken.

Craig: Right.

John: And the pitches have to be that really middle ground between the two. I can see the reality show of it. I can see why that is useful for the feature of it. I can see how it’s exposing the problems and things. But I feel like you have to set up that Jill – there’s a reason why she’s an interesting person to be following at 56 doing that. She’s just an ordinary – you know, she was an office manager. That’s not remarkable. But if she was famous for some other reason or had been famous for some other reason, or she was a soap opera actress. There would be some reason why she’s worth this attention and scrutiny.

Craig: Yeah. Because the plot of reality television company comes in and upends normal person’s life we’ve seen quite a few times.

John: Yeah. It does feel like a feature though rather than a TV series.

Craig: No question.

John: In that a pregnancy is about one change and then a birth. And so that’s what we kind of want to see. Or, if it’s going past the birth it’s not going much past it probably.

Craig: Yeah, there’s a built-in ending. Yeah.

John: A literal ticking clock.

Craig: Yep.

John: Do you want to set up the next one?

Craig: So our next pitch is from Hayley Grgurich. And it is entitled Uncertain Texas. Let’s take a listen.

Hayley Grgurich: Here’s my pitch for a comedic TV series called Uncertain Texas. Rival podcasters arrive in the same tiny East Texas to discover they’re after the same true crime story. The series follows their attempts to out-maneuver each other without much help from the locals who are suspicious of the podcasters’ motives and inclined to keep their hometown business to themselves.

This idea comes from actual people and places I encountered while living in East Texas, along with the popularity of true crime podcasts and two news stories that stuck with me. The first story was about a man who went missing in an 11-person town in the Australian outback. Police suspected foul play almost immediately. And after interviewing the remaining ten residents also suspected everyone in town.

The second story I learned while I was interning at Esquire. Chris Jones, one of the top features writers, went to a small town in Ohio to report a story. After finishing an interview with the key source he said, just as a bit of housekeeping, that he’s appreciate it if the source didn’t share the information they discussed with anyone until after the story came out. The source looked kind of sheepish and told him he already had. It turned out there was a reporter from GQ in town for the same reason. The discovery sent both writers into a neurotic tailspin as they tried to file competing takes from the same motel.

The combination of Texas characters, professional rivalry, and the goofiness of podcasting really delight me and I think Uncertain Texas can also resonate on a deeper level through exploring the conflict between small town culture and big city interference. Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.

Craig: OK. Well, John, what did you think about Hayley’s pitch for Uncertain Texas?

John: I think Hayley set the table really well. She had a good way of describing what the show was kind of going to feel like and what the real life background was behind this kind of stuff. This idea that there were multiple people who would be going after the same story and crossing paths was real. So I like all of that and I liked her sort of quiet delivery of it all. I think that all worked really well.

She didn’t get to any characters or any story or any plot or any things that would sort of tell us what we’re actually going to see on a weekly basis in this series, or an episodic basis on this, which could be fine. I felt like this was honestly the first 90 seconds of a pitch and right after that then you say like, “Now let me tell you about the characters and what would happen next.” But I’m kind of fine with that. Having heard this, I wanted to hear more which I think is a good sign for a pitch like this.

Craig: I agree. Right off the bat you kind of want to be friends with Hayley, you know. She just sounds friendly. You can sense emotion coming through. There’s a little moment at the end where you can tell she’s smiling, even though she’s not visible. And it’s a really interesting idea. It’s a great premise, I think. And what I loved about her pitch was that she explained why she wanted to do it.

John: Yes.

Craig: So instead of kind of hitting me with the good old, “Jim, 25, is a blah-blah-blah.” She just said I’m Hayley, I’m a writer, here’s what turned me on about this whole thing. There were two stories and they made me want to write this. That’s a huge thing. That actually imparts that sort of passion that you’re hoping for so it doesn’t feel so dry. I really liked it. I thought she did a terrific job.

John: I think it’s also good that she wove in the fact that she was an intern. Gives a little sense of her history and backstory within the context of what this project was.

You know, this idea reminds me a bit of A Very Fatal Murder which is the really terrific Onion podcast about a fictitious true crime, but in the best ways. And I think it’s the right way to approach the absurdity of a podcasting universe descending on a small town. Everyone is looking for the dirt and sort of how outsiders stir things up. It reminded me a bit of Schitt’s Creek.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Which is another great sort of outsiders coming into a place. I think there’s a lot of comedic potential here. So, she definitely – she baited the hook really well.

Craig: All right, well, John, do you want to take the next one, our third pitch?

John: Our third pitch is by Jake Arkie. It’s called How to Make a Man. Let’s take a listen to Jake’s pitch.

Jake Arky: Hi Scriptnotes. My name is Jake Arky. And I’m a writer who has a half-hour family comedy pilot to pitch to you guys. My pilot is called How to Make a Man and it’s for a series about when a Mormon family adopts an Indian child with special needs and the patriarch jumps ship which forces the eldest son to step up to become the man of the house.

This is partially based on a true story of my family growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. We weren’t Mormon, but we were heavily involved in communities that were. And when we adopted my brother from India he kind of change our lives in many different ways. And I wrote this series kind of as a This is US meets Malcolm in the Middle, so there’s some poignant stuff, there’s some comedy stuff, but it’s really about the relationships within the family, especially between the two brothers. And the idea behind it is that we’re seeing so much right now about toxic masculinity and how men are being raised in certain ways that turn out to be bad. So I thought what about making a show semi-based on my life about how we can actually make better men and raise them better.

So, that’s my pitch for you. Hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much.

John: Craig, what was your impression of Jake’s pitch, How to Make a Man?

Craig: Well, it was nice. It almost sounded like somebody else had written it and then he was describing it because he’s like, “Yeah, it’s got a little bit of this, it’s got a little bit of that.” There was a certain casualness to it. I think it sort of took off at the end. The advice I would give to Jake is that what’s interesting about his pitch is what he said at the end of the pitch which is why do I want to do this. Because for most of the pitch what I’m hearing is, OK, so it’s just a family and there’s a kid and a kid from India isn’t really a reason to have a show. It’s just a kid.

And so I’m just waiting for why I care about this. And then I get to this end part and I go, oh, OK, that’s a whole different thing. I would argue that if you’re going to tell a story about How to Make a Man then you kind of need to do it from the perspective of the person that’s raising a boy into a man, not a brother. So, there’s issues going on there. But it was – I was engaged and I was listening along. I just I think this pitch would have gone 50% better if he had taken the stuff at the end and put it at the front.

John: I had a hard time picturing anything as he was describing it. So, I think about the other pitches and I could see something, I was starting to form characters. And I think part of the challenge is I didn’t have a sense of how old the brother who is being adopted into the family was. It’s a very different story if we’re talking about toddlers or if we’re talking about teenagers. And I didn’t have any sense of the grounding of sort of what kind of story I was looking at. So when he said Malcolm in the Middle I’m like, oh OK, so it’s more that age great. And the patriarch thing threw me off a little bit too because I took that to mean the father but I wasn’t quite sure that’s really what I was supposed to be meaning.

Craig: Right.

John: You know, sometimes using too specific of a word or too nebulous a word kind of knocks me out of the story for five seconds and when it’s only 90 seconds long it’s a challenge.

Craig: That makes total sense. And you’re absolutely right. I mean, there wasn’t much to sort of imagine there. And there was a lot of ambiguity. It’s a weird thing, Jake, because sometimes when you’re basing things on real life you will elide over details that are absolutely crucial to everybody else but they’re not worth mentioning to you because just you know it. But we don’t, so definitely something to think about.

John: I would also say that Jake it’s great that this involves part of your real life story. And so including that in the pitch I think is crucial because otherwise we wouldn’t have a sense of why you are the right person to write this story. And so explaining that in part of any pitch is really important.

Craig: Agreed. Well, our next one is from Guy Patton and it’s called Sinnerweb. One word. Sinnerweb. Shall we listen?

John: Let’s listen right now.

Guy Patton: Hi, I’m Guy Patton and my show is called Sinnerweb, and hour-long supernatural police procedural in the vein of X-Files with the feel of a modern western. Essentially it asks what if a young female Longmire were the Sheriff of Twin Peaks. Much of the uniqueness comes from the setting in rural Pennsylvania Dutch Country among the Amish and Mennonite communities there. And draws on the real life legends in mythology of those worlds, a rich and uniquely American folklore pantheon to explore.

For example, Hexenmeisters, essentially witches and warlocks who practice a folk magic using Hex signs and symbols to encourage good harvest or to curse someone and destroy their lives. These are powerful figures in this culture and exist in various forms to this day.

The title is also the main character, Sinnerweb, the sheriff of the strange town of Cavalry and a train wreck. Obviously if you name your kid Sinner there’s probably some family issues there to explore as well, and we do.

Initially when we meet her she is doing some decidedly un-sheriff like stuff. She’s in a bar, drunk, making out with a stranger in a bathroom. Then her deputy arrives to let her know there’s been a tragedy. A young Mennonite woman is found dead at the scene of a devastating fire yet her body is unburned. The investigation of this event, based on a real life story, provides the plot of our pilot. Thanks so much for listening. And if you like Sinnerweb you can read the pilot on the Black List website.

Craig: All right. John, what did you think about Sinnerweb?

John: So, Sinnerweb, it is two words. So Sinner Webb is her name. So now I know that. I didn’t know what a Longmire was. And so again I got thrown thinking like what is a Longmire?

Craig: What is a Longmire?

John: We can Google it now.

Craig: Let’s do it.

John: Longmire was a TV show. It’s a dedicated, unflappable staff of–

Craig: Oh, it’s a western.

John: It’s a western.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a western.

John: Great. I liked that there was a supernatural quality to this. I liked the idea of a really folklore kind of place. Twin Peaks is a good reference for it, but it feels like it wasn’t specifically Twin Peaks-y. So, I like the visuals that you gave me in terms of an unburned body in a burned building. That’s really cool. So I think all these things are really intriguing.

Honestly, Longmire threw me off a little bit and I had a hard time grabbing some early straws in that, but I was intrigued by where it was going.

Craig: Yeah. A little bit of overload in the beginning. So in the beginning it’s Longmire, which I don’t know what that is, and it’s a western, and it’s Twin Peaks, and it’s Amish people. Help me. But really, Guy, the funny thing is all you had to say was, “It’s Twin Peaks but Amish.” It’s Amish Twin Peaks and there’s all these mythologies and things and demons and witches and so on and so forth in a culture that we are very familiar with and yet don’t know at all. And then I get it. And then I’m down.

I personally detest characters with names like Sinner Webb. Because I just feel like they were not born of a woman but rather a laptop. Do you know what I mean?

John: I totally know what you mean.

Craig: I just don’t buy it. I just don’t buy it. I mean, the one that always killed me – I like the big robot movie. What’s the big robot movie where it fights the–?

John: Pacific Rim?

Craig: Yeah, Pacific Rim. I like Pacific Rim. But that one character is Stacker Pentecost and I’m just like, no, no, no one’s last name is Pentecost and no one’s first name is Stacker. Or, if they are, they would never be together. It just seems so written, you know what I mean?

John: It’s like a hat on a hat. Yeah.

Craig: It’s a bit of a hat on a hat on a hat. So, I’m like – it’s like a super cool sounding name, Sinner Webb. I don’t buy it. So it kind of like knocked me out a little bit because what I really want is for that person to just be named Carole. I mean, they do this so well on Fargo. By the way, Fargo is how you should be referring to this, I think. Not Twin Peaks. Because Twin Peaks is its own weird freaky thing and it doesn’t sound like you’re doing it. It sounds like you’re doing Fargo but Amish and supernatural stuff.

So, really cool. I would take a little bit of the practiced rehearsed edge off of your thing.

John: Yeah. It felt a little salesman-y, like listen and subscribe and give us a ratings on iTunes.

Craig: Smash that like button. [laughs] No, but it’s a really cool idea for a show. Don’t name it Sinnerweb and don’t name her Sinner Webb. That’s my god honest opinion.

John: All right. Our final one comes from Laura Beck. It’s called Hard Core Vegans. It’s described as a series. Let’s take a listen.

Laura Beck: Hard Core Vegans is a 30-minute dark comedy pilot in the vein of Good Girls meets Barry with a little shaggy dog thrown in. What would happen if there were vegan activists who were willing to do literally anything – and I mean anything – to save animals? Hard Core Vegans follows the two founders of San Francisco Vegans Unite. Ally, a granola-munching, Birkenstock-wearing self-righteous mess, and Sam, a fantastically gorgeous and painfully perfect Instagram celebrity vegan. Because of their warring ideologies the two women are always at each other’s throats and one day, after a particularly contentious vegan bake sale, the two women witness a man die and then through a case of mistaken identities are assumed to be the hit people behind the job.

This leads them into an underworld of murder-for-hire where a shadowy character named Rufus gives the women their second job: kill beloved vegan superstar Moby. It turns out Moby isn’t actually vegan and is running a cannibalism ring. I know! Can our heroines kill one of their idols? Will human blood on their hands be OK if it means they can use the money to rescue a bunch of animals? Will they become straight up hit women and murder hella people? That’s Hard Core Vegans.

I’m vegan, and while I’m not a murderer, I swear, I spent quite a bit of time volunteering for animal welfare causes and met some of the most wonderful, funny, passionate people ever who were also a little bat shit crazy.

Ultimately Hard Core Vegans is an extremely dark comedy about what it means to follow your passions and live your dreams. Even if that means you’ve got to get a little dirty. And by dirty I obviously mean murder.

John: Craig, talk me through some Hard Core Vegans. What was your first impression?

Craig: My first impression was that every single first impression I had was wrong and then I’d have another first impression and then that was wrong. First of all Laura is delightful to listen to and that was a very funny ending. And I happen to know that there – I’m not a vegan – but I read an article once about this crazy schism in the vegan community and it was really vicious. And you think of like vegans as being super positive peaceful people I guess. Nope. They’re just people.

So that part actually was kind of intriguing. I like the sort of satirical aspect to it. Where I just kind of felt myself lifting off the ground in confusion was when Moby suddenly was involved. I just was like I don’t know what this is anymore. But this is one of those pitches where you listen and you go I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment on this. I don’t know what I just heard.

John: I think I’m qualified to comment on it. So, like you I kept having new first impressions. Because it’s like, oh, I get what this is. Like, no, it’s not quite what I thought. And it just kept pulling me a little bit away from where I wanted to be. So she starts by Good Girls Revolt, which I don’t know, but Barry, and I can see that. Where it’s like it’s well-intentioned people and it goes into a very dark place. And I love this idea of sort of warring factions of vegans and sort of people with noble intentions who to really dark, dark places. It’s sort of that question of like well what would you do to make the world a better place?

Craig: Yep.

John: How far will you go? That is so intriguing. And I think that is why it is a really good premise for a TV show. And I can see that. The details of sort of how these two women meet and compete and sort of like what their unique lanes are I wasn’t entirely getting. And I didn’t like that they’re mistaken for murder. Like that to me doesn’t feel like – they’re not making an active choice. I want to see these women make a choice that takes them to this place. And that to me is what’s great.

There could be an element of accident, but I think back to 9 to 5 and you look at the murder that seems like it happens in 9 to 5. You are completely on their side and yet they know they’re done something horrible. So, that to me is an opportunity of a way to look at how these women come together to do this thing.

Craig: I think that’s really smart. That may have been the thing that ultimately started knocking my dominoes down and I was just so confused was the whole mistaken – mistaken identity, like two people mistaken for hit people, just understand this Laura. That plot point doesn’t just say something about those two characters, it says something about the entire world of your show. And what it says is the world of your show is a bit stupid. Because no one actually confuses a hit person like that, much less two people, much less two vegans. It’s just not a thing.

And then weirdly they are hired to kill a non-vegan who is posing as a vegan. So there’s this weird coincidence that they happen to be confused for killers and also now must kill somebody that’s directly related to the thing that… – You know what I mean? It just starts feeling a bit silly in a bad way. But I’m with you. Like all the things you say you like I like. So I would say Laura you should do what John just said.

John: Yeah. I actually like the idea of Moby being a character in this because he’s identified with this kind of movement. I just don’t know that he’s the target for being a hypocrite. I think there’s some interesting way to use him that could be fascinating. If he is the kingpin behind stuff that could be great, too.

I liked him as an element, I just didn’t think killing him was necessarily going to be rewarding for – the best comedic reward for using that element.

Craig: Yeah. I’m not going to stick around and watch that season. I just kind of don’t care about Moby.

John: Craig, what did you think of this whole pitch idea?

Craig: I liked it. I mean, it’s definitely a different thing for us and what we’re talking about now is something that we – it’s actually really hard to get to and this was a fun way to do it. How you interact with the world when you’re talking and being a writer in a bar, in an office, on the street, how do you come across and how does your story come across? It turns out actually this matters quite a bit. And so maybe this is the beginning of little kind of training for people about how to just talk about what they’re writing and why.

John: I think it’s also a useful way for us to divorce the words on the page in the Three Page Challenge from this general idea. Because when we do the Three Page Challenge it is so focused on what I got out of these three pages and less of like do I think that that’s actually an idea, a premise that is going to be sustainable for a feature or for a series? And we can talk about it kind of on those terms. And also I know Mike, my husband, just tunes out all the Three Page Challenges because he won’t read them. So I think he might actually stick around for these.

Craig: He might. I mean, listen, if we can get Mike back we’re onto something.

John: We know we hit something. So thank you to everyone who sent in their pitches. I think what we’ve been doing for receiving pitches is you write into ask@johnaugust.com. You attached the recording you’ve made of your pitch.

I think Megana was sampling for a range of storylines and premises and also genres, but also a bit for quality in the sense of like actual recording quality. So just do it in a quiet room. That’s great. But you can use your phone for it. So, send those in and we’ll do it as another feature down the road.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. Craig, this week I sent a little message to you asking about the font you use in Chernobyl. So this is a thing where I’m watching Chernobyl, I’m enjoying it very much, I’m listening to the companion podcast.

Craig: Great.

John: But you have not spoken about the font that is used in Chernobyl and the font is terrific. And so since I actually know the creator of the show I emailed or I messaged you with the most important question about what typeface is being used as the display face in Chernobyl.

Craig: So, this was something that Johan Renck and I were very, very, very, very, very, very fussy about. Because for starters we don’t have an opening title sequence. It’s not something that people have remarked upon particularly. We tried. We thought about it. We talked to some incredible people who have designed amazing opening title sequences. We just couldn’t find one that seemed to not disrupt what we were going for which was that kind of verisimilitude. You know, we wanted you to forget that you were watching a television show.

So, with that in mind we said, OK, it’s just going to say Chernobyl. And then we have quite a few place and time fonts as well, or subtitles, that we have to put on there. So the question is what do you show. Here’s we knew we didn’t want to do. That really goofy fake Cyrillic English font thing where, oh look, the R is backwards. No. No. [laughs] Definitely not.

What we wanted to do was impart something that in keeping with the rest of the way we do this show some kind of accuracy to time and place. You know, we can’t show Cyrillic to people. They won’t understand it. But what Johan did was he worked with his brother. And I’m still working on getting all the details for you. But essentially they created a font, as far as I understand. And the font was kind of inspired by Cyrillic fonts. And there’s a number of Cyrillic fonts that came out of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had their own state-run typography department and they did create a number of fonts, including something called – well, it’s referred to as Poor Man’s Futura. There’s a bunch of them. Anyway, the point is rather than font out and dork out, what we went for was that. Essentially an English font that conveyed the truth of what Soviet fonts looked like at the time.

They’ve got weird kerning. Some of the numbers are slightly bizarre for us. And then we messed around with the color a little bit and we fuzzed some of the edges just to make it feel like it was part of 1986. So that is the long and short of – and I suppose we’ll have to come up with a name for it. I mean, I’m going to propose that the name for that font be Renck.

John: Oh, Renck would be fantastic. There’s already a typeface called Chernobyl so that would be confusing. What I like about it, Futura is clearly a reference for it. And if you use the What the Font app to look at screenshots of it, which I did, there are faces that are kind of similar to it, but the numbers are really strange and different. You know, it’s a Sancerre face. It has that aspect of weird kerning. You are only using in uppercase which is appropriate because Russian is written in what we would consider uppercase only.

Craig: Right.

John: But anyway, it was well done. And I was just – I agree with you that it feels very specific even though it’s not Russian at all. And I think it’s consistent with everyone is speaking English but all the other signage is in Russian. It makes it feel like the right mix.

Craig: Great. Well I’m glad it’s working for you. We certainly put a lot of intention on that. I think at times Carolyn Strauss and Jane Featherstone were like are these two font nerds going to ever shut up? Johan far more than I.

John: Couldn’t it just be Arial?

Craig: Well, Johan definitely took the lead on that one. He gets the credit for this font. And the Renck family, the extended Renck family.

John: Nice. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I finished last week. It is called Blueprint: Evolutionary Designs of a Good Society by Nikolas Christakis. It’s really terrific. I heard him on the Gist podcast and he was halfway through his interview and I was like I’m going to buy that book.

The book talks about how humans evolved both biologically and culturally to have a set of social ideas that are really important for how we can function together as groups and as a society. So ideas like love, altruism, selflessness, learning, collaboration, individual identity. They seem really obvious to us, but very few other species on earth have these qualities, or have all these qualities. And it’s hard to imagine that we could actually do most of what we do as human beings if we didn’t have this sense. For example, if you didn’t think of yourself as an individual and think of each other person as an individual who is consistent in time you couldn’t do most of the things that humans do.

So as important as speech is, as important as our hands are, these are probably qualities that let us do what we’ve been able to do on the earth. So, I thought it was just a terrific book. Highly recommend it. It’s sort of in that same zone as the Jared Diamond books or the Steven Pinker books. I loved it.

Craig: Great. That sounds like one for me. I like that sort of thing. I wrote a paper about altruism in college and the notion of – and I’m sure that Mr. Christakis gets into this in this book, but the notion that there is a social or rather a survival advantage to being part of a group.

John: Oh absolutely.

Craig: And so pro-social behavior is encoded into us, in other words we are to some extent at least for a number of people instinctively pro-social. We want to do things that would help keep the group together and cohesive. But interestingly that occasionally expresses itself in ways that are directly detrimental to the individual person’s survival.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: Which to bring it back is sort of when you watched things, when I was reading and doing research about Chernobyl and I would see these people do these things I would just think–

John: Oh, that’s episode two. That’s like I’m going to walk into the water.

Craig: Pretty much. And you’re seeing the expression of this pro-social behavior. There’s a very famous story about a plane crash in the ‘80s in Washington, DC, and the plane essentially went into the Potomac and it was freezing cold. And a man just jumped like 100 feet into the water or whatever it was to save people. And he didn’t know any of them. And he had no connection to any of them. He just did it. And in that moment you think, yep, there it is. That’s that little gene going do-do-do-do.

John: Yeah. So it’s obviously – if that person is your own child there’s a genetic component to that so like that would happen with other species. But it clearly goes beyond. We’re wired and our cultural switches are flipped in a certain way that you will do that stuff. You will help a stranger even though it is no benefit to you.

Craig: Exactly right. In fact, this explains things like colony insects, like bees.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: Bees will happily sting you and die as a result just to protect the rest of the hive. Well why are bees so hive-oriented and so kind of pro-social? Because the way bee reproduction works they are all highly related to each other, more so than say humans. There’s way more overlap. In other words, if I’m dying to protect you I’m still furthering our genetic code because we’re really closely related. It’s a world of twins.

John: You can also think about the organism is really the entire colony. The organism is not the individual bee. And to some degree the organism is this human group. And so you will do whatever it takes to keep this human group alive, which could involve individual self-sacrifice. And so when you see nationalism, bad nationalism, it can be as a result of over-identification with that group and not thinking of yourself as an individual.

Craig: Yep. No question. No question. That’s a great point actually and the way it backfires.

Well, I’ll go with something that – we’ll just keep along the idea of pro-social work here. So Chernobyl Children International is a wonderful organization. It is based out of Ireland run by a wonderful woman name Adi Roche. And it is a charity that helps support children and various people that have been affected by the Chernobyl disaster across Belarus and Ukraine and just Eastern Europe in general.

And I was lucky enough and had the honor of speaking at the United Nations. Did you know that, John? I spoke at the United Nations.

John: You know what? Someone might have told me. It was you. You told me that you were speaking at the United Nations.

Craig: John, I have news for you. I spoke at the United Nations.

John: Nice.

Craig: So, anyway, when I was speaking at the United Nations because I spoke at the United Nations I was there with Adi Roche. And she really was the one that put it all together. She is a dynamo. And, of course, as people watch the show they may want to be charitable. I think that her organization is a terrific place to start. HBO and I and Carolyn and Jane all were donors. And so I just wanted to put that out there for people if they were feeling like they wanted to throw a little money towards some people who might be in need, Chernobyl Children International is a terrific organization. Obviously a proper charitable organization. And we’ll link to their website in the show notes.

John: Fantastic. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from the fantastic Jonathan Mann.

Craig: Is this the one?

John: This is the one from last week.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: So enjoy this one everyone. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we like to answer on the show. For short questions though I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. Those are fantastic.

If you would like to send in your 90-second pitch you can also send it to ask@johnaugust.com.

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

Some folks have been doing recaps on Reddit and it’s great. So if you want to read a recap of this episode or the last couple episodes go to Reddit. Go the /screenwriting sub-Reddit and you’ll see them there.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Or you can download 50-episode seasons. There is a new season that should be up by the time this one comes out which goes through episode 350-400.

Craig: Oh man.

John: If you’re going to download that one you might want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide because that has recommendations on previous episodes that you should not miss. So that’s at johnaugust.com/guide. And you can of course through the app listen to any episode you want at any time and just go to Scriptnotes.net for instructions about the app.

Craig: Spectacular.

John: Thank you so much for a new feature. 401 and we’re still innovating.

Craig: Unbelievable. Here’s to the next 100 and I’ll see you next week.

John: Thanks. Bye.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, buy your tickets here!
• Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks (Light) and (Dark)!
• WGA Start Button Video
• John August and Michele Mulroney discussing Issues Affecting Screenwriters
• Verve Signs WGA’s Code of Conduct, Citing ‘Meaningful Dialogue’ With Clients
• WGA-Verve Code of Conduct Agreement
• Pitch Session selections: Karen Welsh You’re What?!, Hayley Grgurich Uncertain Texas, Jake Arky How to Make a Man, Guy Patton Sinnerweb, Laura Beck Hardcore Vegans
• Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nikolas Christakis
• Donate to Chernobyl Children International
• Watch Chernobyl on HBO and listen to The Chernobyl Podcast with Craig and Peter Sagal
• Find past episodes here, Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Thank you to everyone who submitted to the pitch session! If you’d like to be considered in the next Pitch Session, submit your entry here.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Jonathan Mann (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Male Voice: What the F are you talking about?

Craig: Wow.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 400 of Scriptnotes.

Craig: Wow.

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

Craig: Oh my god.

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

Chris McQuarrie: Thank you very much for having me.

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

Chris: You know, Craig–

Craig: Here we go.

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

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

Chris: And I miss that.

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

Chris: About everything.

Craig: Literally everything.

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

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

Chris: It’s the duelists.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

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

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

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

Chris: Thank you.

Craig: Amazing.

Chris: Thank you very much.

Craig: And two more to come.

Chris: Two more to come.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Could have fooled me.

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

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

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

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

Chris: Yeah, that’s true.

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

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

Craig: That’s right, Top Gun Deuce.

Chris: Top Gun Maverick.

Craig: Maverick.

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

Craig: So magic?

John: Just magic.

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

Craig: No, I don’t like that.

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

Craig: You just said three things that I hate.

Chris: Love what you do.

Craig: Love what you do, exactly.

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

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

Chris: You should definitely read it.

Craig: Not gonna.

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

Craig: Dying.

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

Craig: Sweet decay. Sweet decay.

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

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

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

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

John: We do know the words.

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

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

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: Yes, we are post-Chernobyl.

John: We are post-Chernobyl.

Chris: Has it reached the air?

John: Yes.

Craig: Last night.

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

Chris: I cannot wait to see it.

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

John: It’s on demand already.

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

Craig: Very good.

Chris: This evening on HBO.

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

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

Craig: Yes.

Chris: I wanted to make that show.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Right.

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

John: No.

Craig: Oh no. I don’t think so.

Chris: For sure.

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

Chris: I would have been–

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

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

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

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

John: Old drafts?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Oh yeah.

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

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

Craig: We’ll get into that.

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

Craig: Yes, you read them on a plane.

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

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

Craig: I threw a fit. How dare you?

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

John: You’re not to do those things.

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

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

Craig: Probably.

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

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

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

Craig: Yes.

John: You got to do all these amazing things.

Chris: Dear god.

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

Craig: Yes.

John: Which I started listening to which is great.

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

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

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

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

John: No. In the first episode you talk–

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

Craig: There is no place called Chernobyl.

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

Craig: Correct.

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

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

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

Craig: I didn’t want to cheat.

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

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

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

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

Craig: As one does.

Chris: As one does.

Craig: That’s what McQuarrie does.

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

Craig: Jews don’t do this. Ever.

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, hey!

Chris: Which is better than an Ice Cap.

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

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

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

John: Lose the plot.

Craig: Exactly.

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

John: We should be enough.

Craig: We should be enough.

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

Craig: The guests are the topping.

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

Craig: For charity.

John: For charity.

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

Chris: Oh lovely.

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

Chris: We love John Gatins.

Craig: We do.

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

Craig: Those are so great.

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

Craig: You nailed it.

Chris: You nailed it.

Craig: That’s amazing. I love it.

John: The dark version of the shirt.

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

John: Good shirt.

Craig: Percentage of proceeds that go to me?

John: Are none.

Craig: Consistently zero. 400 episodes.

John: Still not making any money out of this.

Craig: Still not making any money.

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

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

Chris: Is it sponsored the podcast?

Craig: No, we don’t do ads.

John: We have no ads. We have nothing.

Craig: We are free in every freaking way.

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

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

Chris: Or goodness.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: I was looking at John.

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

Chris: Yes.

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

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

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

Craig: Right. Which are all Star Wars.

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

Chris: Oh, onto the Disney schedule?

John: Or really any schedule. Any schedule.

Craig: Witchcraft at this point I think.

Chris: Not true.

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

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

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

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

Craig: How dare you?

Chris: I’d like an argument please.

Craig: I love that sketch.

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

Craig: Ugh.

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

John: 100 percent facts.

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

John: Chernobyl.

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

Craig: The truth matters. The truth matters.

Chris: Because I’m right.

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

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

Craig: We did. We resuscitated them.

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

Craig: They’re back.

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

Craig: That have been sort of underserved.

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

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

Chris: It’s a drama.

Craig: Just sort of people?

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

Craig: OK, prison.

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

Craig: OK.

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

John: Totally.

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: That appears to be the case.

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

Craig: That’s awesome.

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

Craig: Shoot-shoot-bang-bang.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: All right.

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

Craig: The Ron Shelton area.

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

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

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

Chris: Tin Cup.

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

Chris: Bull Durham.

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

Chris: Wow.

John: I think that’s a fair assessment.

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

Craig: Hold that. Repeat it.

Chris: Pains me. Pains me to say it.

Craig: Put it on a loop.

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

Chris: It can’t rely on the sport.

Craig: Right.

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

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Which means you generally–

John: You teach them the rules of the sport.

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

John: Yeah.

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

Chris: Yes.

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

Chris: My next question.

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

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

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

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

Chris: Without question.

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

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

Craig: Yes, he’s part of it.

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

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

John: It’s super white.

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

Chris: I’m wracking my brain.

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

John: Yeah, but it’s goofy.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Cricket!

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

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

Chris: Oh, of course.

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

Chris: So the Bad News Bears, but done–

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

Chris: But they tried to remake it–

Craig: They did. They remade it.

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

Craig: Well, that’s the thing.

Chris: The spirt of it.

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

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

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

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

Craig: There it is.

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

John: I do not remember Ball Four.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Correct. About family life.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Back in time.

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

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

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

Chris: Yes.

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

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

Craig: No question.

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

Chris: Oh, This is Us.

Craig: This is Us.

John: This is Us as a movie.

Chris: Modern Family.

Craig: Correct. And interestingly Dan Fogelman–

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

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

Chris: I went to see Hell or High Water.

John: Oh, which is fantastic.

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

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

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

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

Chris: An event.

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

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

Craig: No question.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: No question.

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

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

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

Craig: Isn’t that nice?

Chris: Yes, it’s lovely.

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

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

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

Chris: Yeah.

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

Craig: Love Primal Fear.

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

Chris: The Verdict.

Craig: The Verdict.

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

Chris: One of the all-time–

Craig: Well, and 12 Angry Men.

Chris: Yes, oh my god.

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

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

Craig: And Justice for All.

Chris: We can probably go on.

John: We can.

Craig: Yes, I think we could.

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

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

John: And it feels like a play.

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

Craig: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

Chris: That’s And Justice for All.

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

Chris: The Verdict actually ended without the verdict.

Craig: Without the verdict. Well.

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

Craig: Kelley I think.

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

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

Craig: Right.

John: No.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, of course. Oh yes.

Chris: Have you watched that recently?

Craig: Yeah, it’s amazing.

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

John: He is innocent!

Chris: Yes.

Craig: So great.

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

Craig: Artifact.

Chris: Basic Instinct.

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

Craig: Thank god.

Chris: Can we just skip to that?

John: We can skip to that next.

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

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

Craig: What’s the Dershowitz one with–?

Chris: Claus von Bulow.

Craig: Yeah. Claus von Bulow.

Chris: Reversal of Fortune.

John: Reversal of Fortune.

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

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

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

Chris: “You have no idea.”

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

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

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

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

Craig: Streep v. Washington.

Chris: Regardless of our genre.

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

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

Craig: Police brutality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Well, he’s done it though.

John: He’s done it.

Craig: Can he come back and do it again?

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

John: Yeah.

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

John: We can.

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

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

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

Chris: But would you have picked a sports agent?

Craig: No, but that’s fun. I get it.

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

Craig: There’s comebacks. Makes sense.

Chris: Well, that helps.

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

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

Craig: A little bit. Sorry.

Chris: It’s the whole agent thing.

Craig: Should we go to the erotic thrillers.

John: Erotic thrillers.

Chris: Erotic thrillers.

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

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

Craig: I believe boobs are high on the list.

Chris: Yes.

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

Chris: Yeah.

Craig: Well…

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

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

Chris: It’s a neurotic thriller.

Craig: Neurotic.

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

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: It’s good.

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

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

John: That’s absolutely true.

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

Chris: Yes.

John: Literal pornography.

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

Chris: There’s no parental control strict enough–

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

Chris: Yes.

Craig: Yeah.

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

Craig: Porn.

John: From porn or from things that have–?

Chris: Sexual obsession.

John: Sexual obsession. All right.

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

John: Yeah.

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

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

Craig: A thriller?

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

Chris: Yes.

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

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

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

John: Yeah.

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

Craig: Yes.

John: Cheating on his wife.

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

Craig: Yeah. A little lizardy.

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

Craig: Right.

John: Yes.

Craig: Morality plays.

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

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

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

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

Chris: Have you watched it recently?

Craig: No.

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

Craig: She won’t be ignored.

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

John: Yeah.

Craig: Amazing.

Chris: Anne Archer is this–

Craig: I do remember her being like–

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

Craig: This like luminous angel.

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

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

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

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

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

Chris: Expecting great things.

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

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

Craig: Spoofs and parodies.

Chris: Spoofs and parodies.

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

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

Chris: Jane Austen’s Mafia.

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

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

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

John: Yes. That was my instinct.

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

Chris: That’s very true.

Craig: It’s over.

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

Craig: The Internet is essentially a spoof machine.

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

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

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

Craig: Of a genre.

Chris: Of a genre.

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

Chris: Well that’s a mashup.

John: Yeah.

Chris: And a great one.

John: Fantastic.

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

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

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

Craig: In Like Flint.

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

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

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

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

John: Lord and Miller. Yeah.

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

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

Chris: Meta.

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

John: Oh yes.

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

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

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

John: It took all the comedy out of me.

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

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

Chris: Giant movies.

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

Chris: No.

John: So here’s–

Chris: Because they don’t win awards anymore.

John: They don’t win awards anymore.

Craig: Precisely.

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

Craig: Correct.

Chris: Yes.

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

Craig: TV. No question.

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

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

Chris: It was a letterbox.

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

Chris: No.

Craig: It’s not a movie screen.

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

Craig: No one is going to watch it.

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

Craig: Here it is.

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

Craig: For the life of it. Primarily.

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

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

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

Craig: Yes. Correct.

Chris: I’m giving a conservative—

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

Chris: Four weeks. Yeah.

Craig: It used to be months.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: It is now about four weeks.

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

Chris: It’s a Christ figure against Rome.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Christ figure against Rome.

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

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

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

Chris: He was a great man.

Craig: He was a great man.

Chris: And it’s always a man.

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

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

John: Yes.

Craig: Really?

Chris: Rooney Mara.

John: Rooney Mara plays that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Directly.

John: Yeah, so it’s the same concept.

Craig: No question.

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

Chris: Time.

John: Time.

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

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

Craig: And they were very long movies.

John: They’re very long movies.

Craig: Ben-Hur is endless.

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

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

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: A cold, dead January.

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

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

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

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

Chris: Oh yes.

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

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

John: True.

Chris: Dragged Across Concrete is coming out.

Craig: Yeah. I think they still do these.

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

John: Central Intelligence is essentially a buddy cop movie.

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

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

John: Oh, The Heat.

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

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

Chris: The Odd Couple with guns.

John: An Odd Couple with guns. Thank you.

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

Chris: What it boils down to.

Craig: And they become each other’s family.

Chris: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Craig: And just wait.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Time is a flat circle.

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

Chris: I’m looking at the–

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

Chris: Westerns.

John: Let’s talk about westerns.

Craig: Hmm, westerns.

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

Chris: Yes.

Craig: Godless.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Everything is dead until it’s not.

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

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

John: Oh yeah, of course.

Craig: Pirate movies. Not only dead—

Chris: Do you remember Pirates with Walter Matthau?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Chris: Oh my god.

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

Chris: It killed Carolco.

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

Chris: Killed careers.

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

John: Yeah.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: And…

John: Pirates of the Caribbean. Just takes one.

Craig: There we go.

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

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

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

Craig: And a brand.

Chris: Exactly.

Craig: I mean, just built in.

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

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

Craig: Shane.

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

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

Chris: I will fight you on that.

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

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

Craig: Sure.

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

Craig: Maybe a book would do it.

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

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

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

Chris: Hell or High Water.

John: Hell or High Water—

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

John: It totally is.

Chris: It’s a bank-robbing—

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

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

John: It did, absolutely.

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

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

Chris: The Highwaymen. Sure.

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

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

Chris: That’s everything.

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

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

Craig: Correct.

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

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

Craig: Correct.

Chris: Which they are now.

Craig: And were punished—

Chris: And were punished – exactly.

Craig: If they didn’t do the impossible.

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

Craig: Way more opportunity.

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

Craig: Yes.

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

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

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

I want to do this.

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

Craig: Yep. [laughs]

Chris: The movie is going in three weeks.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: You’ve never done anything like this.

Craig: The actor is kind of in charge.

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

Craig: Correct.

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

Craig: It is really terrifying.

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

Craig: That’s a lot to have faith in.

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

Craig: Nah.

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

Craig: Their podium movie.

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

Craig: They want to make their podium movie.

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

Craig: Big ass dumb movie they want to do.

Chris: Yes, they’ve got some big ass.

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

Chris: No.

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

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

John: It is.

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

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

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

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

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

Chris: I have Two Cool Things.

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

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

Chris: I have to pick one?

Craig: No, you can do two.

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

Craig: OK, fair enough.

Chris: Neither of them may be cool.

Craig: They’re nested.

Chris: They’re nerdy.

John: Kangaroos.

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

Chris: I’m already obsessed.

Craig: Are things that are contained in that photo.

Chris: Oh, come on.

John: Oh great.

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

Chris: Genius.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Shannon Woodward and Rian Johnson and Chris Miller.

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

John: I tried, too, and I can’t.

Craig: Practice.

Chris: If you gave me all the answers.

John: I couldn’t fill it in.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yeah, you started too late man.

Chris: That’s the problem.

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

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

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

Craig: Nice white noise.

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

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

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

John: For traveling I use an app.

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

John: You’ll hear the loop.

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

Chris: That’s got to be like delirium.

Craig: No, it’s super bad.

Chris: Horrible. Do you have trouble sleeping?

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

Chris: Ooh, it’s nighttime.

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

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

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

Chris: In your sleep!

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

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

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

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

Craig: Like a briefcase.

Chris: Like a briefcase bag.

John: Nice.

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

Craig: Or?

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

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

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

Craig: That’s great.

Chris: It’s a great bag.

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

Chris: Oh yes.

Craig: And I got travel wired up.

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

Craig: Right. Exactly.

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

Craig: Is that a battery?

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

Craig: It’ll screw your wrist.

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

Craig: Naturally AViiQ.

Chris: And for people not watching it—

Craig: That’s everyone. [laughs]

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

Craig: I’m not looking.

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

Craig: Oh, wow, that’s great.

Chris: And feel the weight of it?

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

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

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

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

John: Oh my god, it’s so light.

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

Craig: That’s great.

Chris: It’s great.

Craig: AViiQ.

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

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

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

John: It was worth the two things.

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

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

Chris: Correct.

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

Chris: And the AViiQ thing is like $20.

Craig: I like that.

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

Craig: I hear you.

Chris: All right. It’s $10,000.

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

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

Craig: Conflict medals!

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

Craig: 400.

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

Craig: That’s like eight years of podcasting.

John: It’s a lot of podcasting.

Craig: Oh my god.

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

Craig: Can’t believe it. Wow.

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

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

Craig: Chris McQuarrie is?

Chris: Cryptically enough @chrismcquarrie.

John: @chrismcquarrie.

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

John: It’s a good thing.

Craig: Tweet at him anyway.

Chris: Yeah. I answer questions in DMs now.

Craig: Be disagreeable with him. He loves it.

Chris: Yeah, I like being disagreeable.

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

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

Craig: No.

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

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

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

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

Chris: Yes, done. I’m there.

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

Chris: OK, great. I’m there.

John: Chris McQuarrie, thank you very much.

Chris: Thank you guys.

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

John: It’s been nice.

Craig: Thanks man.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.