Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 488 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show the two-year battle between the agencies and the Writers Guild has ended. We’ll discuss what was gained, what was lost, and some of the things I couldn’t tell Craig along the way.

Then we’ll answer a bunch of listener questions ranging from cold feet to writer vacations to killing a project. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss what essential advice we would offer to our 20-year-old selves.

Craig: That will be fun.

John: Yeah. A good adventure-packed episode.

Craig: Start drinking. Drink more. No.

John: No. I have meaningful things to think about with both my own 20-year-old self and sort of a general 20-year-old self.

Craig: There you go.

John: Looking forward to that. But, hey, Craig, this week you had some exciting news. Tell us the exciting news that happened this last week.

Craig: Yeah. So we announced our casting for the two main characters in The Last of Us HBO series. Pedro Pascal is going to be playing Joel and Bella Ramsey who people might be most familiar with as Leona Mormont, the terrorizing fierce wonderful lady of Bear Island on Game of Thrones, is going to be playing Ellie. I was a bit nervous – I don’t know if you know this, but the videogame fan base can be a little harsh. You may have read about these things from time to time.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And there have been months and months of people sort of tweeting at me or at Neil Druckmann about who they wanted to – “you have to cast this person.” Everybody very much was like, “You have to do this, or this, or this.” And we didn’t do any of those. We did what we did.

But it went over pretty – actually, went over really well. I was thrilled with the response. And more importantly we know what we’re doing. We know why we made these choices. And we are thrilled with them. We couldn’t be happier on our end of things. And so this was fun to announce. But, out of that emerged a thing that we need to talk about.

John: All right. Let’s get into it.

Craig: This is a serious thing that has been happening on Twitter that is upsetting.

John: Yeah. I mean, you have it listed here and I think it’s time we finally do discuss this. So, I’m ready.

Craig: Let’s just tear the Band-Aid off on this one. When we’re talking about casting actors in film or television we’re using the verb “cast.” The past participle of cast is not “casted.” It is also just “cast.” No matter what form of the verb cast you’re using, whether you’re saying cast a role, or casting a line as a fisherman, the past participle is cast. These people were cast.

John: Absolutely. Whether it’s transitive or intransitive.

Craig: Correct.

John: Yes. It’s cast.

Craig: Cast. So, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey were cast in The Last of Us. They were not casted. No one has ever casted. And we must stop saying casted. This has been hard for me to talk about because it’s upsetting. And I know it can be re-traumatizing for people. But listen, and listen good. Because you and I, I think, safe to say we have lost the beg the question battle.

John: I’ll still try to use it correctly. But yes.

Craig: Of course. It’s just us and it is we and Peter Sagal standing alone on a mountain swarmed by everybody else who uses it to say “prompt the question.” But on this one I’m not letting go. We just – casted is not a word. Strike it from your lips and fingers.

John: Yeah. So clearly what’s happening here is as English changes and drifts, John McWhorter would have a whole episode about this, there is stuff that happens and things like cast is a special case. There’s been other verbs that are like it where we’ve stuck the “ed’ on the end of it. Like it lasted until dawn. So we’re generalizing from other things that sound like it and putting the “ed” there. But you don’t need it. Let’s try to go ten more years without that becoming the default. If we can last ten years that would be a victory.

Craig: Maybe this moment right now is what–

John: Is how it–

Craig: Yeah. Kind of drives–

John: It pushes it over the edge.

Craig: John McWhorter is so much fun to read, by the way. He’s really good.

John: Talented guy.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I also want to acknowledge that I’m so excited for your casting. So I’ve never met Bella Ramsey. She’s fantastic on Game of Thrones.

Craig: Lovely person.

John: Pedro Pascal was also great on Game of Thrones. I got to hang out with randomly Pedro Pascal over a year ago just at a social setting and he was just delightful and lovely. So I think he’s going to be phenomenal and phenomenal to work with. This was also a week in which some actors who are apparently not phenomenal to work with or who did some things which were controversial. And maybe we’ll have this as a whole separate discussion in a different episode. But I just want to acknowledge that it’s a weird time for actors right now. It’s a weird time to be thinking about who you’re putting into these roles who are going to be so prominent because what if they go off and do something terrible?

Craig: Yeah. And this I guess applies across the board to everybody that’s hiring. Anybody that has any sort of social media presence. One thing to appreciate is that social media presence and reach is not unconsidered when they are casting people, because they want to know who has this sort of built in fan base. It’s exciting for them. If a company wants to put an actor on a show and that actor can say, “Look, I have all these people that follow me, I have this devoted fan base,” then that is attractive to them.

I’m not sure it should be. And it is a double-edged sword. The wider your audience the more likely it is that you are going to, you one, is going to be tempted to throw chum into the water. You know? If you have a million people waiting for you to talk and you haven’t talked in a while, you’re going to talk. And sometimes people say dumb things. And, look, you know we’re talking about Gina Carano obviously who was also on The Mandalorian and she said a really stupid thing. And it was stupid and it was also, I mean, did you see the particular tweet in question?

John: I did not see the tweet in question. I sort of saw the backlash over it. And we should stress that we’re recording this on Friday so who knows what the social media universe is going to be like by the time this comes out. And there was the “get rid of Gina Carano” and then the “no, no, you have to save Gina Carano and cancel Disney+.” It becomes this whole storm and it’s like argh.

Craig: Well Gina Carano has apparently signed on to do a movie in conjunction with Ben Shapiro. So I think it’s safe to say that she’s heading off in a very different direction from where she was. But it was upsetting. It was an upsetting thing that she posted. And it was an upsetting photo that went with it. And it was just upsetting.

So, without getting into how these things sort of shake out, the danger of social media and a social media audience is that you have an audience. That’s the danger. And whereas a studio clearly controls what an actor does to the show’s audience through a script and editing, they don’t have any control over what actors or other very prominent people or entertainers do to their audience that is outside of their purview.

John: It’s a very natural segue to some follow up from our last conversation. So in 487 we talked with Rachel Miller who had suggestions for writers looking to staff on a TV show. David wrote in to say that, “I’m an editor for TV digital in the UK and I’m also pursuing screenwriting outside of that. So Rachel mentioned the importance of social media presence or online presence in general, but my social media presence is there to advertise me as an editor-for-hire. If a script of mine hypothetically got attention would my work within the industry in a completely different department hinder me? Would it be confusing to a producer or to a reader?”

Craig: Maybe. I don’t think it would hinder you. If a script gets attention, meaning people like it, then it takes quite a bit to hinder people from mining it for whatever goal they prospectively see there. Would it be a little bit confusing initially? Possibly. But then people get over it.

John: I think in general don’t worry so much about that, just worry that you don’t have stuff out there that makes you look like an absolute monster. And so I feel like this might be a good time for you, David, to go back through your history and like, oh you know what that joke does not actually read as a joke out of context. This might be a good time to delete that before there’s any exposure being placed on me.

Craig: And humor we know changes over time. And it is important I think to consider that. Maybe a good approach to this is expiring social media.

John: Yeah.

Craig: If you approach social media as kind of a disposable, cheap throwaway thoughts, which I think a lot of people do because that’s what it’s really suited perfectly for, then let it be thrown away. Let it disappear. It’s not meant to just sit there forever like a fish slowly stinking over time.

John: Yeah. So, if you’re a WGA member I’m going to be talking more about this topic. I’m on a panel this next week on Thursday February 18th. The WGA is doing a panel on social media for brand and navigating industry publicity. So it’s social media but it’s also basically how you do publicity for your projects and sort of advice for that. So it’s going to be Julie Plec, our friend.

Craig: Oh Julie.

John: LaToya Morgan, me, and then editors from Variety and other sort of media strategy folks. And so we’ll be having a nice little Zoom conversation. And so if you’re a WGA member I think only in the West, but maybe the East can come as well, there’s a link in the show notes to that. So we have a bunch of people coming, but it’s virtual, so we can fill – I think we can take up to a thousand people. So it’s not like a normal WGA event where it gets limited to like the first 100 people. So come.

Craig: What do you think your brand is, John? Do you think you have a brand?

John: I think I have a really good clean brand, honestly. And that really starts with johnaugust.com. I’ve sort of been this person online really from the start. And so Megana forwarded a question from somebody this last week and they were linking to an old blog post. And I looked at it and the post was like from 2007. And I was like, oh, it still sounds like me and it was basically good advice. It was about using opportunity to name characters in order to suggest an ethnicity. And so I wrote that and I think I refer to you in that post, but I didn’t know you at that time. You were just the guy who had that other blog. And so it was–

Craig: That’s true.

John: Yeah. It’s strange. There’s a dead link to your nonexistent blog in that post.

Craig: My brand is a big bucket of nothing. [laughs] It’s a confusing jumble of contradictoriness. I don’t have a brand. I don’t have a brand.

John: But I think to the degree you have a brand though it has shifted considerably over the last four years. I think you are mostly known as the Chernobyl guy and not the Hangover or Scary Movie guy.

Craig: True. But that’s not really a brand.

John: It’s brand-ish.

Craig: I don’t actually know what a brand is. I’ve got to be honest with you. Like when people talk about their spirituality and I also don’t know what that means. I don’t – like what is it?

John: OK. So I’ll try to define it. It’s a set of principles and ideas and images that are associated with a person or product that is narrow enough that they can say, “Oh, that feels like that person or that does not feel like that person.”

And so to the degree I’m a brand is like John is a helpful screenwriter, I mean, that sounds really general, but going back 20 years that’s sort of who I am. That feels on brand for me.

I think and you’re also a helpful screenwriter. And back to your blog days. But I think your brand is crankier?

Craig: Yeah. Well, I am crankier. God, I’m so cranky.

John: Well, it’s a natural time to segue into the agency campaign. So that’s been a source of a lot of crankiness over the last–

Craig: Two years. Three years. Well, yeah, two years plus, right?

John: Two years plus. To set this all up, and I want to kind of recap where this all began because it’s so important I think as you come to the end of a series sometimes you have those flashbacks to where everything started and you see how young the kids were on Game of Thrones at the start.

Craig: Right.

John: I want to remember how this all began. So on Friday, February 5th right after we finished recording last week’s show the WGA announced it had reached a deal with the final agency holdout in this big campaign to rewrite the agency agreement. So, that agency was WME. They signed the same agreement as the other agencies and a side letter to divest its affiliated production company called Endeavor Content. And there was is an outside monitor who is there to oversee that sale and the transaction and all the inner workings of how that’s going to work, especially with their clients.

And with that the agency campaign, this thing we’ve been talking about forever is finished.

Craig: Finito.

John: Finito.

Craig: Finito.

John: So I have a blog post up, or just a page up that runs through a timeline. And because we say it’s two years, but it was really three years because we had to give a year’s notice for the expiration. And even before we decided to pull the trigger to expire the 1976 agreement we had to have a bunch of meetings with writers to figure out is this really a thing that’s going to work. Is this a thing we should try to do?

So that timeline is long and it was sort of exhausting to put together, but I wanted to do it just to show kind of how much happened before anything happened. And then to remind me of some of the steps along the way. Because it’s so easy to forget like, oh yeah, that was a thing that happened. Over the course of two years it all kind of gets lost.

Craig: Yeah. Pretty great that we have this little time capsule of this show.

John: Yeah. Our first conversation really where we got into this was with Chris Keyser. So Chris Keyser was one of the negotiating committee chairs for the agency thing, and so this was back in 389 we sat down with him.

Craig: Wow.

John: And we talked about it. And so we were all in a room together. Remember when we used to record this sometimes in a room together?

Craig: We were in a room together. And not only were we in a room together, but we were in a room together. There was really no disagreement about anything. It was one of those rare guild moments where it didn’t seem like there was, at least in terms of what we felt about the value of the way agencies were performing their jobs packaging and producing.

John: Yeah.

Craig: There was no difference between anybody on it. It was bad.

John: So let’s take a listen to some of the goals that we’re laying out for this thing. And we’ll start with what packaging was and sort of what was important to think about with packaging. Let’s take a listen.

Chris Keyser: The heart of the conversation is about conflict of interest. The idea that the agency practices have ceased to align their economic interests clearly and solely with the economic self-interests of the writers whom they represent. And that’s a fundamental problem.

Craig: And so for people, I think a lot of people probably have a general sense of how this is supposed to work. Agents represent writers. Agents get writers work. They are allowed to do that by the very power that this AMBA grants them. And then whatever the writer earns, the gross, the agent takes 10% of it. Seems very simple. And in fact they used be known as ten-percenterees.

And so the more the writer makes the more the agent makes. But as it turns out that simple reality isn’t really the reality at all.

Chris: No, in television in fact essentially the standard method of payment now for agencies is to take what they call a packaging fee. And that packaging fee is tied both to the license fee of the show and ultimately the profits the show produces. So the agency makes – and we talk about this and if you read or have seen David Goodman’s speech he’s pretty explicit about this – 3, 3, and 10 is the standard formula. They make approximately three percent of the upfront license fee for a show, although that’s negotiable, somewhere usually between $30,000 and $100,000 an episode. There’s three percent of the backend that’s deferred that is not often collected by them. And then 10% of the adjusted gross.

Craig: And that’s great information, but again just to sort of simplify it for people what we’re talking about with these packaging fees is instead of the agents taking 10% of what we earn as writers what they do is they don’t take any commission from us. Which, ooh, great, we get to keep that 10%. Except, what they are getting in return is more than that from the studios that are producing the television shows.

John: So, Craig, in that conversation we were sort of laying out sort of what packaging was and it was probably the first time we had sort of talked about packaging really on this show. But you had a firsthand experience with packaging as well, right?

Craig: Yeah. I was surprised. I was hit in the face with a surprise package. On Chernobyl it was the first television show I’d ever done. I didn’t really have any experience with packaging. I’d been paying 10% of my gross earnings my entire career. My relationship with my agent for my whole career minus Chernobyl was what the guild was trying to make all of the arrangements like. So I didn’t have any experience with it. And then I got a check in the mail that was refunding me commission and I found out that CAA had gotten a package on Chernobyl and were extracting quite a bit more than what that 10% was from the budget of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was not – I’ve said this before – no one thought it was going to be a bit hit. The fact that we got as much money as we did was amazing. But we were pinching every penny. And to send over six figures in money out of the budget to CAA just seemed crazy. But more importantly, they just did it. They didn’t even ask me. And that, you know, as I said to them was what radicalized me. And it became clear to me that packaging just simply in the version that it existed was not tenable and needed to be destroyed or significantly altered.

John: Yeah. No, for me, my concern wasn’t so much about packaging. And I’ve said this a lot. I was more concerned with affiliated production. Because I really saw that as the bigger issue on the next 10, 20, 30 years going ahead. And so the pitch from agencies about why affiliated production was good, like why they should be able to own production entities, and why it was great for their clients to be working for these production entities is, hey, we’re already on your side. We can give you deals that you won’t get at the studios. We sort of know what’s best for you.

Let’s listen to what I said then.

You are competing with them for IP sometimes. Like if you want that book they may own that book. And so you’re actually in competition with them for the things you’re trying to buy.

Craig: Right.

John: And it’s also just the most classic conflict of interest possible. Something that David Goodman says in his speech is you wouldn’t want Peter Roth negotiating your salary. And that’s ultimately where you’re kind of getting to.

And so those were the things we sort of lay out going into it, the concern about packaging fees and affiliated productions. And so what happened? What was the outcome of all this?

Craig: Well, the outcome is that there are no more packaging fees – well, there will be no more packaging fees after a certain sun-setting amount of time. I think a year and a bit. And also when it comes to the production companies the talent agencies have either completely divested or will eventually within a certain window sufficiently divest to the point where they have what is it a–

John: A 20% cap.

Craig: Under 20%. So that they are no longer the driving force of those production companies. So, in theory we have achieved the goals that we set out to achieve.

John: Yeah. And so a clarification on the 20% thing, you know, it’s one thing for the agency to own a production entity, but what you also don’t want is for the same company to own both a production entity and an agency, which was sort of my bigger concern. We had the possibility that theoretically a Disney could buy a WME and then you’re literally just working for the same company. And so this agreement precludes that. And so you cannot own or be owned by a company that owns more than that threshold of production entity which I think is a crucial distinction.

So those things that we wanted to get achieved were achieved, along with a bunch of information sharing stuff. So the requirement that agencies have to CC the guild on invoices so we sort of know what money is coming in to writers and what money could be coming in late. And to send in contracts so we can really get a sense of what compensation is looking like above scale, which is a thing which has always been sort of murky. So we’ll actually get a better sense of that both in features and in television. So, that information sharing should be really important.

Craig: Question for you about the information sharing. So, I don’t know if traditionally if my agent has gotten copies of my contracts.

John: I don’t know either. I suspect they probably have, because that’s how they sort of have a sense of what deals look like and how to negotiate for their other clients.

Craig: I think they just leave that with the lawyer.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out practically. Like the points where reality rubs on theory. And we’ll see, hopefully, well any amount more than we had is good. So, you know, in general.

John: And we’ve already seen some good progress of that in terms of collecting money from people. And really getting the data to show what is happening with feature screenwriter salaries for example. And that’s really fascinating and of [unintelligible] to both of us.

Craig: Yeah. Nothing good I’m sure.

John: Pros and cons. So it’s not all grim news.

Craig: Well that’s good.

John: Let’s talk about what was expected and what were the surprises along the way. And I’ll start with some of the things that surprised me going into this. If you look at the timeline I was in a zillion meetings for this, in addition to sort of board meetings and committee meetings, I was in a lot of meetings with writers and showrunners, screenwriters going into this and talking about stuff. And sort of what we anticipated things to look like. No one anticipated it was going to take two years to do.

I think part of the reason why we didn’t think it would take two years to do is that we thought that either we would be negotiating with the ATA all together and together they would come to an agreement that we could live with, or that they would split apart and we’d be talking to them individually and sort of make individual deals with places. And they both stuck together longer than I sort of guessed they would have. And splintered in different ways than I would have guessed.

And so the timeframe was longer than I thought it was going to be going in. No one expected this to be a two-year campaign.

Craig: No. But also of some concern was that we weren’t told it was going to be a one-year campaign either. We were told it was going to be a couple of weeks. Or three weeks or something like that, you know.

John: Yeah. I don’t remember ever saying weeks.

Craig: Oh, you didn’t. You didn’t. No, I never heard that from you. But, no, we were in meetings and things. Weeks were thrown around. And there was somewhat of an arrogant sense of like they can’t – they won’t last a month. And ICM will collapse. And the other one was that obviously the big agents at these agencies who probably detest their own agency for taking their money are going to leave and form a new super agency that will sign up at the WGA. There was just a lot of, I think, just conjecture that was based on nothing except hope. And that’s not a great, you know, that’s not a great basis.

John: There were misassumptions I think on both sides. And on the agency side I think there was this patronizing tone. There was this agent-splaining of like “let me explain to you how this all works.” And it was happening to clients, but it was also happening in meetings with negotiations where they said like, “No, no, let’s explain how packaging actually works.” No, we know how packaging works. This is the problem. This is the problem with affiliated. And it took more than a year for the big four agencies to sort of acknowledge that. And that was a surprise that it took so long to get to them, even acknowledging that like, oh, this is what’s happening here.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And a misassumption that the guild was different than the writers. And that 96% vote to approve this thing was all just show, there really wasn’t support for it, when there was support for it. And we’ll get into the times along the way where it looked like there was not support for it. But I think they misread the guild is the writers, the writers is the guild.

Craig: It was a complete miscalculation and I remember before we all signed the things and sent them in saying, OK, we’re terminating your services, and the whole thing began, I was talking to an agent. And he was saying, “Look, you know, I find it hard to believe that clients who have had 20 or 30 year relationships with their agents are just going to fire them because of this. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.” And I was like, and I tried to explain to this agent not only is it going to happen, but you have to understand it is going to happen and it’s going to happen permanently until the union says it’s not happening anymore because what you guys think, you see a labor union. That’s what you see. You see a union with rules and stuff. What members, a lot of rank and file, see is the place that pays for the healthcare of their families.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And that more than anything is going to put the union first. The fact that there are also rules in place and the potential for discipline and all that, sure. But at the heart of it I just always felt like they didn’t understand what our own relationship with our own union was. And so they miscalculated terribly and then dug in.

John: A thing I misunderstood, and I didn’t really understand until we started talking with UTA seriously, which was a lot sooner than it sort of probably seemed, is that a lot of their concern about packaging really had nothing to do with writers. It was mostly that high-paid TV actors have never paid commission. And so if you are an actress on a big TV show you’ve never paid commission because it’s always been covered by a packaging fee. So suddenly that actress does not want to pay 10% of her salary. And it’s hard for an agent to say like, “Oh, now you’re going to have to start paying us that money.” And they don’t want to. And so they were worried about losing those kind of clients.

And so when we started having those conversations like, oh, the calculus is really different on your side. I get it. It’s not going to change what we’re willing to do, but that was a thing that I just hadn’t anticipated it was going to be such a roadblock for some of the agencies.

Craig: You shouldn’t have had to anticipate that. That should have been laid out to you guys by staff before you ever got into those rooms. Because that was so obvious. And we weren’t saying you can’t package writers anymore. We were saying you can’t package anymore. The amount of money that actors and certain directors make on these shows is astonishing.

There are absolutely writers that make astonishing amounts of money. Don’t get me wrong. But there are way more actors that make astonishing amounts of money in the long run. And the fact that we were telling the agencies how they had to conduct their business with not writers was always going to be a massive problem and a roadblock that had to be figured out. Or just waited out.

But you should have been – to me I’m mystified that that wasn’t something that was made clear to you guys immediately.

John: Well, to be fair, we had many, many showrunners involved in the negotiation who had firsthand experience with obviously making these shows and making shows with these clients. The other way you can look at that calculation is ultimately these agencies will probably end up making more taking 10% of that actor’s salary than they would have in the packaging fee. But because we all recognize that the classic backend, which was the huge payday, just doesn’t happen anymore. Or doesn’t happen to the same scale. And so I’m just only talking for myself personally. I misassumed that their desire to hold onto packaging was just this misguided belief that this old system was going to come back or be meaningful when really it was more about fear of other clients.

So I think that’s just a personal – I wasn’t weighting that properly.

Craig: Yeah. It seemed to me that one of the – so this group of whatever it’s called, the Association of Talent Agencies, is that what it is? ATA?

John: Yeah. ATA.

Craig: That’s not a thing. They hate each other. They hate each other so much. And they would occasionally say things like the only people that we hate more than each other are you. But, no, that’s not true. They hate each other more. They are their direct competitors. They eat each other’s lunch. They steal each other’s employees. They want to dominate each other. They are in a competitive, capitalistic business. We’re a union. We’re not competing with each other. We don’t want to kill each other. We want to do the opposite.

So one of the things that made this difficult to do was how much they hated each other and how they saw this as a way to maybe screw over another one of them. So, if we make a deal, like the game theory of it, if I make a deal to get rid of packaging now my big actors have to pay me 10%. The agency across the street is going to immediately call them and say, “Here’s how much this is going to cost you now to stay with your agent. It’s in the millions. Come on over here because we’re not doing that deal and we’ll keep packaging.” That part of it makes it very, very tricky, even more so than dealing with the companies because while the companies also compete with each other in the end what they’re talking – they don’t have much of a way to screw each other over with our negotiation.

John: Well, I think it’s also – people have been asking me like, oh, so how does this change to calculation in terms of like how you would normally do a MBA negotiation, the regular studio negotiation. And really they’re so different because this group we were dealing with like they had never done this negotiation either. And so they didn’t have a great sense of how they were going to conduct themselves or what the priorities were. It was comparatively easy to split them apart because they had no history of working together versus the AMPTP which negotiates this way all the time. Each of the individual unions time after time after time they’re so good at it. And it’s just a completely different experience.

Craig: Yeah. And they know what to make of the union when the union sits there and negotiates back, because they don’t draw conclusions about the way the union is presenting itself because they understand. I mean, it’s like anything. If you’ve been through it before you kind of know, oh, OK, I don’t need to overreact about this, or this, or this. But they had not gone through this before and they did not – I mean, look, I can’t defend the way the agencies conducted it, because, A, it took way longer than it should have, and B, they lost. So, their strategy was bad. It hurt us, too. But it was worse for them than it was for us. That’s for sure.

John: So, some things that I want to say and give them credit for. They held together and those big four held together especially longer than I would have expected. And they kept agencies 5-12 on board longer than I would have guessed. And so it became one at a time they were dropping off. But to their credit I was surprised they were able to hold together as well as they could. And both sides were really good at not leaking. And so there were so many talks happening and you didn’t hear about it in the press. And that’s impressive on both sides. So good at that.

Once it became clear that this was going to be a tug of war where literally the rope is stretched and your heels dug into the sand and then it just becomes a game of inches then it became the dominoes one by one. Agency 12. Agency 11. And you’re working your way up the line and it became much more clear like, OK, this is how it’s going to be resolved. And so one at a time rather than all at once. That was just the way it was. But that certainly wasn’t my expectation going in.

Craig: Yeah. I think everybody was surprised. I mean, I was surprised.

John: Now it’s time for the other surprises. So, this is way back in November 2019. You and I have obviously talked about this a lot, and with me being on the negotiating committee I couldn’t say things that I knew. And you had expressed your great frustration over how stuff was going on in the campaign. And I was trying to articulate sort of like why I feel so differently about these things just because of what I know that I couldn’t share. And so I make up a PDF. I encrypted it. I put it on a USB drive and I handed it to you. I handed it to you before we recorded a live show.

Craig: I’m opening it up.

John: All right, Craig. You have the PDF, so you’re getting a little password screen on it.

Craig: Yes.

John: Now, here’s the password. I’m going to send it to you. And…open.

Craig: It is open.

John: All right. So there should be four things you’re seeing on your screen. So do you want to just read it to us here?

Craig: Number one, and should I say what the date is?

John: Sure.

Craig: So November 22, 2019. Number one. The agency that was close to signing a deal before the rival Writers Guild slate was announced was Paradigm. They had promised a red-lined agreement, then said no, we’ll wait until after the election.

John: So I’m trying to remember the conversation that was happening between us right before then.

Craig: I remember it. [laughs]

John: Tell us what you remember.

Craig: Yeah. So the Writers Guild every year has a constitutionally mandated democratic election, which is apparently upsetting to some people. And every two years, every other election, also includes officers. And in that year that was one of those elections. So, there was a group of writers initially including myself, and then I had to drop off because my son got sick, who were running against David Goodman and his group of candidates. And one of the arguments that people made that was essentially anti-democratic in nature if you ask me was that because there was support for a rival Writers Guild slate a major agency that was going to sign and therefore deliver this whole thing into a kind of paradise of collapsing dominoes wouldn’t sign. And apparently that is kind of true. Paradigm was never going to be the one that was going to do that. I think it was implied that it was UTA. That was at least the sort of rumor that because people had dared run against David Goodman that UTA was no longer going to sign with the guild.

So this is not–

John: Some contextualization around this. So I think it had been said publicly that we were in negotiations with a major agency. And so Paradigm at the time was the first largest agency. So, it wasn’t the big four, but it was just smaller than ICM. And so I think the pushback had been like, oh, you’re talking about some podunk agency we’ve never heard of. And so that’s why–

Craig: Well…

John: I wanted to say this that it’s Paradigm which is a significant agency.

Craig: They were. But I don’t think they’re a packaging agency.

John: They do have packaging fees, but they’re mostly splits on packaging. They don’t have whole packaging fees.

Craig: They don’t have full packaging fees and they don’t have production.

John: They don’t have production at all. So only the big three have production.

Craig: Yeah. Basically I’m always going to come back to that this was really a negotiation about three agencies or 3.5. But, regardless, that is interesting and also stupid on Paradigm’s part. I don’t know why they thought that that was ever going to matter. I mean, there was such a misunderstanding about what – and we can get into all the politics later about what people were saying and what the differences were between how people wanted to litigate this fight with the agencies. I mean, I personally had my – Shawn Ryan was kind enough to just invent an articulation of my thoughts and feelings and send it to everybody. And it was just completely wrong.

Nobody wanted to end this. There were disagreements about how to do it so that it could get done quicker perhaps. And also I still have concerns about what this means for lower earning writers and whether this is going to help or hurt them.

John: Before we get into this next point though, one of the big things that was – I looked through all of the writer statements from the rival slate yesterday just to see what the consistent them was, and the consistent theme was we have to go back and we have to keep negotiating. We can’t be silent. We have to actually negotiate and engage. And my point is we were engaging the whole time as we get to point number two.

Craig: And that’s a perfectly fair point. Point number two. UTA came back and was negotiating before the vote, meaning the election. UTA insisted on keeping it super-secret. Their packaging proposal was basically that everyone pays commission but their own clients get it back. It led to weird misincentives which is why it was a non-starter. But I get why they’re doing it. They want to protect actors who don’t or won’t pay commissions. They’ve scheduled and canceled several sessions. They still say they want to be the first of the big four to sign.

John: Which ultimately became true.

Craig: Well, if they canceled the sessions I’m not sure how – I mean, was that an active negotiation or kind of a teasing of a negotiation?

John: So these conversations were happening before you joined the rival slate. And then they came back–

Craig: Oh, it was me? It was me personally?

John: To recall the events, originally you were running for a board seat. And then ultimately you decided to run for a VP slot.

Craig: Yes.

John: And so it was when you announced you were running for the VP slot that all suddenly got very quiet. And then when you withdrew the conversations started again.

Craig: So…?

John: And I don’t want to pin this entirely on like Craig Mazin influences everything, but–

Craig: I mean, is this a causality/correlation thing? I mean–

John: Causality is too much to say for it. But I think it’s fair to acknowledge that of the people on that slate you were the one with the highest profile and the one who would attract the most attention. That’s fair. You can stipulate that, right?

Craig: I think that’s fair. And they would have been terribly disappointed by my position, deeply. Disappointed by my position. Because my position was never going to somehow keep them rolling with money. The only thing I ever wanted to explore was whether or not we could take the money that was coming in from the companies and redistribute it to the writers. That I thought was interesting. . Particularly writers that were earning under a number. Or writers that were under a certain credit. Because what I didn’t want was this to just become something where showrunners got more money. Showrunners don’t need more money.

And I wanted to be more or what I would consider to be more aggressive about negotiating and, you know, in this case there was – sometimes there is value in kind of change in the sense of like, OK, if you’re stuck in a rut with a certain group you may be able to get out of a rut if they change up who is looking across the table from you. But they would have been terribly disappointed.

And honestly it’s silly if they had to do was just listen to the conversation we had with Chris Keyser. I couldn’t have been clearer about where my heart was.

John: Yeah.

Craig: All right. Number three. WME has come with packaging proposals as recently as this past week. So this is referring to November 2019. They’re not doing it through the ATA. They want to meet as often as possible.

Did that actually happen though?

John: So, they would come back with proposals and then it would be radio silence for a long period of time. And so ultimately the issue you run into is they come up with these packaging proposals that are like, OK, that’s a half-step towards a place we don’t want to end up. So that’s really fundamentally what it was. I think there is an assumption that like, oh, if you would just sit down and talk and talk and talk and talk you would get to a place and that wasn’t actually sort of what was happening. But we were trying to keep those channels open as best as we could.

Your point about sometimes you just need to change the players is kind of where I think the progress was ultimately made in those last things. Because suddenly different people were showing up to those conversations and it’s just like they were empowered to actually get the thing done.

Craig: Yeah. And then the final thing is number four. At the moment the only agency – again, November 22, 2019 – at the moment the only agency not talking with the WGA is CAA. And then in parenthesis, to be fair it’s been a moment on ICM as well. Meaning I guess ICM had sort of started a side discussion and then just dropped away completely.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So my guess is that that’s going to be amusing and annoying to CAA because I presume that they were all like, “We’re not talking to those guys,” and then CAA was actually not talking to you and everybody else was like whisper, whisper. So, yeah.

John: So obviously these are four things that I wish I could have – I felt like if I could have shared them with you it would have made our conversations so much less – I would have felt better if I could have told you these things, but I couldn’t tell you these things. And it just really helped to explain why I could seem Pollyannaish about how things were going to get resolved compared to your grumpiness.

Craig: Well, I mean, it still did take–

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: –beyond a year from that point to get resolved. It didn’t go – I mean, it was expensive for our union to file all the lawsuits and hire all the extra lawyers and all that obviously.

John: And ultimately we will know what that is because as a public union that’s all going to show up in the report. So we’ll see it.

Craig: And so, you know, sometimes unions have to spend money to win fights. Obviously the longer they go the more expensive they are. There are a few things about this that I love and there are a few things about it that I hate.

Let’s talk about the things I love. We won. Right? So we wanted to achieve something and we did. And it was something that – well the end of production, of agency-owned production, and the stripping away of the onerous aspects of packaging, which is most of them, was something that ultimately I did thing that we had total leverage to do. I didn’t see how this was even really a negotiation if the Writers Guild wanted to just not have any other version beyond all or nothing. It was never going to be something the agencies could win. They just couldn’t, because we are in charge of that agreement and we can cut them off. And furthermore the Writers Guild sort of changed their position. Initially they were saying it was sort of voluntary and then they said it’s not voluntary. You have to fire your agents.

And so it seemed to me like that was something that was very achievable. And we did achieve it. The only thing that could have kept that from happening as far as I can tell other than an adverse legal decision, which was possible I suppose, was some kind of like march on the guild by a thousand writers saying we want to go back to our agencies, which didn’t happen.

Now, some people think it happened. But it didn’t. We’ll get to that in a minute. Another thing I love about this is that it sets a precedent for the companies to some extent that when we have a firm kind of life or death position on something it’s firm. And we mean it. And we are willing to go to lengths. And we are willing to wait. Times have changed. It’s a different kind of situation out there in part because of the way the companies have demolished the middle class. They have done this to themselves, and the agencies did this to themselves, too.

And so the demographics are such of the union that people really, you know, they have fewer Fs to give as the phrase says. They are not going to let the companies or the agencies kind of roll over on them when it comes to odious practices like packaging and agency production. That’s what I loved.

John: Let me talk about the things I loved, and then we’ll get into the things I didn’t love. One of the things I really loved about the whole thing was watching people step up. And so we’ve talked about members stepping up and actually just like, OK, I’m now literally going to take agency and start working to find my own jobs and start working to find jobs for people I know and people I don’t know. So things like the staffing boost challenge and other things to sort of get people read and sort of get, especially TV writers, staffed. It was great to see that.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I saw lawyers stepping up. And independent of sort of like having to do agent-y kind of jobs, what I did find consistently is like, you know, attorneys had to be more involved in their client’s lives and actually talking with them about sort of what they’re trying to achieve. And that’s good. I mean, without lawyers negotiating some of these big things I think you wouldn’t have seen some of the headlines that were sort of encouraging along the way. And your attorney had to do great work for you obviously. So that was great to see. And I think reminded people that you have more than just your agent sort of on your team. And I saw the guild working its ass off. And so I think there’s obviously things to criticize, but you see the new things that they rolled out in terms of the directory, in terms of new systems, about letting unrepped writers advocate for themselves was really good an important. Because while I think you and I both have been pretty consistent in terms of like agents can be really helpful for writers, but they shouldn’t be absolutely essential for writers. And there’s a lot of people who are especially in TV and places where maybe they don’t actually need to have an agent doing some of the stuff that we’ve been having them do.

So I think some of the systems that the guild was able to put online were good and smart and should continue. And apparently will continue, which is great.

Craig: Yeah. I agree with all of those. I think everything you said is more stuff that I love. And I do.

Stuff we didn’t love.

John: Stuff we didn’t love. I’ll start with stuff I didn’t love.

Craig: Go for it.

John: That first year was one of the most stressful years of my life. Just in terms of the number of phone calls I had to be on with people who had worries or said they had worries. And these are 45 minute, hour-long calls with a single person talking them off the ledge about what was going on. And some of these people were historically anti-WGA. And the people who are historically anti-WGA is often because they had a bad experience with the guild, especially about arbitration. There’s people who just don’t love the guild and I was dealing with them.

But some of them actually were concern trolls who – and by concern trolls I mean people who pretend they’re on your side, but they kind of aren’t and they just sap all the energy out of you. And it just gave me such a bad taste for that. And I can think of probably 30 people I had to have those phone calls with. Not one of them has contacted me in the weeks since this has signed saying like, “Hooray, this is done.”

And it’s not important really, but also it shows me that I think some of these people really weren’t acting in good faith. They were kind of honestly being selfish and were not thinking about me as an individual during all of this. And that sucks.

And so it’s a small part of the experience. On the whole I’m so happy with where we ended up. But I do have a particular distaste for some people and sort of how they chose to demand my time during this period.

Craig: Yeah. Same.

John: Yeah. You got a few of those.

Craig: Yeah. Have you heard of the phrase “sea-lioning?”

John: No, I want to know what sea-lioning is.

Craig: OK, so sea-lioning comes from an Internet cartoon. And basically it’s the idea that it’s a kind of troll that asks you questions. The questions are incredibly innocuous like, “You know what, I’m not necessarily in agreement with your position but I want to know more so can you just tell me how would you do something differently?” And you’re like, OK, you’re coming at me with a perfectly good faith nice question. Let me answer. And they’re like, “Huh. All right. Let me just ask you this then. How is that different from this? OK, one more question. If you do that…” And then about a thousand questions later you realize you’ve been sea-lioned. That this was never in good faith. This was literally something where they were just tormenting you by asking you endless questions that they were not interested in actually. This was not in good faith.

There’s one person in particular that I tip my hat to him. He was really good at it. I will resent him forever for it, but I tip my hat to him.

So there were a lot of people who were engaging in kind of bad behavior and that does happen.

John: It does happen. And one thing I do want to acknowledge is that, yes, I left the board during the time, so people maybe weren’t as focused on me, but I was clearly still on the negotiating committee for this and for the MBA. And I was surprised how much it died down. Like there were still people who were clearly like when is this agency campaign going to be over, but also like I wasn’t getting barraged by those same questions and there wasn’t the same sort of panic and dread.

Even David Goodman who is our president said like, “Yeah, it’s weird how quite everyone just sort of got.” And everyone was sort of like, well, yeah, it’s going to get resolved eventually.

Craig: I actually got nervous about that. I thought that was possibly a sign that people were just sort of slinking back. And maybe they were. Yeah, I was getting nervous. In fact, that is one of the things that I don’t like – one of my not like things was a sense that the guild has, or had, during this exercise a tendency to let in and emphasize good news and ignore and deemphasize bad news. And I don’t think the guild should be in that business. I don’t think the guild is like a store that should be talking about how great sales have been in the first quarter and sort of ignoring that costs have gone up or something.

It always felt a little bit – at times you felt a little gas-lit. When things are not going well they’re telling us it’s going great. When we get a very adverse legal decision and we’re told it’s not that bad actually. Or, you know, yeah, we said it would be four weeks, but it will probably be in another two weeks. I wish the guild would do a little bit better, or a lot of bit better at being a little bit more pessimistic in the sense of being realistic.

John: Yeah. I can see that. And so there were moments where the headlines weren’t awesome, but I also felt like the headlines that weren’t awesome were kind of deadline headlines that were kind of misconstruing a bit of what was going on. So, the bad headlines were mostly about court decisions. And they would say like, oh, they threw out 20 of the WGA’s complaints, but didn’t acknowledge that like, oh, and actually 15 of them are still going and discovery is about to happen. So there was that.

So, point five on that PDF I sent you was probably the crucial thing which I knew that you didn’t know at that point was that a global pandemic would shut down the world. And with that in mind I knew that things would take a lot longer. So, it’s been frustrating this last week. People say like, oh, it’s all because of Covid that the agencies signed. And it’s like, well, that’s not really the case. Because as I made clear like we were talking with them beforehand. Some of this stuff was getting figured out. And then Covid kind of slowed a bunch of stuff down. We signed a couple of deals right away, but then everyone is figuring out like what the hell are we doing. And so it’s hard for us to have these agency negotiations when the agencies are like do we have to lay everybody off? What is going on?

Craig: I agree with that. I don’t think that this was something that Covid precipitated, meaning that this resolution, this favorable resolution was precipitated by Covid. If it were precipitated by Covid it would have been done a year ago.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Or, whatever, ten months ago I completely agree. I think Covid slowed down a lot of stuff there. I mean, in a way maybe that’s why it got quiet. People were suddenly concerned about dying, handling their families.

John: Hierarchy of needs sort of shifted there. It’s so easy to forget how scary that was right at the start. We just didn’t know what the world was going to look like, and so do we bother negotiating this thing? And at the same time in context we were also negotiating the next MBA agreement which was we started to have the big public meetings about that. There were clearly a lot of things on the table and we had to postpone. There was a lot going on. So, you know, everything would have been different without the pandemic, but that’s just the last 12 months. There’s nothing in the last 12 months that wouldn’t have been different without that.

Craig: I agree. A couple more things that I rued. Rued. The promotion of managers by the guild I thought was unnecessary and dangerous. Specifically because managers literally embody everything that we’re trying to get rid of in the agencies. I mean, I really do not like this conflict of interest stuff. It’s why I’m against the way packaging functions. It’s why I was so angry about the agencies and their production companies. And so we start sending writers to managers that have been doing this forever? It didn’t make sense then. It makes no sense to me now. It will never make sense. And just today the Writers Guild helpfully informed us all that managers can no longer procure employment for us per the Writers Guild. They could never procure employment for us per state law.

So that was the other thing that kind of blew my mind was that the Writers Guild just kind of said this like it wasn’t even fair to managers in a sense, because managers are not legally allowed to procure employment. Lawyers are in a different place because they have a fiduciary responsibility that was a different situation.

So I just was really just regretted that the guild did that. I wish they hadn’t. And it was unnecessary. I think maybe they did it because they thought it was going to strengthen our hand, but I don’t think it did. I just think it drove more writers into the arms of people that do precisely the thing we want to stop. And if everybody gets ready for another war, please let me know, because I hope it’s against the managers.

John: Yeah. And I should stress that when we surveyed members, members love managers, and members did not love their agents. That’s what it comes down to. The idealist in me sees that. But the pragmatist in me sees like people don’t have a beef with their managers, so yeah.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I think that they don’t have a beef with their managers until they do.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s what happens generally speaking.

I am hopeful but skeptical about how this is going to impact the bottom line of our most vulnerable writers. There is a good economic theory that I myself – I wish that people who think that I was like some sort of agency toady could have seen how – here’s my secret belief – how many arguments I would get into with people explaining why this was exactly a fight we needed to fight. It’s really frustrating when you’re being called like a scab and all the rest of that and you’re like I also just called a union idiot 30 minutes ago by somebody who didn’t think we should be doing this at all, but OK.

But the point was that if the agencies are – if their income is decoupled from the earnings of writers they have no reason to push earnings of writers up. Earnings of writers will drop to their minimum and stay there. So, the question now is with the money that the studios used to be shipping to the agencies are they going to be shipping it to the writers? Remember that the lower earning writers on TV shows are, at least in the short term, are going to be losing money on this because they have to pay their agents now 10%.

So will salaries go up? I hope that they do. And I would argue that it is going to be primarily the responsibility of showrunners to make that happen. And fulfill their end of this contract, this bargain, with the membership. Everybody sacrificed here and it is my great hope that we start to see those salaries coming up.

We did not make any kind of official instrument to redirect that income, which is something I was interested in. Fair enough. Other people weren’t. So it’s going to have to be done informally. And I hope it is.

John: So, two points of clarification there. We say that those writers weren’t paying 10%, but a lot of them were. So it’s only if you were at the same agency that packages that you weren’t paying that 10%. So many of those lower level writers it’s a wash. They were paying 10% regardless.

Craig: That’s fair.

John: And we should actually know the answer to these questions. We should actually have a much better sense of what writers are really getting paid because we will have contracts and invoices. And so traditionally the only thing we know about TV writer pay has been – this is a whole other issue – but we only knew what they were getting in WGA coverage rather than sort of–

Craig: Producer.

John: Producer fees. And now we’ll see the contracts and actually really know what the take home pay is. And we’ll have to survey people and we can actually have hard data of that. So we can see what the growth is time after time.

Craig: Do we have time for one more gripe?

John: Sure.

Craig: And this is the most important one. There was a remarkable expression of anti-democratic thought inside of our union. It’s happened before. It happened again. And it will happen again I’m sure. And it goes like this. If the majority leadership is doing something you have to support it. If you disagree with them publicly, if you run against them, if you challenge them for election, you are not only disloyal to your union, you are actively undermining what the union is doing, therefore you are a scab. This is not something that I’m saying out of fabulizing some crazy person’s thinking. This is something that was said repeatedly, over and over, and written over and over in public. There’s evidence of it all over the place.

Now, for me, there was a very strange week and I don’t compare this to the strange year you had because a week is way shorter than a year. But I did have a strange week where I was sitting in a hospital in Salt Lake City with my son who had had emergency abdominal surgery, and tubes going in and out of him, and trying to write a campaign statement and being called a scab on Twitter. And a lot of other things. [laughs] Word things that were worse.

And it was deeply unpleasant. And also frustrating. Because there is something so evidently self-denying about it. A unity argument in which unity must be enforced by screaming at people who disagree with you. That’s not unity. That’s just bullying. And there was an example of it recently from a member of the board who went on Twitter and said some things about, you know, other members and other people, not me specifically. But it was just mean. And I thought uncalled for. And the spirit of it is not forgotten.

And so if we’re trying to be unified we have to figure out a way as a membership to respect each other as long as we are following the rules. Right? If you follow the rules, you fire your agent, you stick by your guns, you do it right, and then you are, you know, and you have disagreements about how we are pursuing the goals, then you’re following the rules. And we need to figure out how to allow that to exist without defining it as disloyalty or god forbid scabbing which is a terrible thing to accuse somebody of.

John: Two kind of related points is that during the time when things got really heated and leading up to the election and such, I sort of got thrown out as the person who had to be the peacekeeper and let’s remind everybody that this is a democratic process and stuff like that. What I couldn’t say that I wanted to say is that when stuff like scab were being thrown around constantly what I was being told is like, “You’re lying.”

Because we would say that this is a thing that’s happening and people would say to my face in front of a whole crowd, “Well I don’t believe you. You’re lying. You’re making that up.” And I couldn’t say because we were – I was telling the truth, but I couldn’t prove it because we were in these negotiations.

So, I got so sick of being called a liar, sort of those words, constantly. So that was my frustration. I was not allowed to yell back about sort of what they were calling me. So that was a great source of frustration.

Craig: Yeah.

John: The other thing which was happening which again I don’t know that it’s useful to dig out all of this and I think someone will write a book that actually sort of goes into what was happening on the agency side of this.

Craig: Worst book ever. [laughs]

John: Well, I genuinely don’t have a sense of like what those negotiations were like between the big four and stuff like that.

We do know because these people would also then reach out to – there would be people saying like, “Oh hey I’m brokering this thing.” There was a lot of time people were trying to have side conversations to do stuff. That was really hurting us. And that truly is a thing.

And so is that against the rules? Yeah. It’s not good. It’s not helping. And so that was – I think some of the frustration you’re hearing from folks who were on the negotiating committee or the board is we know what certain individuals were doing and how much it did screw us.

Craig: That I understand. I still think, look, if you are in an elected office in the union, and I was, and you were, then you have a certain kind of added responsibility to be–

John: That’s why I didn’t and that’s why I’ve not shouted out to people or called them by name.

Craig: That’s correct.

John: Just so you know that’s where a lot of that frustration is coming from. They may have genuinely believed that they were helping, but when we tell them that they’re undermining they just keep doing it. And so I think things went on a little longer, maybe in some cases a lot longer than they needed to, because they were instilling a false belief in our adversaries that we were close to folding, or that some middle ground was going to be formed. And it wasn’t there.

Craig: All I can say is that I hope that there’s a way for folks to treat each other a bit more respectfully.

John: I would hope so, too.

Craig: In all directions. I think that we have to remember in the membership that our board members and our president and vice president and secretary and treasurer are writers. They’re not being paid. They’ve volunteered for that. Granted, they did so voluntarily and, you know, there’s a little bit – you’ll always have to take a little bit of heat when you’re in that position, but you have to keep in mind that they’re not your servants. And then, you know, in the other direction we have to figure out how to respectfully tolerate dissent. As long as people–

John: That’s crucial.

Craig: –are following the rules. I mean, that’s the important thing. And if we start stretching the word “scab” to mean anybody that disagrees with something the president of the guild says we’re in serious trouble.

John: I would agree with you there. I would look forward to hopefully more normal elections where we get a range of opinions and it’s not – it shouldn’t be and it probably won’t be so polarized about a single issue.

I want to wrap this up by saying I always kind of dreaded these discussions with you on the podcast because it was just so uncomfortable. And we don’t fight in real life. But the closest we ever come to fighting has been about these issues. And so I just feel so good to be able to put a pin in this and to move past this. And I know it was a source of stress for Megana as well because she is just listening to us fight, it’s like mom and dad fighting. And for our listeners, too.

Craig: That’s the worst part. If Megana gets upset then I just feel terrible. I know that you don’t actually have feelings. You have circuitry. You have your root sub routines. But Megana…

And, listen, you did a great job. That’s the god’s honest truth. And we were both of us in a strange position, because I get blamed for stuff all the time that I didn’t do. And also apparently entire agencies think that I’m who I’m not.

We were each getting it from multiple ends. And so it is a difficult thing to process through and there were times where you definitely were in a tough spot. And I give you credit. You always listened respectfully. I mean, you behaved the way elected officials should behave.

John: Yeah. And I think people would comment on like, “Oh, I like how you’re modeling the conversation of respectful listening and sort of talking through the issues and not getting upset about it.” But I was secretly really upset. But we’re still modeling. I’m still modeling–

Craig: So was I. I mean, I think that’s part – look, you can’t avoid getting upset. There are times when we’re going to head into situations where we are going to feel things, you can’t avoid that. All you can do as hopefully a decent person is remember that the person on the other end is a human being. That they are a good human being. That you hope that they listen to you. And you hope that you can do the same for them.

And so, yes, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get upset. There’s no shame in being upset. It’s just how you handle it. So, you know, and you had a harder job for sure and so I just, you know, tip my hat. You did a really good job. You were my favorite, by far.

John: Aw.

Craig: Of all of the leadership.

John: Now I feel all warm and happy. Now he loves me.

Craig: Oh yeah. Of course. Listen, of course I love you. But, you know, you really did a great job. And that’s not surprising to me because you are, you know, all joking aside you are more human than I am I suspect. And you want to bridge gaps and find common ground which is exactly the right instinct. And we need more of you, not fewer.

John: Well thank you. That was really nice to say. Thank you.

Craig: Hats off to you. And, you know, listen, hats off to the membership and the guild for achieving something while arguing amongst themselves, which is what we do. As long as you followed the rules. I’ll just keep saying. You’ve got to follow the rules. So, there you go.

John: All right. This is a time in the show where we listener questions where we invite on Megana Rao to ask those questions. But I’m going to start with my first question for Megana. Was this experience uncomfortable for you because I didn’t want to put words in your mouth? How are you feeling about the end of this and this end of this chapter in Scriptnotes?

Megana Rao: I’ve been like so giddy. I feel a lot of emotions right now just in this past hour of recording. I’ve been sad, and happy, and relieved. And I have been dying to know what was on that USB. I didn’t realize the toll it was taking on my mental health having it be encrypted. And now I feel just like a huge weight has been lifted off of me.

Craig: Wow. You’re way more curious. I should say, I’m way less curious.

Megana: Well, I feel like it’s come up in conversations between John and I and I just keep being like what is on that USB.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And so that was a long setup on the show. And was the payoff worth it? You tell me. Was the payoff worth it?

Megana: Uh…

John: No it wasn’t. Was it? [laughs] It really, I oversold it.

Megana: It’s like when you have a time capsule and you think it’s going to be the coolest thing ever and then…

Craig: I thought there were some interesting – I mean, look, it’s about wonky stuff.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So it’s not like oh my god this is going to tell us who shot JFK.

John: Well let’s answer some listener questions in the here and now. Do you want to start us off, Megana?

Megana: Great. So Ryan asked, “I’m finishing up the first draft for a feature and having that cold feet moment I sometimes get before I turn in a draft to the studio. It’s an original story and my deal includes revision steps. So I know I will get notes and I know I will make changes. There are a few minor things I’ve already spotted that I may end up changing, but overall the draft is in pretty good shape. Do you guys sometimes send your first draft for feedback knowing there’s still edits you’ll probably make on the next pass, even if you don’t get the specific notes? Or do you make all the possible improvements you can before you open the kitchen to other cooks?

“Basically, how do you know when your draft is ready to send?”

John: So, the realistic answer is the draft is due, I have to send it in. So that becomes the deciding factor. But, I get what Ryan is asking here. Sometimes you know that there’s things you’re going to want to change and maybe you’re going to save/hold back on changing some of those things because it will give you a thing to do in the next pass.

I would not send in that thing for preliminary review. First off, you shouldn’t do that. Because then you’re going to end up doing free work and it’s going to be a mess. And you don’t know what kind of stuff they’re going to ask for. But you only get really one shot for that first impression. So if you’re going to share it with somebody share it with somebody who is not in the chain of decision-making and get their take on it. And in that conversation you can have like, “Oh, I’m thinking about changing these things. Is that something I should think about?” And you can really have a conversation with the person who has read the script.

But in general every draft you turn in should be the best reflection of what you hope the movie could and should be.

Craig: Yes. Ryan, I know what you’re feeling there, too. And I have to say that I’m kind of extreme on this. So I don’t know if this is good advice or not. But the way I approach it is when I turn in a draft my job, I believe this is my job, is to hand over a document that could be shot the next day.

John: Yup.

Craig: If I know that there’s something that could be better and I know how to make it better I should make it better. That’s what the job is. Now, if there is something that I think is wrong, but I don’t know why or how, that’s where hopefully there’s somebody in the process I can talk to like a good producer to say, “Let’s just talk for an hour, because I’m running into a stumbling block.”

But I don’t want to send a script with that stumbling block included. I want to resolve it before I turn the script in. So I know the draft is ready to send when it feels like it is a good solid, clean undamaged representation of my intention. And that’s not easy to do.

John: Yeah. It’s tough. But I think we’re both saying like every draft you send in has to really reflect your best work. And so don’t send in something that you know is broken.

Craig: Correct. That is a bad look as the kids say.

John: Megana, what else do you have for us?

Megana: OK, so Michelle asks, “How do screenwriters take vacations? Let’s say you have a two-week Europe trip planned six months ago and then you get hired to do a writing assignment a month before that long-planned vacation. The draft is due in ten weeks, but two of those are supposed to be vacation. Do you cancel the trip because you need the work? Or is there any way to tell the producer that you need an extra two weeks? Or do screenwriters just book all trips last minute once they turn in a draft?

“Also, what if you and your partner are both screenwriters?”

Craig: Wow.

John: Writer’s vacation. This could be a whole episode. I’ve had a really hard time – I have a hard time taking vacations, but my husband will say like, “Oh, we’re taking a vacation during this time,” and I’m like OK. And I do it.

Craig: Yup. That’s how it goes over here. I’m like you. Vacation isn’t a thing in my head. You know like people sit there and daydream about vacations and I don’t. And if left alone no vacations will occur. So it is up to my wife to say, “All right, that’s it. We’re doing it. It’s happening. This is when it’s happening.” Because then at that point it’s not me. I’m not the one calling people saying I have to go away for two weeks. I’m calling them and telling them that I’ve been hired by a higher power to go away for two weeks. And that people seem to understand. Everybody has a boss. And when it comes to vacations my wife is the boss.

John: Michelle asks sort of on the ten-week writing assignment and two weeks of those you’re on vacation. That just happens and you just make it work. And you can work from anywhere. When I was doing the Arlo Finch books I just absolutely had to write a thousand words a day. And so wherever we were I would block out an hour or two hours of my time and get out of the room and write during that time. And that’s great, too. But I also feel that there’s a place at which writers actually do need to take real vacations. And I’d welcome our listeners to write in, especially our listeners who are working writing professionals, how do they think about vacations and how do they actually take time off, because I’ve never been good at it.

Craig: Same. Yeah.

John: How about one more question.

Megana: All right, so Mr. Aussie writes, “Last year my dream came true. I finally got the call from Hollywood after a short film of mine went viral. I got an LA manager and many chats and phone calls were lighting up my life. Now Covid has prevented me from flying over for general meetings with all the major studios. And I finally felt like I had made it. I find myself in a dark depression waiting for a call back of good news, or that something is being picked up or green lit. I know the odds are low, but now it’s like I just lay on my bed at night in the dark with no hope or desire to write or create. I feel empty and jaded and I know I’m better than this but can’t seem to snap out of it.

“I’d love to know if depression is real with those over in Hollywood who have movies and TV series green lit year to year and how they deal with it.”

John: Oh, Mr. Aussie. You have depression.

Craig: Yeah.

John: You have depression. You have an actual medical condition. It’s called depression. And you need someone to help with your depression because that’s what you’re experiencing. It’s a real phenomenon. And it’s not just being a little sad. You have depression. It’s the thing that you have. And people here have it. People everywhere have it. And people who have big successful TV shows have it. And you need someone to help you with it.

Craig: Yeah. We’ll talk through the easy parts first, Mr. Aussie. The fact that Covid has prevented you from flying over here is actually irrelevant. Covid prevents all of us over here from going anywhere also. We might as well be in Australia. The only difference between us and you in terms of meeting people is just that we’re on the time zone so we’ll probably be a little more awake. But beyond that all chats and all phone calls are being done over Zoom or regular phones. So that as a circumstance is actually not the problem.

I’m not here to tell you what has led you into this depression, because I’m not a professional. What I can tell you is depression is real with people in Hollywood who have movies and TV series green lit year to year. Without question. In fact, there is a higher, I would argue, incidence of depression and crippling anxiety among artistic, creative professionals than in any other occupation because our minds are overactive and we work with emotion. That’s our paint. And at times it backfires on us, and at times it gets depleted. And we get hurt and everyone’s damage manifests in different ways and this is how yours is manifesting.

John is absolutely right. This is not a thing that you snap out of. This is a thing that you get treated for. So you’re going to make an appointment to see a therapist and a psychiatrist. You’re going to talk about your symptoms. You’re going to talk about your situation. And they are ideally going to treat you well. There is absolutely hope. You may not feel hope, but feelings are not facts. Hope is there regardless of whether you feel it or not.

So, go ahead and reach out and start doing the work to take care of this condition. It is a medical condition. And you should not ignore it or think that you’re responsible for ending it yourself. [Craig’s phone rings] Decline. Sorry. You know what? I think maybe just leave it here as an example for Mr. Aussie of things are just messy and awkward in real life.

John: Yeah. And so I would just urge you, do something right now. It doesn’t have to be like making the appointment with the therapist, but tell someone in your life that this is a plan that you’re going to be doing and get them to help you just make that first step to talk to that person. Because it’s going to get better as you start doing the things to make it get better. That’s just how it works.

All right. It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing I have actually had for a while and I just keep forgetting to give it. So, this is the Kikkerland Make Your Own Music Box Kit. So click through the link there Craig and you’ll see it’s this little, it’s like a music box assembly with a little crank and these strips of paper that you feed in and then you use a special hole punch to punch the notes into the strips and it feeds through.

Craig: Oh my. This is the most John August thing I think I’ve ever seen.

John: It’s musical. It’s mechanical. It is just delightful. And so I was trying to figure out – somebody on Twitter, I think another screenwriter, had linked to it and had done Tainted Love with strips.

Craig: Oh nice.

John: Which is fantastic. I think the ideal use of this gift would be to buy one of these kits, make the song for like a gift for somebody, like their favorite song, and to hand them the device and the thing. But I will give you an example, just a little short thing that I punched myself.

[Music plays – the Scriptnotes Theme]

Craig: I know that song.

John: So I will build out a fuller version at some point, but it’s just simple and delightful, so try that.

Craig: Wonderful. And affordable.

My One Cool Thing this week is a person by the name of Thor.

John: I like Thor.

Craig: Thor. Not God of Thunder Thor, but my friend Thor Knai. I think it’s Knai. I don’t really ever say his last name. It’s Knai. It could be Knai, but I think it’s Knai. He’s Norwegian, or Knorwegian. And Thor is the dungeon master of the game that I play in. So I DM a campaign with our friends, like you play in that game of course. And then I am a player in that game on a further along path and Thor is the DM of that game.

Thor is also now available essentially to hire. So the way we play is over Zoom and Roll 20 and it works beautifully. But it will only work as good as your DM.

John: That’s true.

Craig: Thor is spectacularly good at it. I mean, he’s really, really, really good at it. He runs a number of games and his expertise and his style are just spot on. I’ve learned a lot just observing him DM. I think every DM should be playing also. It’s good for us to always be on the other side and feel what works and what doesn’t work.

So he’s available to hire. If you are thinking about putting together a private game but you don’t have a DM, reach out. So he’s on this site called startplaying.games. We’ll include a link in the show notes. And he puts together custom games, modules, all sorts of stuff. And he’s terrific. Just a very gentle, sweet, fun dude who knows how to DM as well as anyone.

John: That’s great. So I strongly recommend if you have a group of friends who want to play or you played when you were in high school and haven’t played since it feels like a great way to get back into it. And typically Roll 20, Craig and I did this series that we’ll put a link to in how to get started GM’ing there. But someone who really knows what they’re doing will have a much better landing experience. So, yeah—

Craig: John, have you clicked on the link? Don’t if you haven’t yet.

John: I have clicked on it.

Craig: Oh, you have. Because I was going to ask you if you hear about a guy named Thor Knai from Norway who is a DM what would you imagine he would look like?

John: Well, bearded. And so bearded was correct. But he’s also sort of like more kind of like Rob McElhenney sort of like white attractive actor guy.

Craig: He’s a very handsome guy. I think people sometimes are like, “Oh, yeah, you know, Dungeons & Dragons are nerds.” He actually looks a little bit like he could be Thor. Like he could play Thor. And he is an actor.

Anyway, so great guy. Check him out.

John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Thank you, Megana. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is no longer really on Twitter so don’t tweet at him.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll include a link also to the WGA timeline that sort of talks through when everything happened over the course of the past three years.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. And you can sign up there for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record. Craig, thank you for a fun show and a nice closure to a whole saga.

Craig: Ah, it has been laid to rest. Thank you sir.

[Bonus segment]

John: So that music was sort of nostalgic and got me thinking back to my youth which ties in very well to a question from Alec Amate who is a curious 25-year-old. He asks, “The further I get into my 20s the more I realize how little I know and how I really have no clue what’s going on. While this doesn’t disturb me that much, I’m curious. If you could offer one essential piece of advice to someone in their 20s what would it be? Thanks so much.”

So I took this to be like my 20-year-old self. Really he’s talking early 20s. What things do you think would be helpful for a person in their 20s to know?

Craig: Well–

John: I can start.

Craig: Go for it.

John: Or you start.

Craig: No, no, no. I want to hear what you say.

John: So, to me, I think it took me a long time to realize that everybody around me was faking it. I felt like I was the imposter and everybody else knew what they were doing. And eventually I realized like, oh right, no one knows what they’re doing and they’re all just winging it. And if I had realized that earlier on I would just have had much more confidence and given myself permission to take risks because like no one knows what they’re doing.

And I would also understand, like I’d be a little more sympathetic to people knowing that they’re messing up because they really had no idea what they were doing. And they had no clear plan. They were just faking it, too. So I would have left myself off the hook and other people off the hook a little bit more if I had just understood that no one kind of knows what they doing.

Craig: Yeah. No one does know what they’re doing. Everyone is a child. It’s just that we get more wrinkly.

Yeah, I think maybe if I were giving myself in my 20s specific advice I would probably say that even though you are angry for all sorts of reasons, including a number of very good ones, that empathy is going to make you feel better than anger. Now, I still get angry all the time. Don’t get me wrong. But I get angry about things. I try not to get angry at people. When I do feel angry about people or angry at people then I try and forcibly put myself in their shoes and remind myself that everybody has got something going on. Everybody. And that has made me happier. Seems maybe it’s counterintuitive. I don’t know. Maybe in your 20s you’re so ready to take on the world and you’ve been taught that you’ve got to beat the world into submission that it seems counterintuitive. But here I am on the doorstep of 50 and it seems more clear to me than ever that the more connected I am to another person the happier I feel about myself.

John: Yeah. But it’s not an illusion. There’s many, many studies that back that up. Essentially being able to think about someone else’s well-being ends up making you feel better. It does reflect back on you. So there’s a classic example where you sit still and you watch people walking past and you just think good thoughts about all of them. You wish them well individually. And you will noticeably feel better about yourself. And you will personally feel better just because it gets your brain thinking in that space.

Craig: Vastly preferable to Sea-Lioning.

John: Indeed.

So, Craig, I think you know that I have one tattoo. Do you know about my tattoo?

Craig: What?

John: Is that a surprise to you?

Craig: I mean, I think it’s a surprise. It doesn’t strike me as something I knew.

John: Yeah. So I got this tattoo when I was 21 years old. It was while I was at USC, my first year at USC. So friends came down who were living in San Francisco and we had a really drunken, debauched weekend, which was really fun. And we ended up in Venice. And they all had tattoos and I was like I want to get a tattoo. So I got a tattoo on my ankle. And I wanted it to be Latin, but I also didn’t have a lot of money, so I just did the initials for a Latin phrase, which is [Latin phrase] which would translate roughly to “Let me fear nothing, not even fear.”

And it’s been really good advice for me. I come back to that a lot. Most of the things in life that I regret are the things I didn’t do rather than the things I did. And so really to take more chances and to not worry that I will chicken out. Not to worry about being afraid. Just get over it. And that pushing ahead is generally the best policy for me.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s great advice.

I have no tattoos, but I do often think about Don Rhymer’s final words which I believe his son has tattooed which simply “Focus on the Good.” And it’s so simple, but you kind of just want to float right by it until you realize how frequently we focus on what’s not working and we focus on the worst parts of ourselves. Where we are too fat. Where we are too thin. Where we’re too bad. Whatever it is. And we focus on what we haven’t achieved. And what dream hasn’t come true. And all of that.

And, sure, count your blessings and all that. But focusing on the good is really valuable because there is something good there to look at and to appreciate. You know, I like that.

When I remind myself that it came from a dying man it becomes all the more true. Because I will be a dying man and I know there’s no way that I’m going to be there and go, “Oh, Don, you were totally wrong. You should totally focus on the crap, man. That’s important.” No, I mean, of course. Of course. As it is all coming to its conclusion you’re going to – it’s the things that are beautiful that you’re going to miss. So focus on them now.

John: Yeah. Whenever these kind of exercises come up where think back to your 20s and stuff like that I look back at those photos and I’m like, oh my god, you were better looking than you realized. You could have slept with a lot more people. Those are all sort of things that you can think about. You had these opportunities. Look at the body you had at that age.

And then I inevitably stop and think like, wait, what will the 80-year-old me think about the 20, 21 version of John? Why are you not taking advantage of the body that you had, the opportunities you had? And so I think I’m being more realistic about that now. And, you know, there’s a story you tell yourself, like a negative story, like I’m not that kind of person, I can’t do this kind of thing. And I always assume like, oh, you’re not an athletic person. But then it turned out I actually can do all that stuff pretty well. I could run a half-marathon.

So I would encourage my 20-year-old self to look at the negative stories you’re telling about yourself and really challenge them because they’re probably not actually true. They’re probably things that are difficult but not impossible.

Craig: Yeah. Great advice.

John: Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Last of Us casts Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey
• WGA PR and Social Media Event join John this Thursday, February 18th, 2021.
• Timeline of the WGA Agency Campaign
• Scriptnotes 389: The Future of the Industry
• Sea Lioning
• Kikkerland Make Your Own Music Box Kit
• Thor Knai, DnD Dungeon Master for hire
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode was recorded just a few hours before the WGA officially announced that it had reached a deal with WME thereby ending the two-year agency campaign. Now I promise Craig and I will talk about it all next week, including revealing the contents of that encrypted thumb drive I gave him backstage before our live show in Episode 431. You remember that. We set that up a long time ago and we’re going to pay off that set up I promise on next week’s episode. But today’s brand new episode is really good so listen to that and watch the feed because we might put out this next episode a little bit early if we get it recorded in time. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 487 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we unwind a Twitter thread with great advice on getting staffed as a writer on a TV show. And we look at the state of assistant pay in Hollywood. We then fulfill our cultural obligation as a podcast to discuss GameStop, specifically do we really need three movies about it. Plus, listener questions. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’ll share awkward dating stories from our past.

Craig: Sorry. I was just getting coffee.

John: We’ll share awkward dating stories from our history.

Craig: That actually – you should keep that as it is because that was awkward. And I think it’s important to just own awkward moments. It really is. So I think that’s wonderful. Actually quite lovely. We had an awkward moment that was applicable. I love it.

John: Fully, fully applicable.

Craig: Love it.

John: Yes, exactly. Comedy comes from awkward moments and acknowledgement that the specific awkward moments are also a universal phenomenon.

Craig: They’re the best.

John: My present awkwardness is they are jackhammering a building behind my office right now, so if you hear some background noise that Matthew is not able to cut out that’s what you’re hearing is a jackhammer. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.

Craig: It’s not awkward. That’s just annoying.

John: No. It’s not been nerve-wracking all day. I’m not jangled.

Craig: No.

John: Nothing like that.

Craig: Nah.

John: In our crucial IP update the Uno Movie starring Lil Yachty was announced this week. So, the toymaker, Mattel, has announced a live action heist comedy is in development. It’s written by Marcy Kelly and set in the underground hip hop world of Atlanta with Grammy-nominated rapper Lil Yachty eyeing a starring role. So, phew, it’s good to have one piece of IP that has a plan. It didn’t announce who the studio was for it, but Mattel is on the case and naturally the Uno Movie is going to revolve around underground hip hop which is just a natural fit there.

Craig: I’ve got to say, like if you’re going to do it, right, you might as well just blow it up and do it. When I first read this article it seemed almost like someone had done Mad Libs. I need a noun. I need a famous rapper. I need a city. But, you know, I guess the point is what you can’t do – we know you can’t do this. You can’t do the cards come to light at night and number four is to figure out how to join the blue cards. Blech. So, screw it, let’s go all the other way and make it about Lil Yachty.

John: Yeah. We wish nothing but the best for Marcy Kelly and the whole team [unintelligible] and making this movie.

Craig: It’s a heist movie apparently.

John: A heist movie. Sure. We love a heist movie. Got a plan. So Uno joins the Mattel films in the works, including American Girl, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, we’ve talking about before. Major Matt Mason, I don’t know who that it is. Is that a GI Joe kind of character?

Craig: Huh? Who? [laughs] Oh, ha-ha. OK. Matt Major. Matt Mason. I got to be honest that’s a WTF for me and you and I are not young, so we should know this. Unless is it a new thing?

John: It could be. But, I mean, it doesn’t feel like a new thing. It feels like a very old thing.

Craig: I’m looking it up right now.

John: Masters of the Universe. So, I would say that Masters of the Universe is a genuine IP in the sense of like they were characters. They were doing things. There was a cartoon I remember about it.

Craig: They made a movie before.

John: Yeah.

Craig: With Dolph Lundgren.

John: Thomas and Friends. View-Master. View-Master is a strong contender there, because think about what View-Master is.

Craig: Oh my god, dude. Do you know, this is crazy.

John: Tell me about Matt Mason.

Craig: There needs to be some sort of intervention at Mattel. They’re out of control. Major Matt Mason was an action figure created by Mattel. He was an astronaut who lived and worked on the moon. When introduced in 1966 the figures were initially based on design information from a Life Magazine, Air Force Magazine, and other aviation and space interest periodicals. So this was before we landed on the moon, Major Matt Mason in 1966. Come on.

John: I’ve got to say I am genuinely fascinated by that idea because there’s some sort of like retro future thing where it’s just like it’s the ‘60s vision of what space would be like. There’s some kind of great comedy to make there. They’re probably not trying to make some great comedy there. I’m rooting for it. It’s Matt Damon in The Martian but he’s on the moon and, yeah, it’s great.

Craig: Well, maybe if there is some sort of – or if there’s an amazing nostalgic take that’s like meta or something. Here’s the point. You can do something interesting and creative with just about anything. The question is why that thing. So, one thing that these companies do in a strange way that is I think not terrible for artists is it limits the artist’s focus to a thing, like we can sit around and – I can write 100 different things. I can write anything I want. Well here comes a company saying, “Or, here’s a puzzle. Figure this out, smart guy. Major Matt Mason.” And you go, well, I’ve got an idea. You’ve focused my attention.

So, you know, Wishbone. What the hell is Wishbone?

John: Wishbone I believe is a dog. Let’s see what Wishbone is.

Craig: Oh golly.

John: It could be an American salad dressing. It could be a football formation, obviously.

Craig: Of course.

John: A computer bus. Is a boom for wind-surfing?

Craig: It’s the clavicle of a bird.

John: In popular culture, American children’s program. I bet it’s the American children’s program. Let’s click through that Wikipedia article.

Craig: Wishbone.

John: And yet I don’t see any Mattel connection to Wishbone. So, I don’t know.

Craig: Do you think that they think they own the bone? [laughs]

John: Yeah. That’s possible. I’m finding an article from July 15, 2020 which is that there’s a Wishbone movie in the works from Mattel and Universal. This is a Variety article. So there’s something here.

Craig: I’m going to get an angry phone call now. Stop bagging on our Wishbone movie. I’m not!

John: It’s about a Jack Russell Terrier. So now we know.

Craig: Oh, OK. So he was a dog. It’s a dog movie.

John: It’s a dog movie.

Craig: Fine. Great. Wishbone. Mattel.

John: Yeah. Uh, OK.

Craig: Huh?

John: In further follow up, in one of our Three Page Challenges last week we looked at a scene in which a character got electrocuted when using a vibrator. And you and I both expressed skepticism about that scene.

Craig: Yes.

John: Some of our listeners wrote in including Kate from LA and many of them were pointing towards the Hitachi Magic Wand which does in fact plug in and therefore could conceivably electrocute someone if used in a bathtub. So I want to acknowledge that, sure, there was some cis male bias here in our ignorance of this plug in vibrator being a real thing.

But I also want to defend ourselves for saying I don’t think it was a great beat in those pages.

Craig: No. And I am aware of the Hitachi Magic Wand. It is the Cadillac of vibrators, John. The Hitachi Magic Wand famous for being the solution to women like the character in those pages that can’t have an orgasm. But I did a little research, because I love Googling vibrator and electrocution.

John: The most research Craig has ever done for an episode apparently.

Craig: By the way, there are vibrators that – so I thought, OK, if I Google vibrator electrocution I’m going to get a lot of stories about Hitachi Magic Wands falling into tubs. I got none. Zero. My guess is probably because everybody’s bathroom now to code has the GFI circuit on, so it would just trip a breaker and not.

But there is apparently a new generation of vibrators that electrocute you on purpose.

John: Oh yeah, electrical stimulation. Sure.

Craig: Yeah. That just seems like you’re, I mean, I don’t know, it just seems like you’re asking for trouble.

John: Sure. I think whatever someone likes in that area is phenomenal and fantastic.

Craig: Until it kills you.

John: Until it kills you. So, getting back to that specific use of it in that script is it relied too much on the fact that it was a vibrator being used in a bathtub with water apparently, which didn’t seem – that’s what I wasn’t necessarily believing and felt like a bit of a stretch and wasn’t working for me in those pages.

Craig: It is.

John: But I want to acknowledge that I was wrong. All vibrators are not battery-based. I got you.

Craig: Yeah. That is true. Hitachi Magic Wand. Been around for a long time.

John: It’s a classic. So we’ll put in links in the show notes to both the Hitachi Magic Wand and stories about electrocution, which there are basically none.

Craig: The person that you think is jackhammering behind your house may be using the Hitachi Magic Wand. It is apparently very loud.

John: Oh my gosh.

Craig: That is the one thing that I read. If you’re in an apartment with thin walls other people will know that you are Magic Wanding.

John: All right. Continuing our follow up, about two years ago Craig and I started talking about assistant pay and sort of the problems assistants were facing based on emails we got in from people. We’re starting to have that conversation. But at the same time Liz Alper and other folks were talking about the PayUpHollywood movement. They stated this group called PayUpHollywood.

So we’ve been working with them to try to figure out what are the issues, how do we get assistants and support staff in Hollywood paid better. Then over the course of the pandemic, or when the pandemic started, it became less of an issue of pay equity and just sort of survival. How do we make sure that people who are working in these positions can actually afford to keep living in Los Angeles? So that became a source of urgency.

We raised a bunch of money for support staff, Liz and I and Megana, who is also on the call, were instrumental in trying to get that money out to people facing this kind of crisis. Now it’s time for sort of an update on where we’re at with assistants, assistant pay, and so I wanted to invite on two folks who know a lot more about this than we do at the moment. Liz Alper is a writer whose credits include The Rookie, Hawaii Five-0, Chicago Fire. She’s a WGA board member and the cofounder of PayUpHollywood. Welcome Liz.

Liz Alper: Hi. Thank you guys so much for having me.

Craig: Hey Liz.

John: Jamarah Hayner is a political consultant who founded the public affairs firm JKH Consulting. In her career she’s worked with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then California Attorney General Kamala Harris. Welcome Jamarah.

Jamarah Hayner: Hey guys. Great to be here.

John: Give us the sense of where we’re at right now. You just put out a big sort of survey and results of that survey. But can you give us the 10,000 foot overview. What’s happening in the assistant and support staff landscape right now at the start of 2021.

Liz: So right now the big takeaway is a lot of assistants and support staff are very, very broke. Unfortunately because of the pandemic about 80% of assistants and support staff didn’t make $50K in the last year. In Los Angeles in order to be considered not cost burden, which is basically making three times what your monthly rent would be. The average is $53,600 per year. When 80% of assistants and support staff are making well under that, I think 35% were making less than $30,000 in 2020. It’s sounding alarms.

And obviously we’re in such a weird predicament because nothing like the pandemic has ever really happened before. I don’t know, John and Craig, if you guys can speak to this but I’ve never been in Hollywood during a recession that’s actually impacted the industry as strongly as the COVID-19 pandemic has. But what we’re seeing is that we’re losing a lot of assistants to financial stress and there aren’t necessarily supports in place to help them out of this time and keep not just their bank accounts in tact but keep them on this same upward trajectory that they’ve been on. It’s derailing a lot of careers.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this. There have been turn downs. There was obviously the major economic crisis of 2007/2008. When I graduated college in 1992 there were some lovely headlines about how it was the worst year ever to graduate. The recession and blah. But what we didn’t have was a combination of a downturn in the economy and an inherent kind of state of economic despair.

So, if you had a couple of bad years you fought back, but what you weren’t doing was paying exorbitant rent and exorbitant other things while also not getting paid much. Generally speaking the prices of things kind of moved up and down with the amount that you would earn. Generally speaking. It doesn’t seem like that works that way anymore. So, one of the things that I looked at in your beautifully designed presentation is how many support staff had been essentially – have been relying on friends and family to essentially help them survive, even though they have fulltime or in many cases more than fulltime jobs. And 19% of support staff are as reported having had to move back in with family or friends or relocate out of the city because of lost income from COVID-19. That’s one out of every five. That’s awful.

Liz: Yeah. It was kind of devastating looking at these results. I think Jamarah and I can both attest that we knew that 2020 had not been a good year for most of us but seeing how hard hit the assistant and support staff community had been impacted was really, really hard to read. We read every single one of the thousand plus survey results that people took and we’ve read all of the anecdotal messages that they left. A lot of people just saying I don’t know how I’m going to get through this next year if things don’t turn up.

The other thing that people were really shining a light on, and we made sure to include this in our survey as well, was that not only were they making less money that they had in previous years but because the people who were working from home were working from home they were being forced to take on the additional office costs that would normally be paid when you’re working in an office. So things like extra electricity. Increased power bills. Buying a printer. Buying paper. All of these other expenses that you tend to take for granted when you’re in an office setting, all of that piles up. And when so many were reporting that, you know, my hours have been cut, I still have the same workload and in addition to that I’m actually taking on added expenses to compensate for not having an office space, you’re sitting there going how are assistants and support staff paying more to do their jobs than ever before when at this point the studios and the companies should be stepping in to say how can we relieve this financial burden that you guys are under to make sure that our businesses are working as efficiently as possible because we’re making sure that our employees can work as efficiently as possible.

John: Jamarah, when we were first talking though these issues, this is a system that was inequitable, it was broken in so many ways. And so we were trying to highlight those issues. I remember the roundtable sort of gatherings we had where we would talk about what they were experiencing. And it feels like in many ways it’s gone from being broken to just like shattered glass on the floor. We sort of long for the problems we used to have in the system.

But, as we pull out of the pandemic, as we sort of imagine a life sort of outside of this sort of crisis, what are some ways we can think about building back the system better? Because I’m wondering whether some of these assistant jobs are just not going to exist in the same way that some of these systems will be there in the same way. What are ways we can think about getting people back to work and getting them back to work in a way that was better than how they left it?

Jamarah: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the really great things about PayUpHollywood is, as difficult as these realities are right now, is that this movement is working. Right? We’ve seen major employers and studios, Verve, ICM, WME, CAA, UTA leading with increasing pay rates for assistants. So, I want to make sure that doesn’t get lost in this, right.

So when we are organizes, when we’re speaking up, when we’re telling the truth about our realities and encouraging people to be intentional about how they’re running their companies, we actually make progress in really significant ways. So I think as we start to move out of sort of panic and recovery mode into rebuilding that increased attention is really, really critical. Not just sort of across the board we’re all going to get back at this together, but realizing that there are some real inequities that have existed for years and exist more so now.

You know, Liz talked about people relying on their families. For assistants and support staff that come from families that themselves are feeling economic stress right now, they may not be able to help chip in a few hundred dollars a month for your rent. So parents and other supports aren’t going to be able to be there. So I think it’s not just about lifting everyone up but being really intentional about naming those inequities which we know exist. We’re putting the out data to show it exists. People know this. They’ve gone through it themselves if they were assistants back in the day. And really leaning into that.

But I think that we know as PayUpHollywood that when we speak up and we speak loudly and speak boldly we get results.

Craig: And if we had not, I say we, I mean it’s you guys, but we were sort of cheerleading there early on, if this hadn’t been in place already and hadn’t already won some victories I shudder to think of where we would be right now.

Liz: Yeah. I completely agree with that, Craig. Because I think you guys say cheerleading and I really say instigating and invigorating kind of this movement. Because I think the difference between now when assistants are speaking up and the difference between all of these past years that they’ve been speaking up without anyone listening is people like you and John and other showrunners are speaking up in support of these assistants. And making sure that their voices are amplified. Their concerns are amplified. And you guys take them seriously. And there’s a level of care and respect that hasn’t been there before. And that’s so important to making sure that this movement succeeds.

Craig: Philosophically there’s something I wish I could say, oh no, I can. I have a podcast, so I’m going to. To the people who work in Hollywood who employ support staff, whether they’re like me or John and they are running shows, writing movies, or if they are working at a studio as an executive or anything like that, I think because Hollywood is so success-focused, obsessed with winning and earning and money and quotes and how well you do and how big your house is and all that stuff, that there is almost this philosophical fear of staring closely at something that isn’t what you would define as financial success in Hollywood.

So, when you are employing people I think a lot of folks in Hollywood just don’t want to look at this stuff because it makes them uncomfortable. And rather they would just like this person to magically show up. You have no emotional accountability to them whatsoever. They do their job and they go home and you don’t have to think about it ever. And I submit respectfully that we do. And that financial success is not the only kind of success there is. And more so you’re not going to be able to get financial success if you are burnt out and chucked aside, or if you are barely keeping your head above water, or if you have to live at home, or borrow money from friends just to stay afloat. That it is important for all of us to look at these numbers. And then act on them.

Because the amount of money that is required to move people from the “I’m drowning” column into the “I’m breathing” column is not that much. It’s certainly not much for the corporations. And I know it’s not much for big showrunners. I know it’s not. I know it’s not much for big actors. I know it’s not much for big directors. It’s entirely doable. You just have to be willing to look at it and give a damn. And that means, oh my god, thinking about somebody else. So, there, I’ve said it on my podcast.

Jamarah: Hey, Craig, I’ll raise you there. I would say a lot of the content that is being created these days is about racial inequality, income inequality, and we see that whether it’s the beginning of a season or during awards. So, I would say that if you are part of a production that is doing great work onscreen talking about these issues, keep those issues in mind as you go back into your office and pass that person in front of the desk. Or think about the person that you’re calling to do something for you at 11pm at night. The issues are the same. And if you can talk about it in the screen you can live it out in your life.

Craig: Oh my god. Thank you so much. Because, I mean, look, Hollywood hypocrisy is beautifully florid. It’s everywhere. It always has been. But this is one area of hypocrisy I think where maybe we can just go, nah, we’re not going to do that anymore. We can’t all sit around and applaud Parasite and then go home and be the rich people from Parasite. We can’t do it. You’re not allowed to do it anymore. It’s got to stop.

So pay attention and just look at this stuff. It’s not petty. It’s not beneath you. If you don’t have to worry about these things and somebody is working for you that does have to worry about these things then you have to worry about these things. You are accountable to the people you employ. I believe that.

John: Now, Liz, before the pandemic you and I had many phone calls where you were talking heroically with the head of a major agency about assistant pay at that agency. And made some great progress and I want to commend you on that progress. But some of the stuff that came up in terms of like assistants working at that agency were the demands of wardrobe and lunch and hours and clocking in and clocking out. And it occurs to me that as people go back to work they stop working from home and start going back to work new systems are going to need to be figured out. And what I’d love to make sure we are empowering support staff to do is to help make some of those decisions about how work should work now. Because just getting back to work safely is going to be a challenge. It’s going to be so interesting.

You as a writer working on a writing staff, I assume you’ve been working remotely all this time. And same with the support staff for this. And getting people back into a room is going to be challenging and I want to make sure that we are thinking about support staff in those conversations.

Liz: Yeah. I completely agree with you, John. Because I think right now a lot of what support staffers are facing are – they’re being asked to come back to potentially unsafe conditions. A lot of the support staffers who took this survey reported that their employers were taking the pandemic seriously, which was great. But if you look at some of the anecdotal stories that are happening on Twitter, some that were submitted to us, a lot of the people who are being put in charge of monitoring Covid testing on sets are assistants who are being paid less than a regular PA rate daily to be in charge of this very, very important aspect of production.

And then there are other things that we’ve tried to tackle with PayUpHollywood and we’ve realized that the scope is so big that it’s almost impossible for us to figure out every single issue that every single assistant is going to be facing. A wardrobe assistant is not going to have the same problems as an agency assistant.

And I think that’s what we were talking about at the end of the survey when we were encouraging employers to actually talk to the support staff in their company because different support staffers are going to have different needs. We just received an email from someone who said, “I can work from home. My company is OK with my company working from home, but I can’t afford to live in an apartment that has central air or even decent air conditioning. So come summertime I am going to be dying because I don’t have an office to escape to or a coffee shop to escape to because I literally cannot afford to pay for AC on the salary that I am given.”

And I know in the grand scheme of things that seems so small, but that’s one of the discomforts that support staffers are putting up with right now, in addition to being underpaid. In addition to having to adjust to their employer’s new schedule and potentially not being considered in the plans of restructuring the company and how that works within a pandemic.

So, there’s a lot going on and we can’t be the only ones who are catching all of the problems. We do need every employer and every company to actually start stepping up and start investigating what it is that their support staffs need from them. Because it’s going to be unique from case to case.

John: Thank you both very much for this update. Thank you especially for the survey and the results of the survey. We’ll put a link in the show notes to both the press release that went out, but also this terrific infographic you guys designed.

Craig: It’s lovely.

John: That walks us through where we’re at at the start of 2021. Can we have both of you guys back on a year from now to sort of tell us what next year’s survey results were and hopefully we can see some progress along these lines?

Liz: Yeah. I think that’s the goal. Every year we’re just tearing out the old foundation and putting in a new one. And then building upon it.

Craig: Let’s see how we do. I’m just going to be the guy that just keeps banging the shame bell walking alongside these rich people going, “Come on, people. Come on. These assistant are sitting there going through your bills. They know what you pay your pet psychic.” I hate pet psychics.

John: Liz and Jamarah, thank you so much.

Liz: Thank you guys.

Jamarah: Thank you guys.

Craig: Thanks Liz and Jamarah.

Jamarah: Bye.

Craig: Bye.

John: Cool. All right, moving on. So this past week, past two weeks, one of the biggest stories in the United States has been GameStop. And this has been a significant event in world news, so I can see that. But it has also been a source of a bunch of folks tweeting at us and emailing us saying like, “Hey, do you see there’s a GameStop movie in development?”

We often talk about How Would This Be a Movie. This is a situation where there’s a story in the news and suddenly there’s like three movies that are brewing.

Keith Calder, a previous guest, tweeted, “Is it possible to short the movie adaptations of the GameStop story?” To take a little meta quality there. But for folks who are listening to this episode in 2026 and have no idea what GameStop is or was Craig would you talk us through the briefest version of what happened?

Craig: Yeah. GameStop is a videogame brick and mortar company. And they are publicly traded. A number of large institutional hedge funds, I think the big one was called Melvin I believe, they bet against it. So, they took out short positions on it that basically said we are betting that in the future the share price is going to be lower than it is now. And if that is the case then we are going to make money.

A lot of people feel like hedge funds essentially which generally short stocks are kind of ruining everything. I don’t know enough about finance to agree or disagree. All I can say just as a person is it’s like when you go to Vegas if you play Craps and somebody comes and bets against the people at the table it’s like screw you man.

So, anyway, there is a sub-Reddit called Wall Street Bets and they like to kind of work together to buy stuff and I guess maybe the combination of GameStop being something that a lot of people that are Reddit-y are familiar with/nostalgic for, plus the idea of just sticking it to these hedge fund dickheads rallied the folks on Wall Street Bets together and they just decided we are going to start buying GameStop. We’re going to buy it regardless of its earnings, its potential, anything. We’re just going to buy the stock.

And they did most of that through a trading site called Robinhood. And what happens when you buy, buy, buy? Price goes up. Price goes up. Price goes up. Price goes up. And if they make the price go up high enough all the people that had bet against it using their various metrics would lose millions, possibly billions, possibly their entire hedge fund. Gone. And it very quickly became this underdog story of a bunch of people on the Internet essentially turning the same sort of trickery, nonsense gaming that a lot of our financial industry runs on against them.

So, it was incredibly attractive. And so the price went from $35 to like $400. Alas, it has plummeted recently all the way down, I think it’s currently in the $60s. So that’s where we’re at.

John: So looking at this from, pulling back and looking at it, you can see, OK, there’s some stuff that feels a little bit movie-like in the sense of sticking it to the man. You have clear class divides there. There’s a sense of it feels like a heist movie that’s being done sort of through the Internet in a way. You could ascribe good motivations to these sub-Redditors and the folks who are buying the thing and sort of driving up the price and perhaps saving this struggling business.

There’s different ways you can approach it that feel like there’s a narrative there that could go towards a movie. And yet it’s not clear where we are in the act structure of this story. It feels very, very we’re still in the news cycle of it. So it seems premature to be talking about this as a movie, and yet there are three movies in development.

So let’s talk through at least what we know of so far. MGM has acquired a book proposal of the events written by Ben Mezrich. He was the guy whose previous books were adapted into the films 21 and The Social Network. So he feels like a person who would be good at writing this kind of stuff.

Netflix is apparently in talks with the Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter, Mark Boal, about a film that would star Noah Centineo who is the star of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. That’s a possibility. And then RatPac which is the Brett Ratner company has apparently bought the life rights to the guy who created the sub-Reddit. So that’s another way to sort of approach it. And these are three potential movies, three different approaches to sort of how they’re getting into it. One is buying a book written by a guy who is really good at writing books about this thing. One is bringing on a big screenwriter. One is getting the life rights.

I don’t know that there’s one right approach to it. I don’t think we’re going to see three movies come out of this though.

Craig: Not a chance. Not a chance. We will see one, maybe two. This is the danger. So there’s risk and reward. Just like all of the betting on Wall Street itself. This is a story that people are fascinated with.

Now, what people are fascinated with today is not necessarily what they’ll be fascinated with tomorrow or two or three weeks from now. What this story has going for it is that it is about something that feels very relevant to what it means to be an American right now. Economic inequality. This kind of Wall Street machinery that both the left and the right are resentful against. The sense that we are not really in control of our economy. And then here comes these folks that sort of prove it. And then get turned on, you know, by the powers that be as the powers that be kind of influence Robinhood to shut down a lot of the trading there.

But we don’t know how it ends. Right? So we don’t know necessarily what the full story is here. So the bet is that you are going to have a story that ultimately turns out to be something that is a full story, A. B, will still be relevant when the movie comes out. Won’t feel dated or like yesterday’s news. And, C, will feature characters that are fascinating and feature actors and filmmakers that people connect with. So, that’s the big gamble. And the additional risk that you’re dealing with is the fact nobody owns facts.

So, there could be 17 other Wall Street bets GameStop Robinhood movies quietly in development. There could be people just writing specs right now. So, what do they have going for them? Well, if you can find somebody like Ben Mezrich who has proven to convert things like this into books that then can be converted into very good movies, that seems like – you know what you’ve done? You’ve hedged your bet. That’s pretty good. I’m going to keep doing money analogy. I like it.

So that’s what it is. It’s basically gambling. You’re gambling with ideas.

John: Let’s talk about two book adaptations that feel appropriate here. So obviously Ben’s book, The Social Network, which is about the rise of Facebook and the infighting that happened at the early days of Facebook, an advantage that The Social Network is that it has characters. It has characters who are interacting with each other in physical spaces and can actually have arguments.

And so Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, but he also had really good real life people who can become characters who can actually do things cinematically. That’s going to be a challenge for any writer who is looking to adapt the GameStop story because these people are not in rooms together. They are people working with their own agendas separately and the movie has to stitch them together in ways that they would not naturally be there together. The conflict between two characters on a screen is going to be challenging to do in the GameStop movie because they’re not physically there together.

So, someone who is making money through Wall Street bets or who has spent money – has spent money in through Robinhood and has seen their net worth go from $5 to $300,000, that’s transformational for that character but you’re basically going to be probably inventing that character because that’s not going to be a real person or at least a person who is going to have conflicts with other folks in the world of your story. That’s going to be challenging.

The other book that came to mind as I was looking at this was Hillbilly Elegy which was a big bestselling book talking about sort of coming off of the 2016 election a lot of people were using that as a way to look at and explore a story of white working class people that had been underreported. And so there was an adaptation of that, but it was a challenging adaptation and did not sort of set the world on fire in its cinematic form. And I wonder and worry if that could be a similar kind of problem with this story which is so amorphous and kind of hard to hold. There’s not a plot to it.

Craig: Well, there is a plot in the sense that there’s a beginning, there’s a middle, and eventually there will be an end. The question is what will that end be? And will it feel like it justified the journey? So we’ll find out. There are some fascinating stories that I’ve read. You can look. You can go to Wall Street Bets and just read through individual people saying I think I screwed up. I put all of my money in this and I just lost it all and I haven’t told my wife and I don’t know what to do.

I mean, there are people that are talking about suicide on there. It’s terrifying. So, there is a kind of like dream and nightmare scenario going on there that I think is kind of fascinating. But you’re right. To wrangle it into one compelling narrative they are going to need to focus on some individuals. I will say that I do believe that we have an appetite for process stories, arcane process stories, more than Hollywood used to think. Hollywood generally the rule was that people are idiots and what they like are boobs or cars going fast or something exploding. And not that they don’t, but movies that come along like The Big Short which are deeply process movies, or The Social Network which is very much a process movie, people lean in. They want to actually see how the things that they interact with on a daily basis work under the hood. They really do get interested in that.

Whereas it used to be that diving into the weeds was a recipe for people not showing up, well now it kind of works. Is this a theatrical release? Well I don’t know if there’s going to be theaters anyway. But, no, I would think that this very much feels like it should be a play on Netflix or HBO or Apple or something.

John: Yeah. So I remember during the time of The Big Short, the movie The Big Short, not the actual real events, you and I, I think, both had sit down with Adam McKay and or Charles Randolph, the writers who adapted Michael Lewis’s book, and really good conversations you and I each had about sort of how challenging that process was and how to find character stories that could help illuminate really complicated situations about the housing crisis and sort of what actually happened there and how to visualize and narrativize those stories. And that’s probably what’s going to need to happen here. The way that we are sort of trying to obliquely get around what a short squeeze is, we’re going to have to find good ways to visualize that so the audience can understand that.

But I agree there is sort of a hunger for that. The same way that we have hunger for military thrillers where they explain sort of how some warship works. We do love to see that and we love to see people demonstrating their expertise in a very specific field.

So, it’s all conceivable and possible. I think my biggest hesitation is that we just don’t know what the third act of this is at all. And are we going to look at the events of GameStop five years from now as being like oh that was a big positive transformational event, or the start of something horrible? And we just don’t know yet.

Craig: Yeah. I think it’s going to end poorly for the people who invested in GameStop. That’s just my guess. Because in the end there is this interesting – what’s the game theory, the problem of the commons?

John: Yes, the tragedy of the commons.

Craig: The tragedy of the commons. This is a classic tragedy of the commons situation. Eventually, and it’s already started to happen, people who can walk away with a massive amount of money are going to. And this in fact is kind of the problem with the whole thing. There’s a fascinating discovery of how human behavior underlies all this stuff. And there is a little bit of a sadness in how we celebrate the underdog in our traditional fictional narratives, but in real life the underdog almost always loses. And what does that mean about us and our society and the American dream?

So, interesting things to look at. I do think that it will end – my guess is that it’s going to end poorly for people that bought into GameStop. My guess is that the billionaire hedge fund guys will remain billionaires. But that in and of itself is an interesting ending. We’ll see how it goes.

John: I’m hoping that Steve Mnuchin produces at least one adaptation of this. Because really who would be more qualified than Steve Mnuchin to – he’s a Hollywood producer who was also a Treasury Secretary. So he should be the person who should produce this.

Craig: Oh boy.

John: Boy. All right. So we’ll flag this for follow up. Obviously we’ll see what happens to any of these three movies or other adaptations along the way. But it’s a great example happening in real time of the urgency which people feel to acquire rights to hold down this thing which as you point out anyone could do. So we’ll see what happens.

Craig: Anyone could do.

John: Craig, you have left Twitter, although I do see you replying to other people on Twitter sometimes, but you have mostly left Twitter, so you may not have seen a really good thread that happened this past week.

Craig: I didn’t.

John: Rachel Miller put together a thread with advice for people who might be staffing or looking to staff on a TV show. And I thought it was terrific. And it also occurred to me that a Twitter thread does not work especially well at all on a podcast. So I reached out to Rachel and said hey would you mind recording your Twitter thread so we could actually talk about it here, because I thought your advice was flawless and succinct and so brilliant. But it needed to be working in an audio format. So we reached out, Megana worked with her to record this all.

Craig: Great.

John: I thought we would go through her advice and listen to it, but also respond to it and see what people could do, how people could implement this in their own lives. So, some context, Rachel Miller, she is a founding partner of Haven Entertainment, so she’s a producer rather than a writer. She’s also a founder of a nonprofit, Film2Future, which is a pipeline for underserved LA youth in Hollywood. She was just staffing a show for a streamer. And so she and her showrunner/partner read 368 scripts and they reached out to another 50 people to check availabilities for five writer spots for the room.

Craig: Ooh.

John: And she said that the truth is that the odds are not in your favor, but there’s some things you can do to help improve your chances of getting staffed. So, let’s take a listen to her advice.

Craig: OK.

Rachel Miller: One. Write something buzzy. Your sample needs to be something that cuts through the noise, that makes us remember your script after reading 368 scripts. For staffing, we aren’t necessarily looking for a pilot that sets up a series, just something that makes us remember you and your writing.

John: Yes. And so I remember when we’ve had TV showrunner guests on before them talking through like I will read the first couple pages. I just need a sense of can this person write. They kind of don’t care about the plotting overall. They just want to know is this a person who has an interesting voice. Is this someone who I want to keep reading?

Craig: Yeah.

Rachel: Two. Work on the first 15 pages, make them sing. If the first 15 pages aren’t good, it’s unlikely that we will keep reading, but if they are, we will most likely keep reading to the end of the script.

Craig: Well, because if the first 15 pages are good the next 45 are also probably going to be good. I mean, if you write well you write well. That’s how it kind of goes.

John: Absolutely. And so it also speaks to don’t hold back crucial things, oh, I don’t want that reveal to happen. I would say really do focus on that initial experience. So when we talk about the first three pages of this Three Page Challenge we really are getting a sense very quickly whether this is a script we want to keep reading.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So just make sure that works.

Rachel: Three. Have a second sample ready to go. Many times we asked for a second sample to read more of a writer and was told they had none. A second sample should show off something different about your writing, we should not read two versions of the same story in two separate samples.

Craig: That’s reasonable.

John: Yeah. That’s great advice. You know, when I talk to people who are looking to staff I ask them sort of what they’re sending out, but also what else have you got. Because you want something that shows some range. It doesn’t show the same person every time.

Rachel: Four. Make sure you have a bio and credit list and that your rep has it and it is updated. For a bio, tell us something that makes you unique. You never know what someone is looking for in a room so adding something specific that separates you from everyone else is always helpful, especially if you are a lower level writer and a ton of credits a good bio is key.

Craig: Hmm. Well.

John: Yeah. Craig, you’re not hiring writers for your show, but there’s other folks who you’re reaching out to. You’re trying to find out information about them. Do you find yourself Googling them? Are you looking for information about them? Or are you just taking what the reps send you?

Craig: Yeah, so I’m not hiring writers, therefore the people that we’re talking to we will generally get IMDb breakdowns on them. And sometimes if it’s a certain kind of person, particularly actors, but also for department heads, if there’s an interview online I’ll watch it. Interviews are fascinating. If you ever have a chance to be interviewed for anything – maybe you’re not on a staff or anything but you’re a writer and somebody has interviewed you for any little tiny program, well any little tiny program is going to be Google-able. Anything. Right?

And so take it seriously. Take that interview seriously. Be gracious. Be interesting. Don’t be me, me, me, me, me, but just be fascinating. Somebody might find that. Those things matter to me more than – look, honestly, this one is not my – bios are fake. That’s the bottom line. Bios are super fake. Like all resumes are fakes. Everybody who has ever written a resume knows that resumes are fake. So, I don’t put too much credence in those, but an interview. Well that’s something.

John: Yeah. So before we started recording this episode I was on a Zoom with some strangers who I’d – people I’d never met before. And I found myself just Googling them while we were talking. And I was curious the difference I saw between like some people I could find information about them that sort of helped me get a bigger picture of them. And some people were just un-Google-able. There was nothing out there that was helpful. Or the only thing I could see was like in 2016 this person obviously went to Harvard. But I couldn’t figure out really what they’d done in the time since that time. And so if they’d had a site, if they had other stuff out there that could help me get a sense of who they were that would be great. And so I think that’s the advice that Rachel is giving too, to make sure that if it’s an official bio or some other site that it gives some sense of who you are as a writer because you may not even have a rep who is there advocating on your behalf. The script could have just been handed in by somebody else.

Craig: Right. Right. Exactly.

Rachel: Contact info. And this seems easy, but it wasn’t. Make sure your correct rep’s info is on your script, is on IMDb and Studio System, and on your website. It is very difficult to actually contact a writer if there is no way to get in touch with that writer. Make sure your website is up to date as well. And if you don’t have reps, make sure your contact info is on the script.

John: Yeah, so for Three Page Challenges I’ve been happy to see that that’s actually improved. I’m consistently seeing contact information on the Three Page Challenges that we’re getting in. Stick in an email address there and they will email you if someone is interested. And we know people who have been featured on the Three Page Challenge who are getting contacts from reps and managers because there’s something they liked. And they can just reach out to you directly. They don’t have to go through Megana. That’s good.

Craig: Yeah. How are people missing this? I don’t understand. I mean, that’s one where – when you are going through all this stuff, everybody who is going through this has 12 other things they also have to do. Any tiny friction point is going to hurt. And if you’re interested and you want to talk to somebody and they didn’t put their contact info on I’m already angry at them for their weird judgment. So unless the script has blown me away I’m just going to keep going.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s just weird. Like how do you miss that?

John: The other thing I would add, if you are a WGA member you should update your Find a Writer profile because that is a way you can give your contact information, show who your agent is if you have one, your manager if you have one, attorneys if you have one, and include some samples. It will take you 20 minutes to do and that is another way people can find you. So, update that in the directory.

Rachel: Six. If you hear about a staffing job and you have no reps and you think you are a perfect fit, take your shot and reach out to the producers with an email explaining why you feel you might be a perfect fit. Not all producers will say yes to reading someone unrepped but some will and it’s worth taking a shot. Just make sure you specify why you think you are a perfect fit. Do not attach the script in the original email. That will get your email immediately deleted. Wait till the producer writes back and says it’s OK or not to send the script.

Craig: Sure.

John: Yeah. And so you and I have always been skeptical of query letters and sort of that sense of like, “Hey, I have this thing,” but it sounds like what she’s talking about is being very specific and targeted towards like this person is making a medical investigator show set in Philadelphia and I am a person with a background as a medical investigator in Philadelphia and I’m a damn good screenwriter. You should reach out to that person.

Craig: The second part is the key. You have to be able to say, listen, now that I’ve told you this thing you and I would both agree that I would be an idiot to not try. Right? I mean, so that’s the key. You just don’t want to do it and be like, “I’m not repped and I don’t know anything, but I love the stuff that you guys are doing and I think I’d be a great fit.” I love it when people say, “I think I would be a great fit.” And I’m like do you? What does that mean? OK. But there’s no evidence. You know?

John: You know who is a great fit? Zoanne Clack when she’s getting hired on to Grey’s Anatomy. She’s a doctor.

Craig: She’s a doctor. Exactly. That’s a great fit. That’s a fit. Exactly. That works. Not, oh, you’re a great fit because we have a job and you want a job? That’s not fit.

Rachel: Social presence – if you have a website, make sure it works. Even if it just lists your contact info, make sure it’s not a dead site. Think about joining Twitter, Instagram, all the other socials. Being part of a writing community is always helpful but also it’s a way to express yourself so a producer, or showrunner, or exec can get a glimpse of you. There is a flip side to this: Think about what you are posting. No one wants to hire someone who is constantly negative about other people, other shows, other rooms. Build your writer community. Often a showrunner or producer will reach out to their friends for personal recs and those scripts will always go to the top of the pile.

John: Great. And I’m glad she’s pointing out the double-edged sword of having social media because that is a way of sort of showing your voice and showcasing what you’re interested in. It gives me a sense of who you are as a person. But in giving me a sense of who you are as a person I’m going to decide like, oh, I don’t want to be anywhere near that person. That person seems like a real bummer to be around. So, you’ve got to be really mindful about what you’re putting out there.

Craig: Yeah. I think if you’ve written a good sample and they like it and you are not on social media at least for me that would not be a problem for me whatsoever. Most people are too online. And I guarantee you, no matter what I feel about you, if I’m going to read 100 of your tweets I’ll find two that piss me off. No question. That’s anyone. Anyone. Much less somebody sitting there and digging back through your history.

So, I’m not sure about that one to be honest with you. I don’t know if that is good advice. That one I’m questioning.

John: But I think of like Ashley Nicole Black who we only know – we were only sort of put in contact with through Twitter. And has been a guest on the show twice and is just a phenomenal writer both on Twitter and in real life and is doing great.

Craig: But we’re not hiring her. And she’s not doing great because of Twitter.

John: I don’t know if there’s really any correlation between her Twitter use and her writing. I think it enables other people to find her.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there is that. I like the idea of having a presence on the web where you can express yourself in a controlled way and you’re not kind of necessarily – believe me, it’s not like I’m saying don’t be on Twitter. It’s just be really careful. I think that the potential for trouble is actually greater than the potential for benefit in terms of if you’re not on it don’t – I’m just saying if you’re not on it and it’s not your thing, don’t feel like you have to be.

John: Yup. This is a good place for me to plug on the 18th of February I’m going to be doing a WGA panel on public relations and social media for writers.

Craig: Oh great.

John: So if you have other thoughts on that you can join us there.

Rachel: OK, so now you’ve got a meeting. Now what? One, be enthusiastic. Tell us what you liked about the show, what excites you? What part or what characters are you most interested in writing about? Have show pitches ready to go. Some showrunners won’t want to hear them, but some will. At least have them ready in your back pocket should a showrunner ask. Read the materials before the meeting. Sometimes you’ll just have a pilot, sometimes you’ll have a pilot and a book. Sometimes it will just be a link to watch. Make sure you do all your homework and Google the showrunner and producer. Come in as prepared as you can.

John: So, it’s not surprising that she’s saying to come in prepared. And we’ve talked about going in for meetings and going in for general meetings, going in for specific meetings on a project. But I think our biases as feature writers is it’s always like how are we going to approach this project that’s here in front of us. And what’s different about going in for a meeting with a showrunner is that you’re responding to that person’s work. And so you have to be super positive about the thing that they’ve made and how great that is. But also sort of being able to “yes and” and sort of talk about where the series can go, what’s exciting to you about that, which is a subtly different thing than going in to meet with a producer about the Uno Movie.

Craig: No question. And beyond the evidence that you are a worker, and an adult who reads what you’re supposed to read and knows what you’re supposed to know, actual demonstrable passion for a show is going to move you further than almost anything else. And you can’t fake it. It’s got to be real.

The reason you do all of your homework in addition to your actual passion for the show is because it is not only a sign that you are an adult. It is a sign of respect for the people that you’re sitting with. They wrote that stuff. They’ve been working on it. They don’t want somebody sitting there going, “Yeah, I guess I could work on this. You know, I’ll come in and do what you need, whatever you need. You like what I wrote, I’ll write some stuff like that for you.” Well, get out. Get out of my office. You make me feel bad about myself and my show.

What I want is for you to come in and say, “I love what you do. I love your show. It means something to me. I want to be a part of it. I want to learn from you. And I want to leave my thumbprint on it. I want to influence this because I care about it.” Then I lean forward and I go who is this? I want to know you. And, again, you can’t fake that. It’s got to be real.

John: Yeah. So don’t play hard to get. I mean, the opportunity to get hard to get is when there’s multiple people who want to hire you for a job for a slot. That’s fantastic and then you can maybe get your price up a little bit. But, no, you want to seem like the person who has passion for this specific job who they can imagine being in a writer’s room or writer’s Zoom for weeks on end with and not dread seeing you.

Craig: Yes.

Rachel: Four. Write a thank you note after the meeting. Your reps or an assistant will forward it on. It looks great. Five. Most importantly, be yourself. Again, you’ll never know what exactly the needs of the room are. And what mix the showrunner, producer, or network are looking for. So being yourself is always the best answer. Break a leg out there.

Craig: Yeah, being yourself.

John: Great advice. So thank you notes. I’ve generally not done them. Maybe I should do them more. I’ve always liked it when I’ve gotten thank you notes when I’ve been interviewing for people to come work for me. I do notice when those thank you notes come through. So that’s a good idea. I just haven’t done it.

Craig: [laughs] You like getting them, you just don’t like writing them.

John: That’s so totally true. Just like the opposite is true. I prefer to give a present than to give a present. I don’t really like getting presents.

Craig: Sure. Well, no, I hate getting presents because mostly it’s just an exercise in me trying to convince you that I don’t want to throw this thing out. But I do like writing a thank you note. And I’m sort of the opposite. I don’t really care about getting the thank you notes so much, but I like writing them because, again, it’s just to show respect I think mostly. Just to show respect, no matter what the power dynamic is. Whether it’s somebody that was trying to get a job from me or somebody that I’ve been talking to about a job. I do that because it just feels, I don’t know, nice.

But the be yourself advice is always the best advice. It is true that there’s stuff going on that you’re not aware of and never will be aware of that sometimes qualifies you or disqualifies you within seconds. And you have no control over it. It just is what it is. And so you can’t calculate your way to success. Be your enthusiastic, passionate, authentic self.

John: So I want to thank you Rachel Miller both for writing that lovely Twitter thread and for recording it so we could talk about it here on the air. So thank you again Rachel Miller.

All right, I think we have time for one listener question. So Megana Rao: if you could come on board and talk us through a question that we could answer from the mailbag. Because I see there’s a bunch here, but maybe this top one would work for us.

Megana Rao:: All right. Great. So Oscar asks, “What are your thoughts in showing something in flashback versus hearing a monologue about it? Let’s say you have the limited resources to actually shoot that flashback. What would be reasons you would cutaway versus leaving it as a monologue?”

John: That’s a great question.

Craig: I love this question so much because I literally was confronting this very question just a couple weeks ago in thinking about a future episode that I have yet to write of The Last of Us. And the answer Oscar is you’ve just got to feel it. Because there are some stories you really do want to be in. And then there are some stories that you want to hear. And I can’t tell you why one thing feels like it’s better to hear than another other than to say if it seems like if you’re in it and it’s happening it might feel possibly melodramatic as opposed to if you’re just hearing about it and that person can kind of play against some inherent melodrama than maybe that’s a reason to have somebody relay it as a story.

If you think that the story would be fantastic to see and not really a good story to tell then you don’t really have that option. But, if it’s something that you think the storytelling would kind of contrast with. And a great example is in Jaws. So there’s Robert Shaw delivering that amazing story about what it was like floating in the water after the USS Indianapolis is hit a torpedo I think. And they’re all floating in the water and then the sharks come.

Well, you could say it, but then it’s sort of like, oh look, a camera is there and people are in the water and it’s a big action sequence and people are screaming. But having him kind of tell that story with that weird smile on his face because that’s how he covers up the pain, and he’s slightly drunk, and you can tell every now and then inside of the story he starts to reveal feelings and then, no, not at all. And the way he ends it as if to say, “Well, there you go. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.” That becomes fascinating because now the story isn’t about plot, the story is about character. So that’s your choice. You’ve got to figure it out. You’ve got to feel it.

John: Yeah. I would say that whatever movie or TV show you’re doing you also are setting some rules for yourself about are you the kind of thing that tells stories or flashes back. And if there’s one flashback in the whole movie or the whole TV series well that’s weird. It feels like you’re just breaking the rules to tell that one thing. So there has to be a really good reason why you are doing that thing.

Also, you need to ask yourself do you have a good person to tell that story. Is there a person who actually would be an interesting narrator to tell that story and who their choice to tell that story within the scene is meaningful and makes sense? Because it’s not just the story. It’s the scene in which the story is being told. And if you have that moment where it actually really makes sense for this character at this moment to tell that story, that’s awesome. But if you’re just dumping information at the audience that probably is pushing you back more towards a this is the movie wants to tell you, show you what happened, versus this character wants to tell you what happened.

Craig: Yeah. You never want your story to feel like, oh, they just needed to save money. Or, oh, they just needed you to know a whole big bunch of crap and they didn’t want to make you sit through all of it because it’s boring. It’s got to be a great story. That’s the key. It’s got to be a great story.

John: We have many great questions here so I think next week will probably end up being a mailbag episode because I was just looking through this outline and some primo questions being sent in to ask@johnaugust.com, so thank you everyone who has sent those through. And thank you Megana for sorting through all of these.

Craig: Excellent.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Thing this week. The first is an article by Dan Froomkin entitled “What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters.” What he’s arguing for in this piece is basically that we need to stop having politics reporters or political reporters and relabel them as government reporters. Because when you start talking about politics you inevitably move to a this side versus that side and to a sort of sports team kind of reporting on things which is not actually helpful for the good of the nation or for people understanding what’s actually happening.

So, it was a really interesting framing. And I think it could potentially be really useful in terms of what if we just talked about what government is doing and what the issues are and stopped talking about it as a race. And I think some really good points being made in there. So, I will point you to Froomkin’s article there.

And once you’ve read through that long piece I think you need a palate cleanser which I will send you to. This is a clip of Whitney Houston and Brandy singing Impossible from the ABC version of Cinderella. And I just – this is behind the scenes of them recording this. And it’s just such a reminder of what – not just what an instrument Whitney Houston had but just how much life she had. It was just so good to see her so joyful as she was singing this. And as she’s ribbing Brandy to actually sing on pitch, it’s just great. So I loved this little bit. I’m going to play a little clip for you here Craig so you can appreciate how good this sounds.

Craig: I would like that. Yes.

[Song plays]

John: That made you smile right?

Craig: So good. I mean, just – just the GOAT. Just unbelievable.

John: And it made me remember that like I think too much about the tragic end of Whitney Houston. And I need to move past that and appreciate the joyful beginning and middle of Whitney Houston and what she was able to do.

Craig: Effortlessly.

John: That I got to be alive while she was singing like that.

Craig: Just effortlessly. I assume you’ve watched the famous clip of her singing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.

John: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Craig: And when she redefined, literally redefined the melody at the end of the National Anthem. No one else had done Free-hee. No one else had done the octave jump on free. And now you have to do it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: She just made that. She made it. She invented it. It’s amazing.

So my One Cool Thing is, I know I’m off of Twitter, but if you are lurking on Twitter which I think is perfectly fine because it’s free to everybody there is a fascinating woman named Stella Zawistowski. Stella Zawistowski is part of the crossword world. She’s often in the mix at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The big one in Connecticut. And she’s got a great – this is what makes her especially fascinating. This is her, what do you call the little bio thing on your Twitter profile: “Personal records…” I’m going to do it backward from the way she does it because I just like the reveal of it. “Personal records: New York Times Sunday crossword, 4 minutes, 33 seconds. Back squat 265 lbs.” That’s right. Stella Zawistowski not only can solve a Sunday Times puzzle in under five minutes, but she is a powerlifter. There’s a picture of her doing it. It’s impressive.

So that’s a combination you don’t see too frequently. Not to rip on my fellow crossword people but we are not known for our brute strength. [laughs] So, Stella is. But what I love about Stella lately is that she’s been helping people with understanding and getting into cryptic crosswords which I’ve talked about on here before. And she has a hashtag she’s been doing called #ExplanationFriday where she shows a clue and gives people a chance to get it right. And then she gives you the answer and explains how the clue works, because that is how you learn how to do cryptics by sort of going back and reverse engineering the clues and learning the conventions and the tricks and all that fun.

So, it’s a great way to start learning, because honestly I’ve become too bored with regular crossword puzzles. I need the cryptics. So, cryptics or metas. So, Stella Zawistowski for all of your powerlifting, crossword, and cryptic clue needs. @stellaphone. @stellaphone.

John: Excellent. And that is our show for this week. So, as always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao:. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our fantastic outro this week. So stick around and listen to that. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is not really on Twitter so don’t at him.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

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

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on awkward dates. So stick around for that. Craig, thank you for a good episode.

Craig: Thanks John.

[Bonus segment]

Craig: That’s great to see. What are they saying?

John: I don’t think they’re saying anything.

Craig: Just Latin sort of just chanting?

John: Just Latin chanting.

Craig: That’s awesome.

John: It’s great. I also love that it’s so creepy and yet beautiful. I mean, it’s joyful and creepy at the same time, which is just a uniquely church-y kind of thing you can do.

Craig: Yes. Yes. That was beautiful.

John: Yeah. Our topic this week is also potentially creepy and beautiful. Adam in Los Angeles wrote in to say he wants to hear us talk about bad dating stories. And here’s a situation where I think I probably have more dating stories than you do just because you met your wife in college and probably didn’t date a lot post-college. What’s your dating history?

Craig: I didn’t date at all post-college. I dated in high school and I dated in college. I mean, dating in college is really just like I sleep with you, I sleep with you. But then I met my wife my junior year and it’s been her since. So, yeah. I’m out of that whole scene man.

John: I was dating up until I was 30. So I have lot more dating history.

Craig: You’ve got some stories. Yeah.

John: I’ve got some stories.

Craig: Tell us stories.

John: But let’s go back to high school. So my most notable date, I have two things from high school that are embarrassing, which most high school dating is kind of embarrassing. This first one though I remember very distinctly. So, I got set up with a friend of a friend. A girl named Tonya who I didn’t know at all, but she was friends with other friends and apparently she was really into me and I didn’t know who she was. But we got set up.

So we talked on the phone and we ended up going to see a movie for our first date. And, Craig, that movie was Fatal Attraction.

Craig: That’s working.

John: That’s working really, really well.

Craig: Everything about this situation is clicking.

John: Absolutely. So this girl who is apparently a little obsessed with me takes me to see Fatal Attraction. So we see Fatal Attraction which is a really good movie, but also not a good first date movie.

Craig: No!

John: No.

Craig: No.

John: So then we go back to her family’s house and her parents aren’t around because her parents are gone for the weekend or something. And I was like I don’t kind of feel safe here. And so I should stress she’s lovely and so I’ve met her at the high school reunion and she’s great and phenomenal and happily married and everything else. But it was not a good experience for me.

Craig: No, that must have been – yeah, you walk into the house, there’s no one there. It’s the reverse right. Normally you go, OK, I’m the straight guy. I go home with this girl. I walk into the house. The parents are gone. Woo! Party time. And then not the case in this circumstance.

John: It was not the case in this circumstance. Do you have a high school story?

Craig: Yeah. I’ve got some high school stories. Sure. I’m trying to think of a bad, a really – well, I’ll tell you actually prior to high school you know there’s like the awkward early crush, like so now you’re talking like fifth grade crush.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: It’s not quite a date story. But I had this like beyond crush on the girl who lived across the street named Sandra. And I told my friend Eric about her. And he was like you’ve got to write a love letter to her. And I was like what, no way. And he convinced me. And I did it. I wrote a love letter to Sandra. And I walked across and I put it in her mailbox because you could do that. And then I went home. And then I had terrible regrets. I had terrible regrets. What have I done? She’s going to tell everybody. I’m going to be laughed at. She’s not going to like me.

So I went back over there. It had already been taken out of the mailbox. I rang her doorbell. She came out. And I basically said, yeah, none of that’s true.

John: Oh no, Craig.

Craig: Yeah. I just took it all back. And she must have – look, I’d like to think, this is the most charitable imagining. Sandra got this. We’re all like 10, OK? Sandra go this, read it, and went, “Huh?” And then I came to her door and she’s like, “Oh, hi.” And then I say this crazy stuff about how I didn’t really mean it and it was all just a joke. And she was polite about it and then she went back inside and went, “What?” And then just moved on with her day like what the hell was that about.

John: Yeah. And that’s very classic comedy. Something that was so important to you and it meant nothing to her at all.

Craig: I hope. I hope. But, yeah, you know, I don’t have too many disastrous date stories I must say.

John: So this isn’t even really a date story, but it actually has a similar dynamic. So this is in, I don’t know if it was in high school, or maybe it was I was back for summer in college. And I ended up making out with this girl at a party and, whatever, you make out with somebody at a party. And then I guess we exchanged phone numbers or whatever. But she’d said like, “Oh, I work at Fashion Bar in the Crossroads Mall.” And I think she had said something like, “Oh, we could get lunch or something.” And so I showed up at like where she worked.

Craig: Oh, you’re a stalker.

John: Yeah. And in retrospect I’m looking at this from her perspective. She could not get away from me. So I regret that. But I fundamentally did not understand that I was meeting her at work. It was just weird and I’m embarrassed now to even sort of tell that story.

Craig: You know, it’s important to hug yourself.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: And forgive yourself. We all have done these stupid, stupid things. Just, you know, everyone has one. But that’s not too bad, you know.

John: It’s not too bad. I didn’t keep stalking her in any way like that. I think in going there I was like, oh, we’re not going to be able to have a conversation there. And so therefore I should just–

Craig: Right. What is Fashion Bar?

John: Fashion Bar was some sort of retail clothing store. I think there was a Fashion Bar Men’s and a Fashion Bar Women’s. It was a private chain.

Craig: Got it. So she could be like, “Look, I know we made out at a party, but if you want to stay here you need to buy a sweater.”

John: That’s pretty true.

Craig: And use my sticker for the sale.

John: Now, Craig though, you missed out on all dating in your 20s which was the beginning of online dating and all that stuff.

Craig: Yeah, never done it.

John: I’ll quickly talk you through some of the highlights of that. So, not an online date, but I do remember an Aspen gay ski week, meeting a guy on a chairlift and sort of flirting there. And then it’s like, oh, come by my place. I’m like, great, I’ll come by your place. And then he ended up living in New York and so we had phone conversations. So you never had to do a lot of phone dating either.

Craig: Right.

John: But I remember this one conversation where he said, “Oh, you’re exactly the kind of guy my therapist wants me to date.”

Craig: Oh no.

John: That first red flag. And so he was like an investment guy. And I was a broke aspiring screenwriter. And he’s like, “I keep dating these sort of like hot guys who are wrong for me. Listen, I’ve got the money, I can get your surgery. I can get you a trainer. Basically I can change you into the thing that I want to date.”

Craig: Wait, he was Pygmalion-ing you?

John: He was trying to Pygmalion me.

Craig: [laughs] Well, hold on a second. You don’t necessarily want to turn down free surgery. What was he offering?

John: I don’t know. You could be dealing with a completely different host here.

Craig: That’s so weird.

John: So weird.

Craig: That’s psycho. I can get your surgery. That’s what you want from somebody. That says love.

John: Yeah. I wish I could figure out this guy’s name to sort of see where he’s at now in life.

Craig: If only we could cut into you and rearrange your meat. Then…

John: Do you need all your ribs? I don’t know that you do.

Craig: Oh my god. That’s terrifying. All right, well, you know.

John: That’s dating.

Craig: Hey, he was open with you at the very least.

John: And so the one last sort of Internet dating story I’ll share. I will say that I do miss dating in my 20s because I like seeing people’s apartments.

Craig: Oh, that’s a thought. Sure.

John: It’s nice going to see people’s apartments. A guy who, an Internet date, and we ended up going out to lunch at like a Baja Fresh. And Baja Fresh is a chain in Southern California that is known for, they have a salsa bar. And you can have lots of different kinds of salsa there to put on your burritos and your tacos. And this guy got like 15 little cups for salsa. And filled them up with pico de gallo, the chopped up tomato thing, and just sort of ate that as a salad.

Craig: What? [laughs]

John: That should be a giant red flag. And it was a giant red flag. There was not a second date.

Craig: I don’t know. I mean, what if that was just this adorable affectation that he had and he was amazing. He’s like the best husband ever to somebody and they’re like, “Oh my god, Jimmy, the one thing about him is the pico de Gallo thing, but otherwise he’s perfect.”

John: Other than like stalking that girl at Fashion Bar.

Craig: Exactly.

John: He’s a good guy.

Craig: Other than the fact that he came to my house, delivered this love letter, and then 20 minutes later came back and said the whole thing was fake, he’s great. We suck. God we suck.

John: So you shouldn’t judge people by the worst thing they’ve ever done. Which in your case was mail fraud.

Craig: Mail fraud. Exactly.

John: And in my case was stalking at a retail store.

Craig: And Aspen gay ski week guy’s worst case was just being Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs and wanting to cut into you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s terrifying. “You’re the kind of person my therapist wants me to date,” what that means is I don’t want to date you.

John: Indeed. It really does. It frankly does. It’s like you’re not a thing I want, but I want to want you.

Craig: You’re the kind of food my dietician says I should be eating. OK, I get it. I’m asparagus. Screw you man.

John: Fun stuff. Fun times.

Craig: Bad dates.

John: So you haven’t dated in forever, so do you miss any part of that life?

Craig: No. Not at all. I mean, I don’t know – it seems to me like it’s chaotic and disruptive and scary. Fraught with pain. I mean, I’m painting a terrible picture of it. I guess mostly the reason why is if you’re not dating, if you’re in a monogamous relationship and you have a lot of friends who are dating they don’t come to you with good dating stories. They come to you with the disasters. That’s all you hear are just – I was on my skateboard and it went great. Nothing happened. Crazy. And I came home. You just hear like fell off my skateboard, smashed my face into the ground, lost five teeth. Traumatized. That’s the kind of dating story I would get. Just the disasters.

John: Yeah. I think I miss being young. I miss my youth. But I think if I were to ask that person then like what do you want, I totally want exactly what I have now which is like a really happy marriage and family and all the stuff. So I’m just the luckiest person alive. So I don’t miss that dating.

Craig: Yeah. Well that’s the idea. That you know what you want. You get what you want.

John: I won.

Craig: You’re happy with want you want. And you don’t need to, for instance, surgically alter Mike.

John: I do not.

Craig: He’s perfect, except for this one slice.

John: No, no. Perfect.

Craig: I want to meet this guy. This guy sounds awesome actually.

John: Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you John.

Links:

• Lil Yachty Uno Movie
• PayUpHollywood Results and article
• Thank you to Liz Alper and Jamarah Hayner!
• The Gamestop movie at Netflix, MGM, and RatPac
• Rachel Miller Twitter Thread
• Check out Rachel’s nonprofit Film2Future here!
• What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters by Dan Froomkin
• Whitney Houston and Brandy singing Impossible from Cinderella
• Stella Zawistowski
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription, also we’re now offering annual memberships!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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

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

Craig Mazin: Hey guys. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 485 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we make good on our promise to explain Hollywood’s guilds and unions. Then we’ll tackle the problem of good and evil, law and chaos, as it relates to character alignment and whether it’s helpful for writers to be thinking along these axes. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will talk about the screenwriting guru/QAnon connection which is as obvious and obnoxious as you’d think.

Craig: [laughs] Oh, I can’t wait. Can’t wait.

John: Yeah. But before we get into any of this, Craig, I know you are a person who loves puzzles.

Craig: I do.

John: I suspect you also love mysteries.

Craig: I love mysteries.

John: I could see you in another life becoming a detective.

Craig: Yes.

John: So, I have a mystery for you to help me solve. And there is an answer. I promise.

Craig: OK.

John: Since about Thanksgiving a thing I’ve noticed is when I wake up in the mornings my fingers smell sweet. Not like maple syrup, but kind of like an agave syrup. Just they smell genuinely sweet. And this was incredibly puzzling to me. I wondered what could be going on.

I found what the answer was. But I’m curious what your process might be towards figuring out what was going on.

Craig: OK. Well, I suppose the first thing I would do is to try and determine when the crime occurred. So, before I would go to bed I would very carefully smell and taste my own fingers to make sure that they weren’t already sweet.

John: And, yes, I smelled my fingers before going to bed and they did not smell sweet. It’s only when I woke up in the morning that they smelled sweet.

Craig: Interesting. So then the next thing I would do would be to figure out if there was something where maybe inside of my pillowcase or something that there was some sort of – maybe there was something in there that was rubbing off on my fingers. So I would check the bedding, for instance.

John: Yeah. And so I did check that. And I noticed nothing – like my pillowcases did not smell like it. My pillow didn’t smell like it. I couldn’t find that smell anywhere else. It was only on specifically my fingers.

Craig: Fingers. Next thing I would ask is are you wearing any sort of mouth appliance at night.

John: I am. I wear a mouth guard at night.

Craig: Ah-ha.

John: I could not imagine sleeping without a mouth guard.

Craig: OK. So now what I’m wondering is when you wake up in the morning and you’re smelling the sweetness on your fingers is it after you’ve removed your mouth guard or before?

John: It is both.

Craig: Oh.

John: So before I’ve taken it off I do smell it and I still smell it after I take it out.

Craig: OK, so it’s not for instance perhaps you’ve done a good job scrubbing and cleaning your mouth guard and gotten some residual toothpaste on it or something like that.

John: Yeah. That would be a natural thought, but no.

Craig: Right. And it’s not for instance that you’ve left any sort of toothpaste residue around.

John: No. Nothing. And I would say it’s not minty. I don’t want to – it smells more like kind of like a syrup. I don’t want to go typically maple syrup, but it’s that kind of sweet. Or sort of like baked goods sweet.

Craig: Hmm. Mm. OK. All right. I’m now engaging my literal gray cells. My little gray cells.

John: How about this. Why don’t we keep talking about the mystery as we go through this episode, so we can actually get to some of the screenwriting stuff? But we’ll come back to this mystery, because there will be answer by the end, I promise.

Craig: Great. Like in between–

John: You won’t have to flip to the back of the book.

Craig: Right. Like in between our topics. OK, great.

John: All right. So some follow up. In a previous episode we talked about, or I sort of brought up that I never see female characters grappling with ethical concerns. And some people wrote in with some suggestions. But one of the best ones I thought was Joshua who writes, “In Contact the character of Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, is ultimately forced to reconcile her atheism with a transcendent experience she cannot prove, culminating in a memorable congressional hearing where we see her struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through and what it means for how she sees the world and herself.” Let’s listen to a clip.

Male Voice: Then why don’t you simply withdraw your testimony and concede that this journey to the center of the galaxy in fact never took place?

Jodie Foster: Because I can’t. I had an experience I can’t prove, I can’t even explain it. But everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not – that none of us are alone. I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe and humility and that hope…but…that continues to be my wish.

John: So that’s not quite what I’m talking about in terms of an ethical concern. It’s a revelation that I don’t often see female characters have, but it’s not the ethical concern that I’m thinking about in terms of like 12 Angry Men.

Craig: Right. I love that movie, but that’s the part of the movie that I don’t particularly love because it seemed kind of forced in there. There was a slight sense of an engineered ethical conflict when in fact because we were sort of on the journey with her we kind of got it. There actually really isn’t – she’s not struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through because there’s a pretty clear explanation. Aliens did stuff. [laughs] You know? How they did it and why they did it that way they kind of explain. So, there’s not really a question of did I see a ghost or was it something else. So, I agree with you, not quite what we’re getting at.

John: Yeah. But what I do like about that example is that is a character who is encountering a moment and her being male or female is not relevant to this. And that we more often see a male character in that spot. So I do want to give it some partial credit for that reason.

Craig: Partial credit.

John: Let’s also give partial credit to the eight sequence structure. So we talked about this in Episode 483 and we were very dismissive of this idea of an eight sequence structure. A colleague and classmate, Scott Murphy, he went through USC at the same time I did, we were in different programs. He was in the graduate screenwriting program and I was in the Stark producing program. But he said that at USC they actually taught that. And that’s how they taught that. And so he felt it was a little unfair that we were dismissing it based on kind of the first Google result I got, which I guess that is kind of true. I hadn’t done any deep research.

And he says that the first thing that I brought up was the most extreme version of sort of a labeling of what all those sequences would be. And that really the point in teaching eight sequence structure is to get people thinking about sequences rather than 30-page acts. And to really be thinking about sequences having a beginning, a middle, and an end, which sounds more like the kinds of things that you and I would say. There’s a notion of scenes, there’s a notion of sequences, and they build out to become bigger things.

So I want to give some partial credit to this idea of sequences rather than capital-S Structure.

Craig: I still don’t quite know what the value is in terms of teaching people how to create something, because while it is true that you can break these things down into sequences, I mean, you could also break it into sub-sequences and have a 16 sequence structure. But the real question is well what do I write in the sequence. So there’s supposed to be a sequence here but what am I supposed to do? And what if it doesn’t fit inside of this? And what if it’s just a simple moment? It feels pedantic.

John: And pedantic also in the sense of like I can understand why it is maybe a useful teaching way to get people to think about smaller blocks of story rather than 30 pages, you know, thinking about something that’s achievable, and beginning, middle, and end. But it’s also really clear to me how a way of teaching something can quickly morph into becoming a prescribed formula for how things have to work. And it feels like maybe that’s the mistake I was making at looking at this one sheet, but also what I worry about sort of over-generalizing this eight sequence structure is that this may be a useful way to teach people how to build up blocks that sort of become a bigger thing and understand what sequences are. But it’s not the magical formula.

Craig: Right.

John: And I think when you mistake the formula for the actual reality of the script that’s the problem.

Craig: I could definitely see myself teaching a class, something that would arrive at an eight sequence structure. But I would kind of want to begin with one sequence structure. Meaning let’s just talk about what your story is from beginning to end in a very big sort of bird’s eye view. So that we understand the rough movement of it. That’s one sequence.

Now let’s divide that into two sequences. So, halves of that big thing. Let’s talk about what happens in this first half. Now, great, we’ve done that. Now let’s divide each one of those again. And lo and behold, just like that, you’ve got yourself–

John: You’re getting there.

Craig: You’re getting there. You get yourself four and you do it again. And off you go.

John: Yeah. And we’ve often talked about there’s a fractal quality to storytelling is that like there should be movement within a scene. There needs to be movement within a sequence. Movement within whatever you want to call an act to get to this whole story. And so every scene is like its own little movie. Every sequence is like its own little movie. So I can understand, again, why it is helpful to be thinking that way as you’re teaching. I just worry then coming back and trying to impose that as capital-S Structure. And any time somebody brings up structure my [unintelligible] just immediately come up because I feel like that’s, you know, you’re giving us a formula and that’s not going to work.

Craig: Yes. It’s not going to help me make a thing.

John: So, one revelation of this past week is Megana has gotten in a bunch of emails about IP stuff and we now have an umbrella term for it. We’re going to call this Mockable IP.

Craig: OK.

John: So the things like the Slinky Movie, mockable IP. Josh who is pitching sort of a packing peanuts or plywood thing, he said the criteria for a mockable IP is the product should be something real that a company sells. It should be something that makes zero sense as a movie but you can still see someone from the company pitching it to a studio executive’s office. And, third, that it will never, ever be a movie no matter what. Those feel like useful criteria for us to be thinking about with these kinds of IP.

Craig: Well, that’s where I disagree with Josh. It was number three.

John: You think some of these things will happen?

Craig: I think in fact they must be possibly a movie. For us to consider it, because otherwise again we can come down to things like gravel. For us to consider it it has to be something that you know what they might make this. If we talk about, like Slinky, we would do that all the time, and they did it. And we were scooped and they did it. And, yeah. So it has to be something that can be a movie.

John: Maybe this number three is like they could make it, but it would immediately be mocked. The mockability, I guess that is begging the question literally. But that’s a crucial part of this.

Craig: Right. And good use of begging the question. Thank you.

John: Really, I was so excited when I realized I could use that term properly for once. But I also want to, as we talk about this mockable IP, call out a clip that was on the Stephen Colbert show, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, by a listener who directed it, Ballard C. Boyd. It’s a great – got to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes which is Queen’s Gambit, the Scott Frank show, and Rubik’s Cube. So this was The Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube limited series they were pitching. Let’s take a listen to a clip.

Female Voice: I wasn’t just handed my seat. I had to overcome so much. Sexism. A sprained wrist. Temporary color-blindness.

Male Voice: You may be the greatest natural talent I’ve ever seen. But you must master the opening move known only to distinguished players. It’s called “turn the left bottom middle forward to the front-facing part. It’s not like chess.” We don’t get to have cool names for things.

Female Voice: It may be just a block covered in little stickers to you, but to me it’s the entire world. Oh, also drugs. I do tons of drugs. You don’t know me.

John: So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the full trailer for that, but I thought it was a delightful way to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes.

Craig: That’s one way to do it. We got some other suggestions in here I see.

John: Go for it.

Craig: Erica suggests Scrub Daddy. Now, I got to say, that’s possible because it has a face. It’s the goofy sponge that has eyes and a mouth. And I think there’s like a Scrub Mommy and a Scrub Baby. So, I could see a scrub family.

John: Yeah, little Scrubbing Bubbles. I love them.

Craig: Yeah. Chuck says Fidget Spinner. No.

John: No. Because one company doesn’t own it.

Craig: Yeah. It’s not a thing. It’s a thing, but it’s not.

John: I guess there was the Emoji Movie which no one actually owns, but still I don’t think fidget spinner is going to happen.

Craig: Yeah. But emojis are literally everywhere, all over. The fidget spinner was a fad that’s already gone. I don’t think it’s a thing.

Let’s see, Philip from LA suggests Pogs. No.

John: I barely remember Pogs. They were sort of – I was in a gap between Pogs. It was elementary school but I think I’d outgrown them by the time they became a thing.

Craig: Pogs came back in the ‘90s. And, no, no. Nope.

Danny from St. Louis suggests Preparation H. Now, Danny, now you’re just being silly. This is real. You have to take this seriously. [laughs]

I like Sophie’s though. Sophie I’m pretty sure is touching on something that has been in development. Chia Pet. Surely that’s been, like scripts have been written right?

John: Yeah. There must be scripts written about Chia Pet. Or at least parody scripts for Chia Pet.

Craig: Or at least parody scripts. And then finally Matt, we do get this suggestion a lot, Pet Rock. For sure. But Pet Rock–

John: Dwayne Johnson is in it. It has a meta quality.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, it would have to be a period piece because pet rocks did exist happily in the ‘70s and never after.

John: Yeah. I had a pet rock for like a day and a half maybe. And then I realized that it was just a rock with some googly eyes attached to it. And I stopped paying attention.

Craig: I didn’t understand the joke. Because I was too young. I got a pet rock. I was like seven. And everyone was like there you go. And I’m like, OK. But, wait, why? And they’re like, “Well, it’s kind of making fun of the whole idea of toys.” What?

John: Why would you make fun of toys?

Craig: Right. What do you mean the idea of toys? Let’s just back up to that for a second. So this is my introduction to irony. Pet Rock.

John: I think all the things we’re talking about, they have to have eyes. That’s really what it comes down to. If you have to add eyes to it that’s a problem. So, there was an animated Rubik’s Cube cartoon at some point, but it was like Rubik’s Cube and then they added eyes to it. Well that’s disturbing. Versus like Pac-Man, he already had eyes.

Craig: Well, the Slinky doesn’t have eyes, but of course Slinky isn’t a character. It’s about the people that made the Slinky. What do you think about – you know what, that movie, the Seth Rogan animated movie that was basically all just food.

John: Food. Yeah. And so they added food to it, but I think they got away with it because it was just so–

Craig: Dirty.

John: It was such an absurd concept. And it was really dirty.

Craig: It was dirty.

John: It was really, really raunchy.

Craig: Yeah. It was dirty.

John: Like Towelie is one of my favorite characters in South Park and that’s just a towel with eyes.

Craig: A towel with googly eyes.

John: Who is really stoned.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Love it.

John: Really red googly stoner eyes.

Craig: I remember the paper clip guy from Microsoft that everybody hates. It’s a paper clip with eyes.

John: Oh yeah. Clippy. Yeah.

Craig: And eyebrows weirdly.

John: Yeah. Well it’s important because you can’t get full expression without that.

Craig: Right. Yes.

John: So, Craig, interstitial here, do you have any more questions here about my sweet, sweet fingers?

Craig: Yes. This may be violating HIPAA. Do you have diabetes?

John: I do not have diabetes. Happy to report I do not have diabetes.

Craig: OK. I have another question for you.

John: Please.

Craig: Does this happen every single morning, or some mornings?

John: Every single morning.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. One possibility was that it was related to a food you were eating.

John: That was a thought I had as well. I thought perhaps around Thanksgiving I was baking yeasty things that maybe there was something about the baking or the foods I was eating that were specific to the season. But it continued.

Craig: OK. I have another question for you. Even though you like I are in the brotherhood of the bald, do you put any sort of product in your hair or any sort of skincare product that might have an odor to it?

John: The answer to your first question is no. I don’t use Rogaine or any sort of topical hair product. So it’s not that. But, I do want to say that you are getting close to the solution there. Yeah.

Craig: Interesting. Wait, what about Mike?

John: No, it’s not Mike. So it is my own situation here.

Craig: Got it.

John: The second part of your question was a skincare product. And, yes, I put on a moisturizer. The moisturizer does not smell like that though.

Craig: I see. I see. I see. OK. All right. Well we should probably take another break.

John: We’ll continue on and we’ll talk about unions and guilds.

Craig: Great.

John: So this was something we promised we were going to do I think last week. And there’s actually two kind of news hooks for it this week because – we’ll put a link of the Deadline article of Hollywood Unions Celebrate the Inauguration of President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris. The Most Pro-Union President and Partner in the White House. So all the unions and guilds were very excited and little tweets about that.

And also Biden fired the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. And then the replacement person for that. So there’s going to be a new person there. And I will say that doing guild stuff that the people who have been running NLRB has been a challenge for the WGA. You don’t want to go to them for help because they might side with the other side. So, those were two things in the news just this week that are related to Hollywood guilds and unions.

Craig: It’s a big deal. And John is right. You can’t really overestimate the impact that these things have on unions and the way they not only just conduct their week to week business but also how they go into negotiations. Because ultimately when you’re negotiating with companies as a union or when you’re trying to figure out how far to push things with management in between contracts your leverage is that maybe they’re violating the law. Or maybe there is an issue of law that is undecided that could be decided in your favor. Or, maybe there’s an issue in the contract that’s undecided that could be decided by mediators or arbitrators or eventually be heard by the National Labor Relations Board.

And if that government body is skewed to be anti-union you are automatically and reasonably way more gun shy about all sorts of things. The meddling that the government can do to hurt unions is not limited just to how they decide disputes. Sometimes it comes down to just aggravating paperwork.

John: Yeah.

Craig: When I was on the board way, way back when in the mid-2000s the Bush administration changed the rules. So every union must every year file a financial report that is publicly available. And basically under the Bush administration they changed the rules so you just had to report way more information. It was more burdensome to the unions to put it all together. And also it just was like you had to just open your kimono completely. Everybody should be able to see everything. And it was, you know, designed ultimately to kind of put their thumb in the union’s eye.

Over the decades since the big unionization movements in the early part of the 20th century the government has steadily chipped away. Steadily chipped away at organized labor and their power. And this is a much needed course correction on that part.

John: Yeah. So in this conversation we’re talking about unions and guilds as they exist in Hollywood and really only in the US. And so that’s necessarily going to be very limited to this because while there are international Writers Guilds they are more like professional societies because they’re not true unions where they’re representing employees. And we’ll get into some of sort of why the unique way we do it in the US allows for writers’ unions that wouldn’t exist or make sense other places.

And I started to put together a lot of links to the history of organized labor in Hollywood and I realized we are not a history podcast. We are going to mess up way more than we’re going to illuminate, but we’ll have some links in the show notes to that. Important things to understand in terms of background, the film industry is about 100 years old. It’s centered in Los Angeles. Radio and television was originally based out of New York. Even though more production moved to LA, there was still a lot of late night TV and news largely stayed in New York. That still exists. You still see the shadows of that in sort of how the unions are set up.

Interestingly, the first of the Hollywood unions IATSE, created all of this because they were the teamsters who were part of Broadway, sort of vaudeville, Broadway stuff. So it goes even back before there was film there were unions that were involved in the film production.

And, Craig, I remember when you were on Karina’s podcast did you play Louis B. Mayer? I’m trying to remember who you played.

Craig: That’s right. I was Louis B. Mayer.

John: So, this is a thing I did not know and I’ll put a link in the show notes to this, too, but I hadn’t realized the degree to which Mayer and the birth of the Oscars was really a response and an anticipation of organized labor.

Craig: Yup. So Louis B. Mayer, sensing that the artists under this control were starting to organize and come together and talk, and thus threaten his hegemony – and he really was the king of the council of kings – he very brilliantly created the Oscars because his theory was if you are possibly in danger of having to compete for resources with artists hold up a shiny trophy and they’ll forget about you and just fight each other for it. And that’s exactly what happened. [laughs] And continues to happen to this day.

So, the entire awards industry is in and of itself a massive distraction that not only gets artists competing with each other, but gets them competing with each other in a way that allows the entertainment industry to also make money off of their competing with each other. It’s spectacular.

John: It really is a remarkable achievement.

Craig: Remarkable achievement.

John: So a thing that’s important to understand is that when you talk about unions they only make sense really when you talk about the fact that there are employers and there’s somebody that you’re negotiating with and against. And so you can negotiate with the studios individually, with the streamers individually, but you tend to negotiate with them as a group. And that group that you’re negotiating with is the AMPTP, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is the Academy, which I got that confused when I first got out here because it seems like they’re two big organizations that run movies and stuff. But AMPTP is the collective body that we negotiate with as unions and guilds for our contract.

And you look at the different kinds of unions and guilds that there are, there’s a wide range. So you have actors, you have writers, you have directors, all of whom are sort of doing kind of intellectual labor, artistic labor. And then you have much more sort of physical crafts and trades peoples. You have grips and electricians and teamsters who are driving trucks. And you have all the other sort of unions that are involved in actual physical production.

And they seem so disparate and yet there are some commonalities, so I wanted to talk through some of the commonalities before we get into sort of why the different unions and guilds are positioned so differently.

Craig: Sure.

John: So what are some common threads, Craig?

Craig: Well, all of us are working gig work. So, typical union jobs you work at let’s say the Ford plant building trucks. That’s your job. Year in and year out, your job, welder on the line. That’s what you do. And you do it at one place for one employer. In Hollywood everyone is essentially freelancing for their entire careers.

So, you’re getting work from movie to movie, from script to script, from edit job to edit job. Everyone is constantly looking for the next thing because our businesses are organized around shows and movies, not around the steady production of a single product, like for instance a Rubik’s Cube.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So we’re not all together on the same floor, nor do we have longevity in a position or vis-à-vis each other or with one product. We’re constantly moving and swirling around.

John: Yeah. And we should say this idea of skilled labor, like welding is a skill and there’s training that goes into it. The same way that somebody who is working as an editor has a certain skillset. A welder has certain skillsets. But that welder is going to probably be working at the Ford plant for years and years and years and years and really has one employer. Versus this editor who is going to be hopping around from various jobs to various jobs. And it’s cobbling together enough money to make a living through many jobs rather than just one job.

There are exceptions, of course. There’s people who have been on TV shows for forever, but in general you’re hopping from place to place to place.

Craig: Yeah. Those are pretty rare. And similarly where somebody that is in a union as a nurse will have the potential ability to work at dozens of different hospitals, clinics, healthcare centers, etc., we’re more like professional athletes who can work for a single organization of teams. And our teams are Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, and Paramount, and their associated television networks and things like that.

John: Yeah. So there’s an oligopoly in the sense that there’s a very limited number of buyers. And so the big names, I don’t know if it’s 75% of employment, they represent a huge amount of the actual employment is to and for those people. So they have a lot of power because they are the buyers of note.

What is interesting about us as writers and which we should get into this is that we are doing work-for-hire. So intellectual property is commissioned from us. The people who are hiring us to do the thing, they ultimately own the copyright. And therefore as writers, as artists, we are an employee of the commissioner. So same with like an artist who is working at Disney animation, they’re drawing stuff but Disney owns everything that they’re drawing for Disney.

Craig: Yeah. And this works against us and it works for us. I mean, the only good part of this and we are unique in this regard here in the United States is that we can be a proper employer, therefore we can have a proper union. And as a result of our proper union we do have certain benefits that are better than some of the benefits that other similar artists receive elsewhere even as they retain copyright in their country. Because these large corporations here are exceptionally good at exploiting reuse. They’re really, really good at it.

Do we get enough of the share of that reuse? As sufficient amount as we should? No. Is the insufficient amount that we get typically more than what other people get in royalties elsewhere? Yeah, it is. So, it’s an interesting thing. We have a tiny piece of a very large pie which sometimes adds up to more than the entire piece of a very tiny, tiny pie. A little miniature molecular pie.

John: And so we talk about residuals and we talk about back-ends on things and that is an important part, especially for writers to maintain a career, but there’s other kind of fundamental union things which are also important. So things like worker safety and safety on a set. These are things that come about because of unions. Minimum hours/maximum hours. Just other sort of quality of life issues that are only possible because we have unions. So, it’s very easy to be myopic and only think about this in terms of how this works for a writer, but unions help everyone in all these different trades.

So let’s talk about the different unions.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, in Europe a lot of these other things that unions do like enforcing safety and things like that the government does.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Our government is less interested in mandating things and so you do find situations where in order to attract production and employment people will just sort of look the other way. I mean, very famously we have a massive problem in our industry with lack of sleep. We know that. There should be a statutory cap on how much you can work, how many hours in a row. And that’s it. No more. We don’t have it. I don’t know what the number is. I don’t know if there is a number.

I’ve worked 20 hour days. I’ve done it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: On set. It was terrible. Because you didn’t have a choice. So, that’s the kind of thing where our unions have to sort of step in where our government has failed.

John: Absolutely. So, things like – that kind of worker safety, but also it’s through unions that we have healthcare. In other countries the healthcare would be a national priority.

Craig: Right.

John: And we don’t have that here. Pensions are also through a union. So these are crucial things that were one sort of strike after strike over the course of time for the different unions.

So let’s talk about what the unions are. There’s SAG/AFTRA, which used to be two separate actor’s unions which then got combined together. They represent actors, but both in film and television and in radio. Other performers under AFTRA, I always get confused sort of what the boundaries were between this. I would say my general impression, and I think Craig alluded to this last episode, is that SAG/AFTRA is often fighting with itself more than it’s fighting the town.

Craig: Yeah. Well, SAG in particular has a long history of kind of the bitter internal feud between I guess you could call them the more militant folks and the more pragmatic folks. Pick your adjective. But they’ve been struggling with that for a long, long time. And that all came to a head when they merged with AFTRA which was something the pragmatists really wanted to do. AFTRA definitely covered things like voiceover work for radio. I could never quite tell exactly how the division worked. But they are combined now.

They are definitely a much larger union than the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild. That said, they don’t have the kind of employment requirements that we do. You don’t become a Writers Guild member for life. I mean, technically you do, but what happens is if you don’t work after a while you become post-current. So you’re still a member of the union but you don’t get any of the benefits. You’re not voting.

John: You’re not going to vote.

Craig: You’re not voting. That’s the big one. You don’t have a say on whether or not for instance a new contract gets approved. You need to have some employment skin in the game for that. Not so with SAG. I believe once you’re a member you’re a member.

John: And that really does change things a lot. SAG has not gone on strike, at least during the time that I’ve been working for here. If SAG were to go on strike it would shut down everything because we have not just actors in dramatic stuff, but all of our hosts in late night. Those are all going to be SAG people. And so it would be a big deal if it happened. It hasn’t happened. Could it happen? Sure. You never know.

Let’s talk about the DGA. So DGA represents directors the same way that the WGA represents writers, but the DGA also represents assistant directors, so the folks who are running – keeping the sets running properly. UPMs, that class of sort of folks who are making sets function is covered by the DGA, which is odd to me. It’s very different from what we’re used to in the WGA.

Craig: Yes. Well in particular because certainly the UPM job and the AD job are not primarily creative positions. They primarily are positions involved with the management of a production. Scheduling. Coordination. Budget. The employment of others. Management. This is going to come up again very quickly when we talk about the WGA and the reason we need to talk about it is because there’s a rule, it’s not a secret, it’s a rule – management is not allowed to be in a union. That’s just a rule. Which makes sense. You know, because if your boss could be in the union then you just get out-voted by a bunch of bosses and then what’s the point of the union?

So what is a manager roughly speaking the way the government defines it is somebody who is directly in charge of the hiring or firing of other employees, or the management of their time and how they do their job. That’s management. Well…

John: You definitely see that in the DGA. You see that in the WGA as we’re going to get to. But you also see it in this next, the biggest of the unions I think, we’re going to talk about which is IATSE. So IATSE is everything else you can imagine that is probably a Hollywood job follows under IATSE. And there are a tremendous number of smaller guilds within IATSE, locals, who specialize in one area of it. So there’s classically the Editors Guild, which is underneath IATSE, and over the last year has had real frustrations with sort of the lack of attention being paid to their specific specialty within there.

Within each of these places, though, you know, you’ll see that there are people who are responsible for hiring for other people. It’s just a thing that necessarily happens where you’re looking at, OK, I’m going to be in charge of this department so I need to fill my ranks. There’s a management function there. So it’s complicated.

Craig: Yeah. I think if you’re talking about sort of foreman type position, that’s acceptable. Some employees have a higher position of authority than others. So, I get that. You know, a pit boss that works for a casino is still an employee. And the dealer is an employee. And the pit boss is looking. But the pit boss is not hiring or firing the dealer.

And in IATSE there’s probably not a ton of situations where there’s specifically – I mean, technically it’s always the producer who is hiring or firing. Sometimes it’s the UPM in the DGA. IATSE is a great example of too much of a good thing. It is – you want a union to be sizable enough that you have collective strength. That’s the value of collective bargaining. If you have a union that represents six people at one Subway, it’s not that great. If you had a union that represents all Subway employees, I mean the sandwich, not the metro, then they can get something done.

IATSE, what they’ve done is conglomerate a lot of unions together because individually there may not be enough say onset painters to have collective strength. But then they create locals and they get bundled together. And then IATSE is the meta bundle of all the bundles. But the problem is that if you’re in one of these smaller locals, like for instance the Animation Guild. You’re just not going to be able to convince IATSE, all 100-and – I don’t know how many people are in it, 100,000? You’re not going to be able to convince all of them to go on strike so that your 30 members can get a slightly better deal. So you’re stuck. And that is not a great arrangement.

John: It is not a great arrangement. And something you’ve often brought up on the show, a somewhat analogous situation, is screenwriters, feature writers, within the WGA. And that folks who primarily write features in the WGA can feel like their issues are not getting as much attention as TV writers who are the bulk of the membership of the WGA. That’s changing now and there’s – obviously people do a lot more of both. You are now a TV writer. But it’s a genuine concern. And so you’re always having these conflicting instincts to broaden your base so that you can represent more kinds of people and sort of protect yourself. And to specialize so you can really focus on your core constituencies.

And there’s not going to be a great answer for that. You know, we often will talk about videogame writing is very much like screenwriting. There’s clear analogs between how those work. And maybe we should represent and protect videogame writing because that is clearly going to become something that is like animation. We want to make sure we don’t miss out on that.

But, are we going to do the best job representing those videogame writers? Is it pulling focus away? There’s a lot of writing that happens in reality shows. Not just where you aim the camera, but also all the narration. Shouldn’t all that writing be covered by the WGA? Sure. Maybe. But are we going to lose focus in trying to organize that work? So it’s always tough. It’s always going to be decisions and conflicts.

Craig: Yeah. And we’re hamstrung a bit by the law, again. For instance, we can’t necessarily compel union membership for people that are working in Canada. In fact, we can’t at all because they’re not here and jurisdiction sort of stops at the border. So, in videogames there are a lot of people, a lot of companies, that are foreign, international, and they’re not American. And there are a lot of writers that are working overseas. Also the entire videogame industry is vigilantly anti-union. So, one of the tricky things is to try and crack into those places is you’ve got a company where there are 400 people, all of whom would love to be in the union and they’ve all been told you can’t be. And they can’t. And then somebody else comes along and says, “We’re going to successfully unionize four of you.” That becomes hard to do.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And then there’s suddenly a ton of resentments and difficulties and problems. So, they just cracked down on all of it. They are brutally anti-union. And this, again, is why the more strength and pro-union impact you can have at the governmental level, and it has to be the federal level. They’re the only ones. This is all federal. If you get that federal level then some of these things start to tilt your way. If you don’t, running up hill in shoes made of ice.

John: The last sort of evergreen issue I want to make sure we talk about is that we usually think of unions representing the minimums. Basically trying to raise the minimums and protect the people at the bottom. Basically to set a floor on things. And that they’re not especially focused on what we’ll call above scale. So scale being the minimum you could pay somebody. Above scale being whatever beyond that. So much of the work that happens in the WGA is above scale. It’s beyond sort of scale payments. And Craig mentioned earlier in professional sports the player’s unions are sort of similar in position to us in that they are going to set minimums, but most of the members are working way above that and are going to have issues that are not the same as the lowest members. And there’s a natural conflict there. I mean, the degree to which you’re focusing on those bottom line issues for people making scale versus people above scale. And it’s challenging to balance those two demands.

Craig: It’s made more difficult by the fact that a number of the people in the Writers Guild who are making a lot of money are management. They just are. Showrunners who are hiring and firing other writers. They’re management. And so the Writers Guild is engaged in kind of an interesting dance. It comes more powerful vis-à-vis the companies by representing those powerful members of management, showrunners. And in theory that increased leverage helps them get more stuff for everyone. I don’t know if that’s true though. [laughs] So, it’s an interesting thing. And it does create kind of weird situations where you’ve got very wealthy people coming out there and saying things like, “Everybody needs to strike.” And you look at them and go, “That’s not a problem for you. You could strike for the rest of your life. You’re fine.”

There are tensions within our union because of the vast disparity of income which is even wider – well, I don’t know if it’s wider than the overall income disparity in our country, but it’s up there. I mean, we have writers that are scratching by and barely earning the right to have healthcare and making maybe $40,000 in a year gross. And then we have writers who are making $70 million in a year. So hard to hold that ship together perfectly, or even well.

John: Yeah. It’s an ongoing challenge. And it’s kind of always been this challenge. And it’s probably only accelerating. But let’s talk about the WGA because it’s also important to remind everybody that there’s actually two WGAs. So there’s the Writers Guild of America West and then there’s the Writers Guild of America East. They’re technically separate unions. They are sister unions. And luckily, thank god, we get along really, really well. We haven’t always gotten along really well.

I’ve been lucky to be on two negotiating committees within this last year and honestly Zoom makes it so much easier for everybody to be on the same conversation. Because traditionally what would happen is the WGA West handles all of the negotiations for the film and TV contracts. So we deal with the AMPTP and the WGA East basically takes that deal and their members vote yes on the deal.

Usually what would happen is that several representatives from the WGA East would come out and sit in on all these negotiation sessions and say, yes, great, and that would be it. Or raise their concerns about specific things that are of concerns to the East members. In these last negotiations we had a full contingent of East folks who were in all of those Zooms and were participating and that was great. So I think things are closer than they’ve ever been. But it’s important to understand they are different unions and they are kind of representing different priorities.

Theoretically any member of the West could also be a member of the East. But the East also represents. They’ve done a lot more organizing in online writing. So, organizing websites that have writers and they’re going through and representing those writers, which is great but also very different and I don’t know on the West side whether we’d want – it becomes an issue of how broad do you go. Would they be a good fit in the West? I don’t know.

Craig: I don’t understand this anymore. [laughs] It’s pointless. This exists literally because it exists. It’s just – it started–

John: It’s just because of history.

Craig: Yeah. Because of history. But it has long outlived its actual practical purpose. To the point where the Writers Guild West processes residuals for all Writers Guild West and East members, mails the checks to the Writers Guild East for them to just put in Writers Guild East envelopes and mail to their members. We are done to that amount of silliness. And the arcane nature of how the council and the board vote, it all is an unnecessary – what do you call it? Cruft? If that what it is in code? It’s organizational cruft. There shouldn’t be a West or an East. There should just be the WGA.

John: Yeah. So traditional arguments against it is that what I said in terms of East actually represents some kinds of writers that are not sort of classically West writers. And, yes, West represents some news folks too, but I don’t know that we do an especially good job of that. Traditionally it’s been like, well, how do you have national meetings? How do you actually have somebody – basically you can’t get everyone in a room together. In the age of Zoom it’s become much less important. And so the fact that none of these people have been in rooms for a long time, maybe it’s less important than it’s ever been before.

It’s hard to do that sort of on the ground work and have the meetings and do the stuff with membership when people are spread hither and yon. But it’s probably more possible – it is more possible now than it’s ever been before to conceive of some unification. But to me I would say having been on the board recently and been through this last bit of negotiations, it’s just not a giant priority for me. It’s I think a lower priority for me than it is for you.

Craig: It will remain a low priority until there’s a problem. And there have been problems and there will be problems again. And that’s when it will become – this has to be solved. We have writers all over the country. Basically if you’re west of the Mississippi you go to the West. If you’re east you go to the East. You’re right. You can switch. You can’t be in both at the same time. But you could switch. And it’s all just – we have two award ceremonies running simultaneously.

John: It’s goofy.

Craig: It’s just dumb. It’s dumb. And there’s duplication. We have two executive directors. Why? And sometimes it actually does cause problems when, for instance, in credit administration. If you are in a credit arbitration with a writer from the East there is a chance that the East may handle the arbitration instead of the West. Well what’s the difference? Well, there is I believe one lawyer on the staff of the Writers Guild East. There are about 12 lawyers just in the credits department of the Writers Guild West, all of whom are the ones that essentially take the lead on all of the negotiation, arbitration, and enforcement of credit rules with the companies. You want those guys running the arbitration because that’s what they do.

John: You want the cardiac surgeon who has done 100 of them rather than the first one.

Craig: And it just – let’s just fold it all together. You can have two. If you need an office over there, like people go to a physical office anymore. I mean, all that stuff is going away. So it would be ideal to solve this before it becomes a problem again. Because the actuality is when you look at the constitutions of the Writers Guild West and East, if the East wanted to cause a major problem it can. It has a way to do that. It hasn’t in a long time, happily. But it would be nice to get rid of it. Pointless.

John: Yeah. Last thing I probably should have stressed earlier in this conversation is that a frequent question I get is how do I join the Writers Guild. Or how do I join the Screen Actors Guild or anything.

Craig: Fill out this form.

John: It’s actually one of those amazing things where you don’t have to do anything.

Craig: They’ll find you.

John: They will find you. Once you’re hired to work on a project that is union-covered you will be required to join that union. A certain requirement has to be met. But you can’t join until you have to join and then you have to join and then you’re in. That’s really the simple explanation for it.

Craig: They will hunt you down. And one of the reasons they hunt you down is because when you become a member of the Writers Guild you are required to become a member of the Writers Guild. And therefore you’re required to send them quite a fat check for initiation. So, believe me, they get you. You’ll know. You’ll know. Congrats. Surprise.

John: Yup. All right. So that’s a quick overview. There’s obviously a lot more we could talk about with the guilds and the unions, but I want to make sure that we get some more time to resolve the mystery of the sticky fingers.

Craig: Mm, OK.

John: Not sticky, I should stress. Sweet, not sticky.

Craig: Sweet. Not sticky. Sweet. So, I was sort of getting close when I was talking about potentially some sort of hair product. So my theory is that you’re touching something that has that smell on it and it is transferring, but it’s happening while you’re sleeping. And I’ve already investigated the bedding, the begging material. It’s not that. It’s not your mouth guard. It’s not any sort of skincare product, as far as I can tell.

John: Going back, it is a skincare product. That’s the distinction. But none of the skincare products smell like that.

Craig: Oh, interesting. So perhaps there is a skincare product that when exposed to the air oxidizes and turns into a different smell.

John: That is essentially what has happened. That is the answer to the mystery. And so it is this facial moisturizer I put on. It’s like the last thing I put on at night. And it doesn’t have any smell at all. But somehow overnight it has like vitamin C in it or something. That changes – basically I don’t wash my hands afterwards because it’s just moisturizer. And the chemical reaction that happens is it smells sweet in the morning.

And so I was able to test this out by – that was my theory – and so what I tried is like, OK, I’m going to put this stuff on but I’m going to put it on with like a Q-Tip and not actually touch it. And so I tried that for two nights and then I went back to using my fingers. And that is exactly what is happening. It’s a chemical reaction to the moisturizer I’m putting on before bedtime.

Craig: Right. I have never done that.

John: Yeah.

Craig: No.

John: It’s important to moisturize.

Craig: Everyone says that. Everyone says it. I’m not going to do it. You know I’m not going to do it.

John: You’re not going to do it. You’re just not going to do it.

Craig: No.

John: No.

Craig: I come from a long line of men that just stupidly don’t care about the largest organ in their body. It’s the skin.

John: Craig, can I ask you a question about sleeping? Because we played D&D till pretty late last night. And then I know you had to take your puppy out to pee. And yet when I look on Twitter like you were up hours before I was. So I worry are you sleeping enough?

Craig: Sometimes I am. And sometimes I’m not. And it’s really weird. So I didn’t have to wake up that early. I had my alarm set for a bit later. And I just happened to wake up that early. Sometimes when I wake up earlier than I should I don’t feel tired. And I’m fine. Right now I don’t feel particularly tired. I’ll probably sleep longer tonight.

There are sometimes where I get like eight hours and the alarm wakes me up at eight hours and I feel like I could sleep another 20 hours and I’m miserable. It’s really weird. I can’t quite explain it. But, yeah, I only slept I would say four hours last night.

John: Yeah. That would not be enough for me.

Craig: It’s just natural. Yeah, it’s weird. Normally I would be a zombie, but I don’t know. Coasting on adrenaline.

John: One of the tweets that I saw recently from you was about D&D alignments as pertaining to crossword puzzles. And so what I saw in your tweet from January 17 was you can imagine like a Tic-Tac-Toe grid and in it was different layouts of crossword puzzles and they’re identified as being lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. And so it was a meme that you were sharing.

And I want to talk quickly about D&D alignment charts and that idea of the nine kinds of alignments and whether they have any relevance to the work that you and I do as writers.

Craig: Sure. So the classic breakdown in Dungeons & Dragons is there are three general axes of goodness. There’s good, there’s neutral, and there’s evil. So that’s kind of your moral approach. You are a person that is – you believe in some sort of moral positivity, you just don’t care, or you’re just actually evil. And then those are divided into kind of ordering mechanisms. There’s lawful, neutral, and chaotic. So, lawful, you tend to follow some sort of rigid code. Neutral, you sort of make decisions on the fly as you need to. And chaotic, you don’t follow any rhyme or reason. You’re all over the place. And you can apply those to any of those. So there’s lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. Lawful neutral, true neutral, which is neutral-neutral, and chaotic neutral. And then lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil.

John: And so classically you see that arranged as a Tic-Tac-Toe grid where true neutral is the center square.

Craig: Right.

John: And so my first exposure to I think morality or sort of the concept of regimented morality was in fifth grade playing D&D for the first time and seeing this alignment chart, which I don’t know that it pre-dated Gary Gygax and the original D&D or not, but it was my introduction to this idea of systemic kind of morality and approaches to these things. And we’ll put links in the show notes to a bunch of different memes about Arrested Development or Marvel, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, looking at that grid with classic characters from those mythologies and how they would fit into that grid. And it’s useful to some degree I guess. But I wanted to talk about sort of what’s good about it and sort of the pros and the cons of it.

I guess for me it’s useful to distinguish between approaches to a problem as a hero, so lawful good versus chaotic good. I can see the differences there. And imagining a lawful evil, like a really organized orderly evil versus a pure chaotic evil can be helpful. And so I think as I’m approaching my own writing to some degree I’m aware of that as an approach. I’m never – in no character breakdown have I ever written like somebody is lawful good for a screenplay. But it is somewhat useful as a framing device if you’re thinking of a character’s approach. What would you say?

Craig: I probably get – the only use I get out of it other than entertainment when somebody breaks down a show that I love into these characters. It’s the Game of Thrones alignment chart. Who’s in what? But I do think that it’s good if you find yourself feeling like you’re stuck between two easy, obvious polls and you can go, oh, this is just like a good guy or a bad guy. Well, it’s good to think in these terms and think about what would happen if – what does it mean to be chaotic neutral? And what would happen to my character if I took away their sense of morality? I didn’t make them evil. I didn’t make them good. I just made them not care. What would happen if my bad guy didn’t really follow a code, but also wasn’t a lunatic. And these things are interesting.

Look, the classic boring ones are lawful good, which is just like–

John: Dudley Do-Right.

Craig: Yeah. Superman. Lawful good. And then chaotic evil is just a monster like a wolf-man running around and biting people. It’s chaotic evil. But then you have these really interesting ones like chaotic good. And lawful evil. And true neutral, which is very rare. So it’s fun to kind of challenge yourself a little bit if you feel like you’re stuck. But, I mean, it’s a pretty blunt tool. I wouldn’t go too far.

John: It’s a pretty blunt tool. We’ve talked before about the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. And this is really kind of a version of that. Because like the Myers-Briggs you’re looking at two polls and sort of putting people on a spectrum between these two polls. And grouping them together in ways that sort of feel like, OK, if someone were lawful but they’re also good this is what the characters would be like. But you can really do that for any qualities that have two polls. Anywhere there’s a spectra of how they could come out. So you could look at this in terms of like how much is this person a planner versus an improviser? Are they serious or are they funny? Are they warm versus cold? Introverted versus extroverted?

You can really take any two opposites there and look at where a character is on that scale and as you combine the other things you kind of feel what they’re like. But I do just worry, even going back to eight sequence structure, it can just become a lot of busywork, a lot of ticking of boxes that’s not actually doing the work about what is making that character interesting, distinctive, and specific to this story.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, in the end if you can neatly fit a character perfectly into one of those boxes then they’re not a person. They’re a box.

John: Yeah. Yeah. I would say the last thing that’s been helpful for me thinking about alignment or these opposites is that it’s useful – once you’ve figured out who your hero is, who your protagonist is, thinking about who the polar opposite of that character is can be really helpful in terms of thinking about your villain, your antagonist. What is it about that antagonist that is uniquely challenging to that protagonist? And that can be a useful starting place for thinking about who is the person to put opposite your hero.

All right. We have time for a few short questions. Let’s invite Megana Rao, our producer, on to ask some questions that our listeners have sent in. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

Megana Rao: OK. So Adrianne from LA asks, “These days every company has its own streaming service that exclusively exhibits its content. Disney has Disney+. Apple has AppleTV+. And now Netflix creates originals not shown anywhere else. How is this not a modern day violation of the Paramount decrees? And how does this all factor in with the termination of the Paramount decrees? Please help me understand. I’m so confused.”

John: Yeah. So it’s a separate piece of that. The Paramount consent decrees are about studios owning movie theaters. Basically said that the studios were not allowed to own movie theaters. That’s going to go away and studios are going to buy the movie theaters. That’s kind of inevitable.

What you’re describing, Adrianne, is a little closer to Fin-Syn which was the change in the ‘80s I’m guessing that allowed for networks–

Craig: I think so.

John: ‘90s? When was it?

Craig: I think it was the late ‘80s or possibly early ‘90s. Yeah.

John: Regardless, there was a time in which NBC could not own its own programming. They basically had to buy from somebody else. That changed. And that’s kind of more like what we’re talking about here. A form of vertical integration. I think it’s not great. But it’s where we’re at.

Craig: Yeah. So Fin-Syn or financial syndication laws were why networks licensed their shows. So the way network television used to work is a studio like say Paramount would produce a show like Star Trek. And Star Trek cost a whole lot of money to make. And the network that showed Star Trek would pay Paramount a license fee per episode of some amount to run that show in Primetime, or syndication, or whatever.

And, if you could make enough of those then you could rerun them and that’s where you make all your money, and so on and so forth. And then for the network their whole game was pay out less in licensing than they take in in advertising. That was how that business worked. It has not worked that way in decades. John is absolutely right. Fin-Syn is what you’re thinking of here.

Paramount decrees really just referred to the brick and mortar buildings where they show movies and obviously that’s also gone. So, hopefully that helps you understand. Basically imagine all the possible barriers there could be and then get rid of them all. There you go. That’s what we got.

John: Yup. Megana, what have you got for us next?

Megana: So Tara asks, “My script made the Black List, got me agents, and several generals, and we’re finally getting a little heat. I’ve been writing in my free time for 20 years, but the business end of this is all new to me at 46 years old. My team is brilliant, but here’s my question for you and Craig. We’re trying to build a package. We may be close to getting the perfect lead attached. And the perfect director is tentatively interested. Hopefully I’ve got meetings with them in the next few weeks. What should I ask them and what can I expect them to ask me?”

John: Great. First off, Tara, congratulations. That’s awesome that you’re getting this together.

Craig: Good job.

John: And I’m guessing this is a feature that you’re putting together. I mean, it could be a limited series. It could be a TV pilot. But when we say a package, don’t worry or mistake the idea of a packaging fee, the kind of thing we’ve been fighting against for in the WGA. A package is a grouping of great bits of talent together to make this thing attractive to buyers. So it’s awesome this is happening for you.

Those questions when you’re talking to a big actor or director is sort of what attracts them to the project. What are they excited about? What are the questions they have for you? What is it about their previous work that you have questions about? Talk about the thing you’re hoping to make. Talk about the sort of – just get a sense of whether this is a shared vision for things. That’s the most crucial thing is to feel like what is it going to be like working with this person.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I just want to point out that if I were on your team I would – this is a great sentence. My team is brilliant, and you can see them sort of sitting up straighter in their chairs. But here’s my question for you and Craig. And then they’d go, oh, dammit. You know, there is no special questions. There’s no secret handshake. I don’t know what they’re going to ask you. Because sometimes they ask great questions and sometimes they ask terrible questions.

I can’t tell if you’re talking about a feature or if you’re talking about a movie – it feels like you’re talking about a movie. So a lot of times with movies the directors barely want to even acknowledge that you are a human in the room, which is terrible, but true. And I hate that.

So, just have the conversation. And if you have the ability to decide in some way, to help decide who is getting this and who is doing it, then have the conversation and then just check your gut after. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the person that you’re going into business with, if you have any control over it, agrees with you about what this is, and what the tone is, and why it’s good. And if they don’t, then they’re not the perfect lead or director. That’s kind of what you’re about to find out.

John: Yeah. And that’s a longer conversation. Maybe we should put that on the list. What do you do when there’s a person who is circling your thing who you don’t really like? And I’ve been in Tara’s situation where there’s been a director and it’s like, ugh, how do you shake that person away without burning bridges? It can be challenging. So maybe we’ll ask Megana to put that on the list for follow up, because getting rid of somebody you don’t want is sometimes harder than attracting the person you do want.

Craig: True, true.

John: Megana, thank you for these questions. I see there’s a whole bunch more we have on the Workflowy, so thank you to all the listeners who sent in questions. Anything more you want to share, Megana?

Megana: No, I think that’s great. Thanks guys.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is type related. So, the New York Times has banner headlines occasionally for really big things. One of them was recently Trump Impeached and Trump Impeached Again. When you have letters that are next to each other you have to sometimes worry about how those letters are bumping into each other. In the case of impeached, when you have that uppercase, the E and the A next to each other looks kind of weird. There’s actually a lot of space. And so you’ll do some kerning to try to get those things a little bit closer. But then if they bump it feels weird.

So I’m going to link to an article that goes through the New York Times’ decision to build a special ligature, a special combination EA for headline situations where those capital letters are showing up next to each other so it forms one kind of letter glyph. And ligatures are pretty common in type overall. You’ll see them a lot with FL or FFL. There’s special combinations for those things because otherwise the letters would bump together in weird ways. I love ligatures and so I loved this little article explaining how and why they created a special EA for the word “impeached.”

Craig: Impeached. I also see they used it in Biden Beats Trump.

John: Yeah. Special.

Craig: Biden Beats Trump.

John: Feels nice.

Craig: I just like the sound of it. Thank you, John. My One Cool Thing this week is a website called Wordlisted from a gentleman named Adam Aaronson. There are a few resources on the Internet that allow you to – well, they give you a little bit of a helping hand if you are constructing a puzzle, and they can certainly give you a very big helping hand if you’re trying to solve a puzzle. And I probably cited some of them before like One Look for instance.

This one is quite the Swiss Army knife. First of all, it allows you to upload your own dictionary. And you’re like, what, I don’t have a dictionary. Well, a lot of puzzle folks create word lists. So, some terms that may have not made it into the dictionary or phrases, for instance, that they can sort of add on to the regular dictionary. And then you have all sorts of options doing simple pattern searches where question marks are missing letters and asterisks are missing strings of letters. There’s anagrams. Hidden anagrams where if you need to figure out, take the word MATE, how many words have an anagram of MATE inside of it. So, “steamed” for instance would be an example of that.

There’s letter banks where you put in eight letters and it tells you all the letters that come from just using those letters, with repeaters. There’s sandwich words. There’s replacements. Deletions. Prefixes. Suffixes. Consonancy. Consonancy is when two words have the same order of consonants but the vowels are different. Of course, there are palindromes.

And it’s all sortable by length or by alphabet. It’s a wonderful tool. And it’s free. So, thank you, Adam Aaronson. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. So you can find this. Wordlisted. We’ll throw a link in the show notes for you. But if you’re listening at home it’s Aaronson, that’s with two As. Aaronson.org/wordlisted.

John: Very nice. And right underneath that link we’ll also put a link to Rhyme Zone which is a thing I use as a writer all the time and I think it’s the best online rhyming dictionary. And so if you need to rhyme something, a very good tool for that.

As we wrap up, I need to give a special shout out to Megan McDonnell, our former Scriptnotes producer, who has her first produced credit this week. So episode three of Wandavision, the Marvel show that I think is just delightful, has a nice little credit that says Megan McDonnell, because she wrote it. So we’re very, very proud of Megan and–

Craig: Well, you know what? That’s your first credit. That’s a big deal.

John: Yeah. It’s awesome. First of many credits to come. So, congratulations to her.

Craig: No question.

John: Scriptnotes is currently produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week, and thank you so much for people sending in outros, this new one is by Malakai Bisel. It’s great. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re going to talk about right after this on QAnon.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: And we’re back. So James in New Zealand wrote in to say, “It’s been reported that one of the top QAnon influencers is a ‘failed Hollywood screenwriter.’ That started me pondering two things. One, what is a failed screenwriter? Most of us, present company included, have failed in some aspect of screenwriting. Two, do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? At its core it’s about writing a compelling story. I’m wondering if there’s a Save the Cat template for conspiracy theories.”

So, Craig, the confluence of things in our lives. So, many, many years ago there was a guy named Script Shadow who was a thorn in our collective sides, well before the podcast even started I think. But the QAnon guy is not the guy who is this guy, but there’s relations. Basically Script Shadow had reviewed one of these guys’ scripts and they sort of knew each other, the QAnon guy. And another listener wrote in with a longer explanation of sort of the history behind all this stuff.

I am not at all surprised that some of the QAnon folks are aspiring screenwriters.

Craig: Me neither. And this guy apparently was kind of haunting Franklin Leonard for a while on social media because he didn’t do well on the Black List. It’s not like Franklin sits there just digging into screenplays one by one and adjusting the scores and giggling. He doesn’t do that.

So, this was a grouchy guy that wasn’t getting the pat on the head that he thought he deserved, which is something that entitled people have in common. And so question number one. What is a failed screenwriter? I don’t know. I think if you abandon screenwriting, if you wanted to try and be a screenwriter and it didn’t work out and you didn’t get paid, or you got paid once and never again, and you leave it, then your attempts to have a kind of ongoing career as a screenwriter have failed. And that’s most screenwriters. I mean, honestly most people out there are failed screenwriters if they’ve written a script. Because very few screenwriters are able to kind of keep that going. It’s unfortunate. That’s the way it is.

Do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? No. Here’s the thing. I’m not surprised that a guy that was struggling to be a successful screenwriter was not struggling to be a successful conspiracy theorist because conspiracy theories are by definition overly complicated, pointlessly involved, illogical explanation of simple things. They are the opposite of elegant.

We are always trying to create elegant plotting that is simple, and compelling, and there’s not a lot of like weird rules stacked on top of each other of why this thing actually doesn’t work this way, but really this way. And that’s all these conspiracy theories. They’re terrible screenplays.

When you look at the QAnon screenplay for what’s going on you go, “Wait, what? That’s terrible. That’s just bad writing. That’s not how humans are. It’s not how organizations work. It’s not how anybody behaves. This is ridiculous. Ridiculous.”

Every single one of these conspiracy theories fails the “yeah, but why” test. Like, oh, didn’t you get it. There’s 17 flags behind him and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. But why? What does that actually achieve? Nothing. Nothing! Oh my god.

John: So, Craig, you’re saying that a screenwriter wouldn’t be great at creating conspiracy theories, but a screenwriting guru, or a wannabe aspiring screenwriter guru, that does feel like the sweet spot. And that’s apparently who this person really was.

So this is a person who was not successful as a screenwriter but then ended up setting up a website about how to make it in Hollywood. Basically giving all his tips. And that feels like such a great connection there.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Because you’ve discerned a pattern for success and you’ve broken the code of Hollywood and now you’re going to expose the real secrets within it.

Craig: Grift. Utter grift.

John: And that feels exactly – yeah, but grift and self-delusion are all part and parcel with a conspiracy theory.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: It’s an elaborate mythology that you’re building and that you have the actual secret for seeing past the illusion.

Craig: Well, the level of either self-delusion or just outright, just shamelessness required to, A, not succeed at something, and then, B, subsequently take people’s money to inform them how to succeed at the thing you could not succeed at is mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.

So I looked at a couple of the articles and I saw the nature of the way this guy would post things. And it was terrible. It was just a lot of “don’t you get it.” A lot of these aimless questions. Like, “You might have missed it. Don’t you get it? Think about this.” Just open-ended.

You know, like when people accuse a television series of not being accountable to its own stuff, like it starts to make up mysteries and rules and things and then it never actually pays them off. And that’s bad. That’s all this stuff is. It’s literally like you never got anywhere. I mean, there are people who have been, I hope, that a lot of the people who were caught up in this silly cult now understand, OK, that’s what it was. And I hope that they didn’t lose too much money. I hope that they didn’t lose too many people in their lives and family members. I hope that they didn’t hurt anybody. I hope that they can just gently return to sanity. They deserve the right to return to sanity.

But now that they’re hopefully able to see they can see that this was just a ridiculous game of Lucy pulling an imaginary football away from Charlie Brown day after day after day.

John: I think who I’m angriest at are the people who clearly didn’t believe any of it, but were using it to maximize – the Ted Cruzes. Who clearly doesn’t believe a single bit of it.

Craig: Of course not.

John: But is using it, the furor over it, to advance his own aims. That drives me crazy. I want to both be able to punish him and provide a ramp back to normal society for the folks who got caught up in it like it was Lost. And didn’t understand this is not actual reality. And I’m curious to figure out what are the best ways to get people re-involved in a normal functioning society and feeling like what they do matters because it actually does matter.

To me it feels like them volunteering at a soup kitchen a couple Sundays in a row might get them thinking about the world outside of them that’s beyond their screens. I don’t know.

Craig: Well, you know, people got stuck in their homes. And they were frustrated. And they were afraid. And they were being fed a fascinating story. Obviously they were inclined to want to believe it. I don’t think anybody who has been voting for the Democratic Party their whole lives was suddenly grabbed hold of by Q and went, “Oh, wait, hold on a second.” The willful manipulators, the crooked Bible-thumping fake preachers are always going to make us angrier, always, with their deceit and their nonsense which is so blatantly tuned to earn them money.

A lot of the leaders of this Q movement were selling Q merchandise. And their platforms were monetized on YouTube. And Facebook. And Google and Facebook should not only be ashamed, but they’re the ones who need to do the penance. They’re the ones who have screwed us.

But, yeah, this QAnon guy, that’s perfect, isn’t it? Freaking screen guru selling consultation fee sessions while he’s also just – he’s like, here, let me go ahead and grift you like this, and with my other hand I’m going to grift these people like this, because I’m bad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Oh god.

John: Sorry. We can’t always be hopeful. But, yeah.

Craig: Ugh. Ugh.

John: Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Thanks, John.

 

Links:

• Ballard C Boyd for Stephen Colbert’s show Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube
• Hollywood’s Unions Celebrate Inauguration Of President Joe Biden & VP Kamala Harris: “Most Pro-Union President” & “Partner In The White House” by David Robb
• Biden Gave Trump’s Union Busters a Taste of Their Own Medicine by Mark Joseph Stern
• Impeached Ligature EA
• Wordlisted by Adam Aaronson
• Rhyme Zone
• Wandavision check out episode 3, written by Megan McDonnell!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Malakai Bisel (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.