Scriptnotes Transcript

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 281 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Except not today, because today on the podcast we’re not going to be talking about screenwriting at all. Rather, we’re going to be looking at the practice of homeopathy and what it can teach us about how narrative shapes belief.

Craig, are you ready? Are you set?

**Craig:** I’ve been looking forward to this. Of course. Like beyond. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, my whole life.

**John:** And so much have you potentized your umbrage on this topic?

**Craig:** It’s weaponized. I’m bringing weaponized umbrage today. Yeah.

**John:** Yes. And you do that by diluting your umbrage down, so it’s just infinitesimally small.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But then that makes it much more powerful.

**Craig:** Yeah. By having no umbrage whatsoever, my umbrage will be that much more effective.

**John:** It’s going to be great. So, let’s talk about what homeopathy is, just so we’re defining our terms properly. So, homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine. It’s based around the idea of like cures like. That is that a condition can be treated by use of a substance that is similar to it, or creates similar symptoms. So, a practitioner of homeopathy is called a homeopath. And they create treatments through the process of homeopathic dilution, which is what we were referring to right there, where substances are repeatedly diluted which is believed to increase their potency.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, Craig, how much did you know about the history of homeopathy before we started this episode?

**Craig:** I knew a bunch, because I was pre-med, so you tend to study the history of medicine. I took a great class in college called The History of Medicine, which was wonderful. And also I grew up in New York and then New Jersey and Hahnemann – there’s still a very large Hahnemann Medical Center in Philadelphia. And so I knew the name Hahnemann. And quickly came to learn how stupid everything he believed was. [laughs]

And I’ve always been this way. I’ve always felt like this strange person walking the earth who doesn’t understand why so many people believe things that are just absurd. And so I naturally gravitate towards them to learn about them.

**John:** Absolutely. So we originally were going to have this as part of our fact and fiction episode, where we were talking about courtroom stuff and other sort of weird, like hospital things, and like we had so much to say about homeopathy that we couldn’t fit it all into one episode. So, this is going to be the full-on – this is the tasting menu, everything you could possibly eat about homeopathy will be in this episode.

So, let’s dig in. Let’s start with the history of homeopathy, because I knew almost nothing until I started researching it this morning.

So, some of the ideas behind homeopathy go back a very long time. That sense of what can make a man ill can also make them healthier, so that goes back to sort of prehistoric times, but very early sort of philosophers talking about how the body works. Granted, they didn’t have a great sense of how the body worked overall, but there was that sense of like, oh, you have a little bit of this thing which will make you feel better because it’s like that thing.

So, that goes back a very long ways, but the guy you were referencing, Samuel Hahnemann, was the guy who sort of came up with the term of homeopathy and is really the mastermind, if you want to say mastermind, behind the whole “science” – air quotes – of homeopathy. So, talk us through sort of where he came from and sort of what is guiding principles were.

**Craig:** Well, Hahnemann was German and his belief was that small things that were similar to the diseases that they might treat could work. So, if you were suffering from a disease that was caused by – let’s say like for instance malaria, that was a famous one. Then, if you could find some substance that caused the same symptoms as malaria, but just give people tiny amounts of it, that should kill malaria. There’s actually no reason to believe this whatsoever. None.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It is essentially the ultimate begging of the question. They just decided that it was true. And then went from there. Now, in defense of Samuel Hahnemann, who was working in the 18th and 19th Century, no one knew a damn thing back then. No one. They were really struggling.

**John:** This is the era of bloodletting and leaches. Medicine, as such, was pretty barbaric. And so when you approach something with like, oh, I’m going to approach this with “scientific rigor” – air quotes again – it seems very impressive because it seems like you are trying to really suss out the origins of the problem. So, what you said about malaria, this actually fits into – he was translating a book by William Cullen, and Cullen had sort of cited that Peruvian bark, this cinchona, was useful in treating malaria. And he said it was because of its bitter and astringent properties. And so when Hahnemann was doing the translation of this book, he made a big footnote saying like, oh, it’s not just that. It’s because it caused symptoms similar to the disease it was treating. So, literally in doing the translation he sort of changed the translation to say, oh, it’s not just this bark is useful. It’s useful for exactly these reasons.

It turns out that the bark was useful because it had quinine in it. And so quinine cures malaria. But he was making a leap of logic to say like this is the reason why these things are working.

**Craig:** Yeah. This period of time, it’s somewhat tragic, because Hahnemann dies in the 1840s, but as you get into the second half of the 19th Century, suddenly things start to turn. And that’s when you get Louis Pasteur. And that’s when you get this enormous explosion of proper science dealing with microbes and disease. And that’s also where you start to find vaccinations come into play. And some people might think, well, this is a little bit like vaccinations. It’s not. It’s not at all like vaccinations.

Vaccinations are – the science behind vaccination is to take something that causes a disease directly and then weaken it and give the body a small amount of that weakened version so that it can create an immunity to that without suffering from the effects. Homeopathy is about finding things that cause the same symptoms and then saying, oh, that will cure it.

Or, as we’ll see as it develops, taking things that maybe cause a problem and giving you an amount that is essentially not really there.

He is a victim of the time he was in. No such excuse for the people who believe in this baloney today.

**John:** Yeah. So, what Hahnemann was doing, he set out to do his provings, and by provings, it’s not that he was testing the validity of his underlying premise. It was really basically just saying like, well, what are some things that cause similar symptoms? And basically he was looking for and testing on his family and everyone else around him what can I give you that’s going to cause these symptoms, because if it causes these symptoms then I can use it to treat diseases that sort of have the same symptoms. And so he was gathering up all this “research” – again, air quotes – putting together his findings, and his complete overview was called The Organon of the Healing Art, which was originally 1810.

First off, The Organon is just a great title.

**Craig:** Amazing, right?

**John:** The sixth version, which came out in 1921, is still used by homeopaths today. So, that’s where he introduced the concept of miasms, which are infectious principals underlying chronic diseases.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** And so we can see what he’s doing here. He basically – he has a postulate. He has this idea, but rather than trying to prove this idea, he just sort of builds from hit, and builds this whole big system on top of this idea without ever trying to prove the underlying idea. And sort of when he has to come up for an explanation for things, he invents new words. And in inventing new words, he also invents new words for things that already exist. And so traditional medicine he calls allopathic medicine, which is sort of used pejoratively for all that other sort of normal stuff that isn’t the real good homeopathic stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s not enough to come up with a principle and then instead of testing the principle for truth simply just start exploring things that might help you further the cause of your principle, you also had to demonize everything else because of this competitive sense that there must be an answer. And this is really the stuff of cult or religion. You begin with an article of faith. Everything that you pursue begs the question that the faith is true. And other practices that question your faith are bad. It’s just straight up religious.

**John:** It is. And also along those lines, you need to have an opponent. And that opponent can’t just be a passive thing that’s out there. So, it’s one thing to call everyone out there who was doing the normal medicine allopathy, but you have to have someone who is actively against you. And that became the medical establishment. The growing medical establishment that says no, no, no, this is not actually real; what you’re doing does not actually work.

And so early 20th Century popularity of homeopathy began to wane. There was this report called the Flexner Report, which is an evaluation of medical schools, and found that the schools teaching homeopathy were lacking. Medicine itself had become less barbaric. We talked about Louis Pasteur. We have the dawn of microscopes. We have the ability to look inside and see what’s actually causing disease. And what’s causing disease does not seem to be these underlying miasms. It was actually something visible now with modern technology.

So, by 1950, there’s no homeopathic colleges in the US. There were estimates of only 50 to 150 practicing homeopathic physicians in the US. And a lot of those practitioners were older because they had started at an earlier age. And so for a while it looked like it was going out. And then it came back.

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit like measles.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. Funny how that works. An idea that roars back into life. So, not just in the US, but Great Britain, and in France, India, you see homeopathy in lots of places worldwide. I see it when I go into the pharmacy in France. It is a thing that has come back roaring. And there’s not good science behind it then or not good science behind it now.

There’s actually a lot of good science around it now, but it’s all sort of negative. So, before we get into sort of the reasons why it doesn’t work, we should talk about – let’s talk about the storytelling that happens in this history, because I do find it just so fascinating. Because you mentioned cults, and as I was reading through this I was reminded a lot about sort of all the early churches. Look at sort of the origins of really any church that set up in opposition to the orthodoxy of the time, or even like Joseph Smith and Mormonism. You look at L. Ron Hubbard. There are charismatic people who are challenging the system. They’re saying the normal system isn’t working. I have secret knowledge to share. And don’t listen to those other people when they tell you that what we’re doing is crazy.

**Craig:** They’re picking at this thing that we have, or just a normal human state of mild paranoia. And the normal human state of mild paranoia stems ultimately I think from our mortality. So, on some level we’re told that we’re going to die. That is very hard to process. It just doesn’t – the brain is not particularly good at reflecting on its own lifespan and eventual demise.

So, we begin to wonder if maybe everything is not true. Perhaps this is all an illusion. Or I’m not going to really die, of course. And even if that’s subconscious, you are suddenly susceptible to people who come along and say you’ve been fed a bunch of lies, and you probably always suspected that you were fed a bunch of lies. What if I could show you the truth?

This makes for wonderful movies but terrible medicine.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the characters we’re describing in Hahnemann and L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, they wouldn’t be classically the hero of a story. I mean, I guess there could be some sort of call to adventure, but more likely they are the wise old man who shows up to tell the hero, “No, no, no, there’s a better way.” They are Morpheus in The Matrix. They are Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. They’re the person who says the world you see is not the world that has to be. The force permeates all things. There’s more to this world than they will let you know. That’s the function that these characters tend to play in these stories.

And you can see why they’re seductive because we don’t want the world to be the way it is. We want the world to be the way we want the world to be. And if someone offers you that solution, you’re going to say, well yes, show me how to do that.

So, in homeopathy, the key to getting the world the way you want it to be is dilution. So, we need to talk about the concept of homeopathic dilution, because that’s sort of an article of faith you kind of have to take. And say like, well, I know that doesn’t make sense, but trust me, it works. But let’s talk about sort of what’s really going on there and sort of the mathematical problem that comes with this dilution.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, for starters, you just have to look at the words and kind of gawk that anybody ever bought it. They’re saying if you dilute things, you make them more powerful. That is simply the opposite of true. It’s not not-true. It is the opposite of true. It’s like saying if you shine a light, something gets darker. It is just defying the meaning of the words.

**John:** That’s an article of faith. That is basically I know that everything you’ve ever seen works a certain way, but trust me, it doesn’t work this way in this case. You’re asking someone to make a big change in belief right there. Like that is the fundamental ask I think of homeopathy is like I know this seems crazy, but no, it really works.

**Craig:** And, you know, for a long time what they were talking about was essentially invisible to the eye. So, you could accept it if you chose, just like God is invisible to the eye and people choose to accept God. So, Hahnemann creates a scale, the centesimal or C scale. And this scale is a measurement of how diluted a substance is. Remember, these are substances that either mimic the symptoms of your problem or directly cause your problem. But, of course, we’re not going to just feed somebody the thing that’s causing them the problem. No, we’re going to dilute it. That will somehow make it stronger and also beneficial. So, we’re going to dilute a substance by a factor of 100 at each level of C.

**John:** So, a 2C dilution would take a substance that was diluted to one part in 100, and then that diluted solution is diluted again by a factor of 100. So, it’s like two 100s down.

**Craig:** Correct. So, essentially one/ten-thousandth, right? And so each time you do this, I guess it’s logarithmic, right? I think that’s the proper use of the mathematical term. So, by the time you get to 6C, you’ve taken a substance and you’ve diluted it to one part in 100, then you’ve taken that dilution and diluted that one part in 100. And then you’ve done it again – take that, and dilute it one part in 100. And so and so on. And Hahnemann remarkably – now, we all know, like everyone has heard, every kid has heard the story of the guy who says I bet you that a king – if you give me one penny on one square of a chessboard and then double that for the next square, I will take that as my payment if you fill up all the squares. And before long, the king is out of money because when you double things it gets bananas really quickly.

Well, Hahnemann didn’t care. He advocated 30C dilutions for most purposes. 30C, that means one in a hundred, and then take that and make that one in a hundred, and do that 30 times. So, apparently according to physicists, the greatest dilution that is reasonably likely to contain even one molecule of an original substance is 12C. And 12C, John, what is that equivalent to?

**John:** That is a pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic oceans.

**Craig:** I mean…

**John:** A pinch of salt.

**Craig:** One pinch. [laughs] One pinch of salt in an entire ocean. That’s 12C. Hahnemann wants 30C. So, if you want to make 30C, you need to take one molecule and put it in a container that is more than 30 billion times the size of Earth. And then he’s saying that one molecule in the container that is 30 billion times the size of Earth will cure your disease. That’s what he believed. And, in fact, that is still what these people believe.

**John:** Yeah. And so there’s a footnote here or like an asterisk for like people will say how is that possible. And so the sort of modern belief among homeopaths – not all homeopaths, but some homeopaths – is that there’s a sense of water memory. So, basically the process of dilution, it has changed the water to some degree. There’s a memory of what that substance was in there and it has changed the water, so it still has the effect. And that is completely inconsistent with our understanding of water. And how things work in the real world.

**Craig:** Or anything.

**John:** So, you can take a vial of water that has been treated and a vial of water that has not been treated and there’s no scientific test that can determine any difference between the two, and yet that is the belief.

So, again, that is faith. That is a belief in an invisible thing that is happening there that cannot be measured. And that’s troubling. Yet, we should say like it kind of doesn’t – maybe there is some mechanism that is actually doing it. And so I think we have to step back and say, well, even if we don’t know quite the mechanism behind it, what does it matter if it works. I mean, Craig, if it works, it works.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, listen. I mean, that’s the nature of science. If we don’t understand something, but we see that it has an effect, we try and figure out why. We know things – there are things that happen now, we’re not quite sure why. We’re still trying to figure out why people sleep. But we know they sleep. We’re just not quite sure why it’s necessary. And so we’re trying to figure out the answer.

That, of course, is different than we don’t see anything happening, but maybe something is. As it turns out, if homeopathy worked we would be hard at work trying to figure out why.

Good news, everybody. Homeopathy, of course, does not work.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a sad thing. Because we can actually study it. And we can study to see whether it has the effects it claims to have. And it doesn’t.

**Craig:** No. Not even close. And I hate that we have to do these studies. It’s so absurd. So, Australia, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council reviewed more than 1,800 studies on homeopathy. And let’s just stop right there and go, oh my god. Right?

**John:** That’s a lot of studies.

**Craig:** The waste of money and time. You might as well do 1,800 studies on whether or not somebody humming is going to cure their own cancer. It’s insane. But because some dude came up with this baloney in the 1700s, we have to have 1,800 studies. And, oh, big shock – they only found that 225 of those were even rigorous enough to analyze. And why? I suspect because 1,575 of them were sponsored by homeopathic institutes and were absolute crap.

But when they looked at the 225 rigorous studies, they found it does not work.

**John:** Yeah. There’s no good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy is effective in treating health conditions. I share this frustration with having to spend the time to research these things. I mean, it’s good that even if we do spend the time to research these things, and we spend the money, and you got to check them. And it’s important to check even things you think work to make sure that there’s not sort of research or bias in there. But, yeah, it’s maddening.

When we were preparing for the original episode, you had done specific research on one type of homeopathic medicine, which I was not even aware of, but I think it deserves sort of a special spotlight because it’s sort of extra crazy pants. So, talk us through it.

**Craig:** It is. It is. Well, in its own way it kind of epitomizes the crazy pants of all homeopathic “medicine.” Actually this substance – substance – it’s a sugar pill – spoiler alert – is very popular in France. It’s actually manufactured by a French company. And you will see it being used here in the United States. I think sometimes when people buy these things they just simply don’t understand what homeopathic means, so they don’t realize what they’re buying. And they’re packaged and marketed to look like medicine. So, you’ve probably seen this in stores, those of you at home. It’s called Oscillococcinum. Or Oscillo, it’s shortened to. And it’s manufactured by a French company.

And it is sold as a cure for the common cold or a fever related to a common cold. So, what is Oscillococcinum? It is a homeopathic medicine. It is based – oh, and let me just add. They sell so much of this. Millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars of this. Keep that in mind.

It is based on the theory, which I will suggest is nonsense, and you decide, of a French physician who in 1919, you know, the height of medical enlightenment, thought he had discovered a shimmering microbe that he called Oscillococcinum. You get it? It’s like oscillating. So, he believed he found this little shimmering microbe and he found it not just in one of his patient’s samples under a microscope. He saw it in all of the samples that he took from his patents who all had different diseases.

Now, as it turns out, that’s probably because his microscope was faulty and he was just seeing light. And he thought things were shimmering. Microbes don’t shimmer, as it turns out. Because this isn’t fricking Star Wars.

So, he had a bad microscope, saw an artifact in every slide he had. Another spoiler alert: no one, except for this dude, has ever found this “shimmering” Oscillococcinum microbe because it doesn’t exist. But, okay, that’s quackery level number one. Let us advance, John, to quackery level number two.

Homeopaths said, oh, you know we have this wonderful theory that if you take stuff and you reduce it down to impossibly tiny amounts, it can cure the thing that that thing causes. So, if Oscillococcinum, which doesn’t exist, causes the cold, we should reduce Oscillococcinum, which doesn’t exist, down to incredibly tiny amounts. So they harvested that from – and here comes quackery level three, John, you ready?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Okay. Where else would you get Oscillococcinum from other than the liver of ducks? Why?

**John:** Well, that makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] Right?

**John:** I mean, there’s duck liver everywhere here. I mean, it’s super common in France, so it makes sense.

**Craig:** It’s common. Right. So, let’s just take some duck liver, which will definitely have Oscillococcinum in it, but we’re homeopaths, so let’s reduce it down so many times in water that, quackery level four, even if they had started – and I love this statistic – and this is true of the people selling you Oscillococcinum now. If they started with a duck the size of the sun, there still would not be a single molecule of it left in an Oscillococcinum pill based on how many times they reduce it.

Let me state that again. The duck, which does not contain Oscillococcinum because it doesn’t exist, is reduced so many times down that even if they started with a duck the size of the sun, there still wouldn’t be any molecule of duck or Oscillococcinum in an Oscillococcinum pill.

**John:** Here’s my question. Is it vegan? Because–

**Craig:** [laughs] It is. It absolutely is.

**John:** There’s no duck in it, because even though it’s harvested from duck, at this point there is no duck in it. So, a vegan, I think, can safely take this medicine. I haven’t Googled yet.

**Craig:** Well.

**John:** I’m sure there’s debate online about, because–

**Craig:** They may not be able to. And here’s why. Because while there is no microbe in Oscillococcinum, nor is there a single molecule of any active ingredient in Oscillococcinum, nor could there ever be because the active ingredient is imaginary. What there is in the Oscillococcinum pill for sure are two ingredients – lactose and sucrose. Sugar and sugar.

**John:** Yeah. Lactose is a milk sugar. I mean, that’s not vegan, Craig. You’re spoiling it here.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** If someone could just make this a vegan cure, why – god, I’m so frustrated.

**Craig:** It’s really a bummer. They were so close. They are selling you sugar pills, not the euphemistic sugar pills. They’re selling you actual sugar pills and they’re telling you that they’re selling you sugar pills. It’s on the box. Gah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I mean, I assume that this is as confusing and upsetting to you as it is to me.

**John:** It is sort of maddening. And I think if there’s good news is that it’s maddening to lots of other people as well. So, FTC recently proposed new labeling for homeopathic medicines basically selling the box has to say this doesn’t work, which is a bold claim. I will also link to this Alan Levinovitz article for Slate arguing that the labels may actually backfire, because when you call out the scientific validity of things, in a weird way it kind of reinforces it.

So, according to 2007 government data, Americans spend about $3 billion a year on homeopathy.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** And the market is growing. And so time and time again studies show that when you actually say like this claim has not been supported by the FDA, they don’t actually change their purchasing behaviors. So, in a weird way it makes it clear this is an alternative to a normal system. So, I’m not so optimistic that even a label on the box will stop people from using it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the problem with the FDA warning, which is very weak sauce, and I wish–

**John:** And I should also say, I think it’s FTC rather than FDA.

**Craig:** Oh. It’s FTC.

**John:** So, it’s the Federal, Fair Trade – what is FTC?

**Craig:** Fair Trade Commission? Federal Trade Commission?

**John:** Federal Trade Commission?

**Craig:** Federal Trade Commission.

**John:** So it’s not the Food and Drug, but it’s actually the people who are responsible for the things you buy, rather than the drugs you take.

**Craig:** Got it. Well, that disclaimer unfortunately just says, “We can’t say whether or not this works.” They don’t say, “This does not work.” They’ll say, “There is no scientific evidence.” And you’re right. People ignore that, because they just think, oh, because the big pharma is making money off of it.

What they need is a statement akin to the kinds of things they put on cigarette packs. These will cause cancer. Here’s the sort of opposite label for Oscillococcinum. This does nothing. It should be in huge big words in a huge box on the label.

**John:** We just came back from dinner here in Paris and I was looking at this woman’s cigarette box. And it says, sort of the translation is like, “This will kill you,” in big letters.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I like how direct it is here. So, “Tue,” the verb for in French for killing you, is nice and short and effective.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the efficacy of this. Because we’ve established why scientifically it doesn’t work, but why does it seem like it works? Because people who take this are taking it not just once. They’re taking it again and again. And why are they taking it again and again? And this gets into the root I think of sort of what really happens here. I think the bigger question for why this goes beyond on homeopathy. It goes to our basic psychological nature and our inability to process why something can seem like it’s working when it’s not really working.

**Craig:** Well, certainly we know that there’s a placebo effect. And there’s always an ethical question around placebo effect, because it’s real. So, we know that if you convince people that they’re taking potent medicine, they have a tendency to feel better. And that’s not a fake tendency. They can actually physically get better faster. So, there’s an ethical question. What if you know something is a placebo. Should you tell everybody?

There are different kinds of placebos. The placebo effect that I think is most defensible and most common is the placebo effect that comes from very low dosages of medicines that at higher doses have legitimate effect. There doesn’t seem to be a very strong placebo effect for literally sugar pills.

So, there are some other things that are going on. For instance, you’re feeling sick and you take Oscillococcinum and, you know, the next day you feel better. You might have – probably would have – felt better anyway.

**John:** Absolutely. So, that’s the disease running its course. So, let’s take a common cold. Let’s say you’ve got a cold that people are usually sick for like four days. So, on day one you take this homeopathic medicine for your cold. On day two and day three, you’ve still got the cold, maybe you’re feeling a little bit better. By day four, you’re good.

So, you’ve taken this homeopathic medicine and think, well, you know what, on Monday I was sick and by Thursday I was better. So, hey, I guess it worked. Because you have no counter example. You can’t know how long a cold would have lasted if you’d done nothing. And it feels like, you know what, I took some action and I’m better because of it, so I guess it must have worked, because now I’m feeling a lot better. And that repeated again and again across a whole bunch of people, that’s why it feels like it works.

It’s a form of magical thinking. Magical thinking in general is that sense of you are trying to draw a causal relationship between two events. And sometimes it’s an action and an outcome, but it seems like those two things are related, so I guess they’re related. And that’s how we get to a lot of our beliefs about how the world works is by drawing these inferences whether they’re valid or not.

**Craig:** And unfortunately there’s a tremendous overlap between people who have a tendency for magical thinking and people who have no respect for the scientific method whatsoever. So, a lot of times people get a cold and they go to CVS and they pick up NyQuil and some Advil and some Oscillococcinum. And they take all of it. Well, you know, I got better. Obviously it was that magical combination of two things that are medicine and one thing that’s a sugar pill. You know? They just don’t weed out these factors whatsoever. I think that there is another subset of people who are more distressing to me than I would say just the people who are making the casual error of purchasing this nonsense.

There are people who view as medicine and their own self-care as an act of protest. And that goes back to that paranoia, you know. So-called smart people are lying to you in order to take your money. They want you to be sick, so you have to buy more of their junk. And, in fact, these are the secrets that they’re keeping from you. And not only will you get better if you take this, but you are a more virtuous person who is striking a blow for freedom and truth.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the more radical version of I would say like a consumerist approach to healthcare, which is basically like I’m going to keep shopping for an answer until I get the answer I want. And I’m going to pick that answer and that answer is going to be the one that has the most benefits for me and the least drawbacks for me. Factually-based is not a high priority.

So, you know, the same way we sort of shop for clothes, we want to shop for a medicine. Like, I want the one that does exactly these things, but doesn’t have any of these bad side effects. And they’re not recognized in the realities of the situation. Like, things are real.

So, I want to circle back to placebo effect because it’s such an important aspect of what’s happening here. So, most of the people who are feeling better, it probably is a placebo effect to some degree. Sugar pills are classically placebo effect. And there’s nothing wrong with placebo effect. And we should note that when drugs have to go through real FDA trials, they’re tested against a placebo.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in order to be approved, they’re supposed to show that they are much more effective than, or at least noticeably or measurably more effective than an equivalent placebo. And that’s because the placebo effect is so strong, they want to measure them against–

**Craig:** But like think about – here’s the crazy part. If you really think about what you just said, which is absolutely accurate, what regular medicine manufacturers are doing is they’re saying we have a medicine, we think it works. Let’s compare it to Oscillococcinum. [laughs] Because if it doesn’t work better than that, it’s not real medicine. That’s literally what they’re saying. They’re saying Oscillococcinum is our gold standard for doing nothing. So let’s compare it to that.

**John:** Yeah. In the show notes I’ll put a link to a great episode of Science Vs. where they looked at antidepressants and whether antidepressants work, because there’s a lot of science out there that’s suggesting that in many cases they’re not noticeably better than a placebo. And so, well, what do you do? Because they seem effective in a lot of people, but it could be a placebo effect that’s doing a lot of that work there. And so that’s an ongoing scientific controversy.

I’m delighted to have that kind of controversy about a real thing rather than imaginary things.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** And I’d also say, we were talking about the common cold, and so some of the things we offer as solutions to the common cold really are placebos and we should acknowledge that they are placebos. It doesn’t mean that they’re not useful or palliative because if it feels good that’s sort of part of the job. Like comfort should be part of it.

So, when I start feeling a cold, my go-to is Makers Mark. Makers Mark bourbon for whatever reason, it makes me feel better. It’s probably just because I’m taking some action. It’s probably because it’s alcohol.

**Craig:** Ah, there you go. [laughs]

**John:** But it makes me feel better. In the same way my daughter starts to feel a little pukey, I’m like–

**Craig:** Bourbon?

**John:** You give her like the one children’s Motrin. And it’s not going to do anything, but it makes her feel like something has been done. And that’s reasonable. And that’s the kind of thing I wish people would embrace rather than–

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, we all are – this is particularly effective for children. Because children, their brains are still forming. They’re supposed to be completely ignorant and foolable. Every parent knows that, you know, when their three-year-old falls and bumps their knee that they want a Band-Aid. They’re not cut. The Band-Aid is doing nothing. But they want it. And it will make them feel better. And that’s fine for children.

Obviously, yes, only you would wonder what magical ingredient in bourbon could possibly be making you feel better. [laughs] But there’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But there are costs to the wholesale acceptance of thorough complete nonsense. If you give your daughter three Motrin when she has a fever, it will impact the fever. No question.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s medicine. But there’s a cost to believing in this junk.

**John:** Yes. Let’s talk about it. So, I think the underlying pervasive problem for me is that when we choose to be irrational about some things, like our own healthcare, we open ourselves to be irrational about lots of things. And so there are many things out there in the world which a lot of people are kind of irrational about. Climate change. Vaccination. Conspiracies about everything, including 9/11. Psychics. Birtherism. And all sorts of other kind of non-medicines that are thrown out there as being alternatives to western medicine, many of which are actually dangerous.

**Craig:** Yeah, dangerous by addition because they themselves make you worse, or dangerous by subtraction because you’re using them instead of things that work. And there are some very, very sad clear examples of let’s call it homeopathic style magical thinking that has led to harm. Latril, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that word.

**John:** I don’t know what Latril is.

**Craig:** So, in the ‘70s, some ding-a-ling decided that there was this substance in peach pits that could cure cancer. And there is a substance in peach pits. It’s cyanide. It does not cure cancer, at all. And people were spending money on it and dying, not surprisingly, either because they were ingesting too much cyanide, or because they were not following a prescribed course of medicine by actual physicians, or because they were going to die. So, Latril was a huge problem.

And then you had this crazy thing that I think it’s finally going away. This crazy thing that happened where people who were HIV-positive were suddenly denying that HIV was the real cause of AIDS. They believed that, I don’t know, toxins in the atmosphere, or the – or even worse, the drugs used to treat HIV were the real cause of AIDS. And there’s a woman named Christine Maggiore who was HIV-positive and she wrote a book about this. She was kind of the champion of this movement. It gained traction. A one point the Foo Fighters were on board with this ding-a-ling.

And here’s what happened. What happened was that her daughter, named Eliza Jane, contracted HIV from Christine, who refused to take antivirals. And Eliza Jane died of AIDS at the age of three. And then Christine Maggiore died shortly thereafter from AIDS. What a shock. And, you know, if you want to die as a result of your own ignorance, I understand. But she willfully infected her own child and killed her own child. That’s just terrifying to me. Terrifying.

**John:** There’s also a lot of examples of situations where people, especially parents, take something that is actually a real thing and try to apply it to stuff that’s not the actual situation. So, there’s a thing called chelation which is when you have heavy metal poisoning, like seriously heavy metal poisoning that could kill a person. Arsenic, lead, mercury. And there’s a medical practice for how you do it, but parents will try to do it themselves for things that aren’t metal poisoning because they think, oh well, I’m making my kid cleaner on the inside. You can kill your kid that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And my worry is that the same type of belief system that can make homeopathy seem like great, it’s nice, it’s safe, can get a parent to chelation very, very easily.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Think of homeopathy as gateway stupidity. What we’re saying is homeopathic medicine can’t do anything to you. It can’t harm you. The Amazing Randi, James Randi, who is a wonderful skeptic and magician, there’s a terrific video of him swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills at once. [laughs] Because there’s nothing in them, right? But that is your first step down the road of I don’t believe in truth. I believe instead of this modern phenomenon called My Truth. I hear people say this. “Well, my truth, or your truth.” No, there is no my truth. And there is no your truth. There’s just truth. Either something is true, or it’s not. And if you start wandering down the path where you decide that universal truth is less important than what you choose to be true, well, the foundations of everything real beneath your feet begin to crumble. And you will end up in trouble, inevitably.

**John:** Yup. So, the most recent horrible example of this was Pizza-gate. And so for listeners outside the US, or any listeners inside the US who have blissfully been able to not be aware of what Pizza-gate was, it was just this crazy scandal that sort of burst out of Reddit. It’s so hard to believe that it existed, but it did exist. But essentially these people believed that there was a child sex trafficking ring happening at a pizza place in Brooklyn that major Democratic officials were involved. Hillary Clinton was involved. There were secret code words. That it was all this big thing.

And it seemed like one of those crazy Internet things until somebody like shows up there and starts shooting. And that’s what happened. And so Pizza-gate is not the same as homeopathy, but I think it’s that same sense of like I’m going to choose to believe what facts I choose to believe, and if anyone confronts me about these imaginary facts I believe, I’m going to say that you are just trying to suppress my truth. You’re trying to conceal what’s really happening behind.

**Craig:** Right. Because it feels true. And if it feels true, it is true. Except that’s not how truth works. And as we proceed in this incredible age of enlightenment and technological advancement, when I look all around me I see this ever widening gap between rationalists and irrationalists. And there are so many more irrationalists than rationalists. And what’s so crazy is the rationalists are giving us everything. Our iPhones and our computers and the Internet and the microphones we’re using and the medicines that have extended our lives. And the vaccines that give us the luxury to walk around in a crowded building and not worry about getting the plague. These people are thriving and giving us everything. The irrationalists take these things and use them to spread irrationality.

So, they use the Internet, a rational thing, and they use medicine, a rational thing, and their extended life spans, and all of it to spread things that run counter to what the rationalists say and do. And I worry that we are going to end up in this crazy bifurcated world between people who are recessing backwards towards caveman-like magical thinking. And then these other people that are moving forward towards some sort of star child status. I don’t know how we lost our love of rationality. But, homeopathy is such a canary in the coal mine for me. It really is. I hate that more people are using it. It makes me angry.

**John:** Yup. So, let’s talk about the real problems of using it in a medical situation. So, one of the problems is just finite resources. There’s only so much money to spend on medicine and on drugs and on healthcare. And if you’re spending $3 billion a year on stuff that absolutely cannot work, that’s $3 billion that you’re not spending on research, on actual medicines that could work.

I don’t want to pretend that our modern healthcare system, specifically our modern drug system, is wonderful or ideal. It’s not. It’s messed up. It’s deeply messed up and needs to be changed. But the solution is not an invented system that has no basis in science whatsoever.

**Craig:** That’s right. We know for sure that heart disease kills most people that are dying of medical causes in the United States. Heart disease, number one. What if we just took that $3 billion and just donated it to heart disease research? That would be better.

**John:** It would be better. I mean, in some ways I think taking that $3 billion and putting it in a hole would be kind of better also, because that’s what you’re essentially doing and you’re encouraging this false set of beliefs by spending that $3 billion on these sugar pills.

**Craig:** It’s true. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Sort of to get around to sort of like how homeopathy represents these bigger issues, let’s look at how homeopathy started and how it all began. So, Hahnemann took a very simple idea, a simple and sort of compelling idea. It was easy to summarize that idea. He spread it by denouncing the experts. He created alternative vocabularies for everything. He renamed his opponents, so he called them allopaths, basically don’t even refer to them by their normal name.

And when he was confronted by facts, he just kept spinning. He just kept inventing new things until he died. And this is essentially, you know, we urged you before to use the term begs the question properly. This is begging the question. This is circular reasoning that’s not ever proving its underlying premise.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a bit like you know how we’re going to make America great again? We’re going to make America great again.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Sold.

**John:** Sign me up.

**Craig:** Yeah. And let me just come up with a bunch of funny names for the people running against me and lies schmies. Yeah.

**John:** Good stuff. So, what can you do as a person, as a citizen, to look at homeopathy in a better way and sort of like help us move past our current situation with homeopathy?

**Craig:** Well, my advice is not to – it’s not wishy washy in any way. It’s more of an imperative. None of you should pay a single penny for any product described as homeopathic. If it says homeopathic on the box, it does not work. By definition. It cannot work. It is not even meant to work. That product exists to enrich liars. That’s it.

How often do we come across things where we can say happily, “This isn’t a fuzzy issue. There’s no middle ground. There’s no good homeopaths who are getting a bad rep from the bad ones.” The story has one side. Homeopathy is stupid and wrong. And if you believe in it, you are doing something that is stupid and wrong. And if you take it, you’re doing something that is stupid and wrong. And the only worse than doing something stupid and wrong by mistake, which we all do, which is part of the human condition, is doing something stupid and wrong on purpose, knowing it’s stupid and wrong. That’s a moral crime.

So, you want to help? Stop doing it.

**John:** I agree. I’d also say along with don’t equivocate, like don’t draw false comparisons. So, there are things where you sort of squint and look like, oh, that kind of looks like homeopathy. But actually investigate it and see whether it is homeopathy or not homeopathy. So, we talked about vaccinations. Yes, vaccinations, you’re taking something in to prevent a disease, but that’s not homeopathy. That’s actually a real thing. So, don’t throw out vaccination because homeopathy doesn’t work.

Same thing with like there’s allergy treatments where you’re actually building up your body’s immune system so it doesn’t react to certain things. Like they just announced a way to do that for peanuts, which is great, because that was actually killing real kids. So, there’s things that sort of look like homeopathy but are not homeopathy, so don’t confuse those things, too. Don’t throw out everything. Just look at sort of what homeopathy is doing and say like, “That’s not it.”

I like Craig’s suggestion for if you see the homeopathy, then you know it’s not real. Just replace that mentally in your head with like ineffective. Ineffective cold medicine.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You wouldn’t buy anything that was called ineffective cold medicine. Don’t buy something called homeopathic cold medicine.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or replace it with the word scam. So, scam cold medicine. Okay, yeah, I get it.

**John:** Although Zicam was very effective, and Zicam is a lot like scam.

**Craig:** Zicam is not that effective.

**John:** It was effective in terms of its marketing.

**Craig:** Yes. In terms of its marketing, you’re right. Yes, they were dancing very close to… – Hey, listen, we’re in a freaking post-Trump world now where he went to this rally and people were like Lock Her Up, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I remember Lock Her Up. That was funny. That played well before the election. We don’t need that anymore.”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** It was like, he’s just telling them now. And they’re like, “Yeah.” [laughs]

**John:** He’s doing his own commentary track. That’s the crazy thing.

**Craig:** He is. And he’s doing what homeopathic medicine does, which is to say you should take this. It’s a sugar pill. It doesn’t work. Take it. It works. Wait, what? So, part of what people struggle with, I think, is if you take this away, what is left? And unfortunately – and this is where if you are somebody who wanted to believe in this, but maybe we’ve gotten through to you and you’re thinking, okay, okay, I submit. But the alternatives aren’t great. Well, no one promised you a rose garden. Here’s the deal with science. You can’t blame science for correcting itself. I think people do this all the time. They’re like, well, what do the doctors know? They used to say that you should do this. And then they said you should do this.

Correct. That’s what science does. Science does its best and is constantly examining itself and then changing to reflect new information. That is exactly why science is valuable. You can’t reward fake science for being consistent. That’s the hallmark of fake science. There’s no prize for being consistently wrong the way that homeopathic medicine has been consistently wrong.

So, similarly you can’t really punish science for being inconsistent. That’s part of why science works. And we know that while science may stumble and move forward and backwards, you know, two steps forward, one step back, when they do arrive at things that work, they’re life-changing.

Lipitor has saved so many lives. And it works. And it’s good. Science is ultimately a matter of statistics and best guesses and margins of error. And that is messy, I think, conceptually for people. But it turns out messy is far more effective than fake meat.

**John:** I agree. And let’s talk about what you can do as a writer. So, if this has inspired you to think about these topics, what can you do as a screenwriter? I would argue that you need to be careful with your narratives, because we brought up The Matrix, we brought up Star Wars. It’s very easy to play into the narrative where your hero is told that the world is not as it seems. They are standing up against a system. These are all common tropes for our movies and they’re there for a reason, but maybe think about not making the villain of your story medicine, or a system which is actually sort of there for the good.

Stand up for facts and truth in your stories. Have your heroes stand up for facts and for truth. And up against lies. That’s always a great thing. And don’t make your heroes sort of like gleefully, blissfully ignorant. Don’t reward them for their faith in an invisible thing beyond all reason. That’s my concern is that so many of our compelling stories are about that sort of belief in the invisible magical force that surrounds us in the universe. And so we see these stories and we’re just like, oh yeah, that’s right. I’m like Luke Skywalker. I believe in the Force.

And it’s like, no, no, you believe in an imaginary speck of duck liver that’s not actually there in the thing you’re drinking. That’s my concern. So, I would just argue for look for ways to tell stories where the heroes are not those guys who are believing in the impossible thing just because.

**Craig:** Yeah. The heroes of rationality. I agree.

There are times when the nature of drama requires you to tell an outlier story. And there are stories where people fought against the medical establishment for something and prevailed. And that’s fine, too. But when you’re telling that story, at least acknowledge that while there may be a bad guy, that science itself is not the bad guy. That, in fact, whoever is fighting this fight to advance their belief, which turns out to be true, is a scientist. They got there rationally.

So, the worst thing is when they paint… – Look, movies want to paint the world in the most simple, gleeful way. You know, folks, if you just walk outside and chew a simple leaf, like these noble savages, you will held. No. No. Those people aren’t noble or savage. That leaf doesn’t work.

The ones that do work get turned into medicine, like aspirin, which comes from the bark of the willow tree, I believe. Or, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of drugs that come from plants. And we use them. We don’t use the ones that don’t work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, these people don’t know anything. I mean, really, do you think that the Oscillococcinum people are like, wow, we figured it out and then Bayer wasn’t like, “Ooh, we’d like to get in on that.” Doesn’t work that way.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** A good friend of mine back in Los Angeles, who I deeply love, but he will consistently believe impossible things. And so about once a week I have to sit him down and really talk him through this thing that he’s thinking and really explain why it can’t possibly work. And by the end of a session I can sort of get him thinking like, oh yeah, okay, I get that. But he’s not able to sort of generalize that through to the next situation that is nearly identical to that. And I think in all of our lives there are going to be some people who are like that. And you got to pick sort of who are those people who you’re going to help walk through those roads.

So, if you’re a person who is post-homeopathy and that this has at all been inspiring you to get past your belief in some of these systems, it’s great that you’re there. Just pick up the torch and like carry it on. And get some other people in your life to be thinking rationally about some of these situations.

**Craig:** Amen.

**John:** Great. It is time for out One Cool Things. So, keeping with our medicinal topic here, I’m going to say my One Cool Thing is French Pharmacists. So, yes, French pharmacists will have homeopathic medicines on the counter. They’re not pushing them, but I do see them there. But, I’ve had three exposures with French pharmacists and they’ve been remarkably helpful in ways that American pharmacists never will.

So, they will actually, like there was a problem with one of my prescriptions. They’re like, “Okay, I’ll call your doctor.” Like, they’re never going to call the doctor. But, no, they called the doctor, then they called and they said like, “I couldn’t get through to the doctor, but I’m still working on it.” Twice they did that. And then they found like cheaper ways to get things to happen. They’ve been so remarkably helpful and useful.

Another fun fact about French pharmacists. If you are gathering mushrooms out in the woods, you can take them to a pharmacist and the pharmacist will identify which ones are the poisonous mushrooms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** They’re trained in identifying poisonous mushrooms.

**Craig:** It’s so French. So French. I love it.

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** A-mazing. Well, I’ll keep in line as well with our topic here. If you are interested in being like me and John and being skeptical of bad medicine and bad science, I urge you to check out a website called Quackwatch. Quackwatch.org. it is not a pretty website. They have invested no time or energy in good web design.

However, they are a great clearinghouse for information on all of the terrible, bad medicine and medical ideas and health scams that are floating around out there. Think of it like your medical Snopes. And when someone tells you, “I’ve that blah, blah, blah,” go check it out on Quackwatch.

Sometimes things are new and sometimes things are effective. A lot of times what you’re hearing is pre-packaged or repackaged/reheated crap. And Quackwatch will help guide you through that miasma, as Hahnemann would say.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Tim Minchin. He’s the composer and lyricist of Matilda.

**Craig:** Wait, what? [laughs]

**John:** And the upcoming Groundhog Day.

**Craig:** Wait, wait, wait, what?

**John:** He did not compose this specifically for us. This is something I found online where he talks about homeopathy and I felt it was so appropriate that even if it does not have a [hums], it should be our outro for this week’s episode.

**Craig:** My heart stopped there when I thought it was, like, oh my god, Tim Minchin listens to our show.

**John:** Yeah. I know.

**Craig:** He’s like my hero.

**John:** That Broadway and medical outrage combination. Like it’s Craig’s day.

**Craig:** Genius.

**John:** Tim Minchin lives in Los Angeles apparently. Did you know that?

**Craig:** You’re kidding. I want to hang out with him so bad. So, I don’t know if this clip is from Storm, his incredible poem.

**John:** It’s related to Storm, but it’s not from Storm.

**Craig:** I think Storm was one of my prior One Cool Things. God, I would do anything just to hang out with that guy for an evening. Anything.

**John:** So, our sense of like we would do anything to meet has worked once before where we met the wonderful Kates from Australia.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This guy is also Australian. He’s in Los Angeles. Somebody who listens to the show knows him. So, maybe we’ll make this happen.

**Craig:** Make it happen.

**John:** All right. If you have an outro, or you’re Tim Minchin and wanting to write into us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re on Facebook. So, if you have not already left a comment about our last topic, where we talked about transgender issues, you can let us know what you thought about our homeopathy episode.

**Craig:** Heavy fire.

**John:** Heavy fire. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the app to download. Some people were having problem with the app. It’s great that you wrote in to me, but it’s also great if you write into the folks who actually make the app, which his Libsyn. So, even though it’s underneath my umbrella of a company, it’s actually the folks at Libsyn make the app. So, if you find a technical issue with it, talk to them because they are the ones who interface between the library and everything else. They can help you more than I can help you on the app.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find transcripts for this and all of our episodes. Between Godwin and John who does the transcripts, they are up about four days after the episodes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for all the back episodes and the show notes for today’s episode. We’ll try to have a lot of links in there for the things we talked about.

And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right. Have a good week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [What is Homeopathy?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy)
* [The History of Homeopathy](https://www.homeopathic.com/Articles/Introduction_to_Homeopathy/A_Condensed_History_of_Homeopathy.html)
* [Oscillococcinum – “Oscillo”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillococcinum)
* [FTC Labeling](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/996984/p114505_otc_homeopathic_drug_enforcement_policy_statement.pdf)
* Science Vs [#11 Antidepressants](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/11-antidepressants/)
* [French Pharmacists](http://ouiinfrance.com/2014/06/12/differences-between-pharmacies-in-france-and-the-united-states/)
* [Quackwatch](http://www.quackwatch.org/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Tim Minchin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_281.mp3).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, today’s episode has some swearing in it, so if you’re in the car with your kids, maybe save it for later.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 280 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing post-scriptdom depression. That low feeling you sometimes get when finishing a screenplay. We’ll also be looking at some of the trends in the most recent Black List. And a protest over Boys Don’t Cry, which has me shaking my damn head. But, first, we have some news. Craig, tell us the news.

**Craig:** Well, very exciting. Our friend and friend of the podcast, so by extension your friend at home, Malcolm Spellman is developing a television series based on Foxy Brown, the 1974 cult classic film. Malcolm will be one of the executive producers, along with Ben Watkins, another guy we know, we I think created or show-runs Hand of God, which is an Amazon show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Malcolm and Ben are going to be writing the script and running the show, so that’s going to be on Hulu. And, you know, what a world, because if I had said that three years ago it would have been like, “Aw, that’s sad.”

**John:** Your little show on Hulu.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, aw. Wow, that’s awesome. That’s better than basically everything. So, what a crazy world. Anyway, congratulations to Malcolm Spellman. Foxy Brown, by the way, I love that movie. I love Foxy Brown. I actually think it’s a brilliant idea for a TV show because it’s so TV-able.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** By the way, I don’t know anything about creatively. I haven’t talked to him about it yet. I don’t know creatively how they’re approaching it. But, man, I hope it’s period. I hope. Hard to do, because it’s expensive. But…

**John:** Yeah. I’m very excited to see it as well. And I think what you say about it being a TV idea is absolutely true, because it’s the characters. It’s centered around this character. And it’s not about the one journey the character is on. It’s about her adventures. It’s about sort of what she’s doing and the trouble that she is solving. And so that is going to be great. So, I’m so excited for Malcolm. It feels like a perfect match.

I’m going to have my tiny little rant about Hulu. So, I pay for Hulu because Hulu is how here in France we watch New Girl. It’s how we watch The Simpsons, South Park, and other great shows that we love. So, because we are paid members of Hulu, I feel like I should be able to watch Hulu while I’m here, and I cannot without a VPN. So, if you are a person who works at Hulu, can you make it so that if I’m a paid, logged in member of Hulu I don’t have to use a VPN to watch your program while I’m here? That would be awesome. Thanks.

**Craig:** That would be awesome.

**John:** So, the other weird thing is Hulu actually follows me on Twitter. Like I got the little notification on my phone, like Hulu is now following you. So, great. I will also tweet them to ask them to please turn this off. Because Netflix, notably, does not VPN block you. I guess because they have a Netflix France, and that’s what I’m watching.

**Craig:** Well, that’s what it comes down to, right? I mean, Hulu must have some sort of partner in France that they’re demanding your view instead, right?

**John:** I suppose so. I don’t know who the Hulu partner is. So, like, for my HBO shows I’m watching them through OCS. That is where I watched Westworld. But I don’t know who the Hulu equivalent is here. And I don’t know where I’m supposed to watch The Mindy Project, for example, which is only a Hulu show, if not through Hulu on the VPN.

**Craig:** Like at the very least, if you’re trying to access Hulu and you’re not in a territory that is Hulu-accessible, they should tell you go here instead. Right? They shouldn’t just give you some dumb thing like, “Sorry.” Because I assume that the deal is that Hulu charges some French company to deliver their content, therefore that French company is like, fine, but then you can’t deliver it, only we can if we’re paying you for it. That makes sense. But then just tell me where to go.

**John:** Yeah. I think there’s also some logic. Like as they’re cutting out their deals, like if someone is actually a paid member who is like paying you in the US for this thing, I feel like that should be carved out of the sort of like we have France kind of stuff.

I know it’s complicated. And most of the people listening to this show are either – they’re living in America and they don’t have to worry about it, or they’re living internationally and have been dealing with this their entire lives. So, to have me complain about it is a little bit pointless. But, anyway, that’s my little Hulu rant.

**Craig:** Oh John.

**John:** Let’s get to things we actually do know about – our t-shirts. So, our friends at Cotton Bureau have received so many requests for our Scriptnotes t-shirts, our last two Scriptnotes t-shirts, that they will be printing a new run in January.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** So, hooray. So, if you are a person like Craig Mazin who ordered a women’s medium shirt, rather than a men’s medium shirt–

**Craig:** Huge disaster.

**John:** You can fix that. So, when they actually have the t-shirts up, I’ll tweet about it. Craig may even tweet about it. But if you want to make sure you don’t miss the deadline for them, you should go to Cotton Bureau right now and put your email address in there so that they will notify you the minute they become available, so you can get a t-shirt of your own. Either the Three Page Gold Standard, or the Classic Scriptnotes logo.

**Craig:** They’re both very, very good. Jennifer Simard, Broadway star, Tony nominee, very worked up over her failure to get a t-shirt. Tried to work the angle with me to get her t-shirt. No.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** No. No, no. I don’t care how many Tony nominations you have. I do, actually. That’s the thing with me. Regardless, Jennifer, I know you listen. So you’re going to go to Cotton Bureau, like so many others of you, and pre-order your shirts so that John August can get richer.

**John:** Yes. So much richer. It’s nothing but money for me.

While we’re talking pure commerce, the thing I actually do make money off of that is not even sort of paying for the podcast is Writer Emergency Pack, which is the thing I Kickstarted, which is now sold on Amazon. If you’re looking for something to buy for the writer-friend in your life, or if you just want one because no one else got something cool for Christmas, they are available on Amazon and at WriterEmergency.com. So, that’s a thing you can buy if you want to support me and not Craig.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That’s a thing you can buy, too.

**Craig:** And you do. It is a good gift for your writer-friend or lover.

**John:** Mm, yes. Especially good for lovers. What’s also good for lovers is movies, especially movies in France.

**Craig:** Segue Man!

**John:** In the last episode we discussed how and why Moana is called Vaiana here in France, and some other countries. We also talked about how The Hangover was released here as A Very Bad Trip. So, we got an email in from somebody who actually knows the reason why Craig’s movie was not called Hangover here.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, Kristof in Paris writes, “According to industry friends, The Hangover had too little time to play off of it’s a hit in the United States, and no stars to push, so the title was translated to Very Bad Trip in order to recall Pete Berg’s Very Bad Things, which over-performed in France, and was deemed to be a not un-useful connection for moviegoers to make.”

That’s fascinating. It’s fascinating on so many levels. I mean, first of all, Very Bad Things, I’ve seen that movie. I don’t know if you have, John.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Not only not a hit, but almost invisible. Like an incredibly small movie here in the United States. And surprising that it would be that market meaningful in France. But, that makes sense. There had to be some reason, right? I mean, so, that makes sense.

**John:** It actually makes a lot of sense. And think about it, in the abstract, if you were like to squint and look at both movies you could say like, oh yeah, they seem like the same kind of movie. It’s both about like horrible people going on this trip. They both happen in Vegas, I think. Did the first movie happen in Vegas?

**Craig:** Yeah, but they’re so tonally different. I mean, Very Bad Things is sort of a nauseatingly dark thriller about men covering up the death of a stripper. And that is not at all – The Hangover is tonally wildly different. But it just, you know, I assume that The Hangover did very well in France, so strategy successful.

**John:** So successful. So, let’s continue this thread. We also got this great article sent to us that has a bunch of these American titles and the French titles for movies. And so a thing you’ll notice, and something I’ve noticed as I’ve walked around here, a lot of times you will see the movie released in France will have English words as the title, but they won’t be the same words we had in America. And so, I thought we would take a look at some of these movies. And I’ll read the American title and Craig, you can do the French title, and see if we notice any trends, okay?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So, No Strings Attached.

**Craig:** Sex Friends.

**John:** The Hangover.

**Craig:** Very Bad Trip, of course.

**John:** Euro Trip.

**Craig:** [laughs] This one is great. So, our friend Alec Berg makes his movie Euro Trip, and in Europe, France, they call it Sex Trip.

**John:** Mm-hmm. How about Wild Things.

**Craig:** Sex Crimes.

**John:** Not Another Teen Movie.

**Craig:** Sex Academy.

**John:** Out Cold.

**Craig:** Snow, Sex, and Sun.

**John:** Mozart and the Whale.

**Craig:** Crazy in Love. Well, that’s nice.

**John:** Yeah. Trainwreck.

**Craig:** Crazy Amy. [laughs]

**John:** Meet the Spartans.

**Craig:** Orgy Movie, which I have to say, is actually a title for that particular film.

**John:** Yep. The In Crowd.

**Craig:** Sex and Manipulations.

**John:** Step Up.

**Craig:** Sexy Dance.

**John:** Let’s go down to The To-Do List.

**Craig:** Sex List. [laughs]

**John:** A Short History of Decay.

**Craig:** What else could it be? Sexy Therapy.

**John:** Yeah, but that’s not the only one, because Thanks for Sharing is called…

**Craig:** Sex Therapy.

**John:** Yeah, so do we notice a trend here?

**Craig:** Yes, and I have to say that what a great double bill to go see, both films not widely seen–

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** But to go see Sexy Therapy and then Sex Therapy. Yeah, they seem to be, you know, separate from I guess what our natural suspicion would be about the French and their interest in subtlety, they seem to be even more blunt in their titling than Americans are.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe you could say like they don’t want their American comedies to be subtle. They want their American comedies to be loud and brash. And it certainly looks that way. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to what we just read, but also a whole other Tumblr which is called Pardon My Titres, which is just a bunch of the French titles for movies.

But there’s one thing I thought was actually really interesting that I’ll single out which is this last link here, which was the same movie and a very different marketing strategy. And so this is the Australian version of it versus the American version. So, the American movie was called That Awkward Moment. And so it was a comedy that had Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan, and Miles Teller in it.

And so I remember the trailer. I never saw the movie, but I remember the trailer, and it felt like a buddy comedy with the three of them. And so they compare that to the Australian version which is like it’s Zac Efron and the girl. And they’re the two people on the cover. They’re the only names that you’re seeing. Rather than That Awkward Moment it’s called Are We Officially Dating. They’re like walking in the fall. It’s such a completely different way of marketing the movie.

**Craig:** Wild. Yeah, I have to say that looking at these movie posters and the retitlings, it’s not surprising that French people look down on Americans. I mean, I don’t know if they all know that we don’t call every movie Sex Blank. It’s so strange. Maybe it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They view us as sort of silly, and so they give our movies the silliest titles, and then French people think we’re silly and so on and so forth. But the most fascinating one on the site to me is this movie, I’d never even heard of this movie. It’s a movie called Bad Biology. That’s the American title. It appears to be some kind of dark horror romance. And so, of course, they retitled it Sex Addict. But the cover–

**John:** The poster.

**Craig:** The poster, they have – you know what? Let’s just put it in the show notes. [laughs] Let’s just put it in the show notes so you can see.

**John:** So, this week as I was looking through some of these posters, I found one that is like, wow, I wonder if he knows this. So Ryan Reynolds is a friend and so I just sent him this poster for this movie that he’s in. He’s the only person on the cover and it’s called Under Pressure. And he’s like, “Wait, what is this movie?” And the movie, in the US it’s called Mississippi Grind. It’s a gambling drama. But the poster for Under Pressure is completely different. And so there’s dice on it, kind of, but it’s not even – the image of him is not even him from this movie. It’s a completely different version of him on this poster. And he had no idea what it was.

And so you can imagine if you’re the actor who sees one of these posters, but if you’re like the filmmaker and you see like, oh, this is what my movie is sold as in other markets, it is bewildering.

**Craig:** It is. I know a lot of filmmakers get worked up over it. I tend to blank it all out. I don’t look at what the posters look like or the retitlings. I don’t know what they call these movies elsewhere. I just sort of give up. I’ve actually given up caring what they are like here as well.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I now just write them and then go away.

**John:** The key to Craig Mazin’s success is not caring.

**Craig:** Not caring. I care about the script and the movie and then the day my job is done, I stop. I have to.

**John:** All right. You have to.

Last bit of follow up. So we did it again. Back in Episode 267 we did a How Would this be a Movie in which we talked about Dr. James Barry, the 19th Century British doctor who was identified as a woman only after death. So, this week news comes out that Rachel Weisz is attached to play James Barry in a movie adaptation. The script is being written by Nick Yarborough, whose name you’ll hear again later on in the podcast. And it’s based on Rachel Holmes’s book The Secret Life of Dr. James Miranda Barry: Victorian England’s Most Eminent Surgeon.

So, it’s a different book than what we were looking at when we discussed it, but hey, we were right. That’s a movie.

**Craig:** We were right. I mean, that was so obviously a movie. And I’m kind of curious to see which of the methods they approach it. Because we had talked about all sorts of different ways to do it. I mean, one way is the kind of straight up way. One way was concentrating on her relationship with her partner/servant/confidante.

**John:** Also her mother was a great character.

**Craig:** The mother was a great character. So, you know, interesting to see what they do and how they choose to come at it.

**John:** Yeah. I think the one thing I feel confident about is because Rachel Weisz is a great actor, and everyone involved seems like really great people, so there’s no chance of any controversy whatsoever about the choices they’ve made in making that movie, because everyone is going to see like, well, that’s just obviously how you should do it.

**Craig:** No one gets worked up over the casting of any actor when it comes to [sighs] characters who are transgender, or gender-fluid. And so we arrive now at umbrage.

**John:** Yes. So, this is something that actually happened last month, but the news of it just sort of came out this last week. So, last month students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon started a protest over Kimberly Peirce’s movie Boys Don’t Cry. So, Kimberly Peirce is the very talented director who that was her breakout movie, a Sundance movie, that won the Oscar for Hilary Swank. So, there was a protest at Reed College while she was giving a Q&A basically sort of trying to take over the Q&A post-screening.

So, Kimberly Peirce had to leave for a while, and then rules were established. She came back in. They were criticizing her for making money off of a movie about trans people while not being trans herself. They attacked the casting of Hilary Swank, a straight woman to play a trans man. They put a sign on her podium that read Fuck This Cis White Bitch. Someone shouted, “Fuck you, you scared bitch.” And then the students walked out.

So, Kimberly Peirce, an openly lesbian director, did not have a great experience there at Reed College.

**Craig:** Where do you even begin? I mean, listen, there is a level of stupidity here that is so in your face because Kim Peirce is not only a lesbian but has described herself as gender-fluid or gender-queer. And Kim Peirce is one of the few well-known openly lesbian filmmakers making movies about these issues. She was as far as I know the first director period to make a really insightful movie about this particular case, which was based on a real thing. She broke ground. She is a brave person.

And she ought to be celebrated by the very people that care about these issues. So, of course, they rip her apart and in ripping her apart do so with racism, and with misogyny, because she’s not pure enough for their 2016 sensibilities. It is disgusting to me. I mean, nauseating. I hated this.

**John:** I hated this, too. So, before we enter into the period of great umbrage over this, I do want to sort of acknowledge that Reed College itself seemed to recognize what was going on and tried to – they tried to walk a fine line of like we want to have vigorous discussions on this campus, but this was not cool. So this is what the Dean of Faculty, Nigel Nicholson, which is a great name, this is what he wrote after the fact. “The actions that I saw were not animated by the spirit of inquiry or the desire to learn that usually animates Reed audiences. The students had already decided what they thought and came to a question-and-answer session to make their judgments known, not to listen and engage.

“Some brought posters bearing judgments and accusations. Others asked questions that, while grammatically questions, that is they ended with question marks, were not animated by a genuine desire to explore a question, but rather sought to indict the speaker. It felt like a courtroom, not a college.”

So, that’s a reasonable response from the academic point of view. But I think I want to stop being reasonable right now and just unload on this a little bit if we can.

**Craig:** Thank you. Go. Go, go, go.

**John:** What luxury fucking outrage this is. We live in a time where like the fundamental rights of LGBT people are under attack and really at this precarious moment. Like the gains that have been won are all up for grabs right now. And so you choose to aim your weapons at the openly gay director of a movie that came out 20 years ago? Really, how fucking dare you.

And what’s worse is like you’re ignoring the fundamental role of movies like this that got us to where we are. You don’t get visibility and understanding of trans people without a movie like Boys Don’t Cry. It makes me just so furious.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, congratulations on finally reaching umbrage level. That was umbrage. Took 200 and how many episodes? But–

**John:** That was 280, yes.

**Craig:** 280. Real umbrage there. And, of course, completely deserved. First of all, Nigel Nicholson, Dean of Faculty, I have some advice for you. Expel these assholes. How about that? It’s not enough to say, well, you know, they brought some – some brought posters bearing judgments and accusations. You put a placard on the podium where your invited guest, Kimberly Peirce is speaking, that says “Fuck this Cis White Bitch.” Expel them. It’s as simple as that. They don’t belong in any college. They are assholes. They are anti-intellectual. They are bullies. And they’re violating everything that they’re pretending to protect.

It is also nonsense. I mean, underneath all of it, it’s not like – we’re not saying, look, these students have arrived at a reasonable place but they’re missing the context of what things were like when Kim Peirce made her movie in 1999. No, at least I’m saying where they have arrived now is insane. What they’re suggesting is that you cannot make a movie with a transgender character if you do not hire a transgender actor to play that character. They are also suggesting that you cannot make any movie that profits off of anyone’s misery because that’s somehow morally wrong. And so with one broad stroke of their pen they have eliminated every movie about the Holocaust. Every movie about slavery.

Oh my god, look what happened, you have Steve McQueen making 12 Years a Slave. Profiting off of slavery. What a jerk. Can’t do that. Oh, Spielberg, profiting off of the Holocaust. You can’t possibly put anyone in these movies that portray somebody that they don’t – Daniel Day Lewis, you asshole, you were in My Left Foot. You don’t really have cerebral palsy. Boo.

This is nuts. Nuts.

**John:** Yep. It’s frustrating. And I think what I don’t understand and I doubt there is a reasonable explanation for it is what they were actually after. I mean, were they demanding a time machine to go back 20 years and unmake this movie? Were they asking her to apologize for making this movie? Basically, they didn’t want anything bad to happen to Brandon Teena, because that’s what it seems to be. Is that like I can understand the frustration of like not wanting to see people who look like you hurt in movies. I get that. And that sense of like if all you ever saw – if you were a Jewish person and all you ever saw were movies about the Holocaust, or a black person and all you ever saw were movies about slavery, yeah, I could see how that could be really, really frustrating. But the thing is that’s not the only movies that are out there for LGBT people. There’s thousands of film festivals across the country that highlight the broad diversity of experiences of these people.

So, rather than picking this one movie to harsh one, acknowledge that there’s other stories out there and start telling those stories, but don’t show up at this Q&A and not ask questions but rather attack the filmmaker who made this movie.

**Craig:** You know, you’re getting to something true here, which is that it’s not real to them because what happened to Brandon Teena happened before they were born. This movie came out before they were born.

Here’s a little advice, children. If something happened before you existed, consider that before you smirkily dismiss it as obviously wrong. Because you don’t know. You know who does know? Kimberly Peirce. You know who lived through that time and did not conform to gender standards and did not conform to sexuality standards in the mid-90s, in the early 90s? Kim Peirce.

So, fuck you, to start with. I’ll give you back your own poster. And I want to also say that I support the casting and employment of transgender actors. I do. I want to see that. I want to see it, by the way, not so that they’re only ghettoized into playing transgender parts either. I’m okay with – and more than okay, I’m hopeful that transgender people will become more visible in all aspects of life, as well they should be. But we have to address some math here.

The latest statistics tell us that 0.6% of the United States population is transgender. 0.6%. Okay? Now, very few people in the United States are crazy enough to want to be an actor. Of those very few crazy people, a very, very tiny amount of them actually train to be an actor. Of those tiny, tiny amount of people, very few of them are any good at it. And of those tiny people, very few of them are the right age or look for a part that is based on a person who actually lived. It is simply not realistic to say that you cannot make a movie about a specific person and only limit the portrayal of that person to somebody that fits characteristics that frankly are not essential to the humanity of that person.

Why I love the movie Boys Don’t Cry is because I empathize and feel for the humanity of somebody that is not like me. That’s the point. And that’s what actors do. They created the empathy of the separation between themselves and who they play.

**John:** That’s what actors do. That’s what directors do. That’s what filmmakers do. That’s what writers do. They create the experience of being in another person’s perspective. Another person’s life for two hours on a big screen. And that is a remarkable thing that takes tremendous talent up and down the call sheet.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100%. I mean, I love watching – part of the magic of Hamilton is watching people that don’t fit the racial characteristics or even the sexual characteristics of the people they’re portraying. And then you forget about it. Somebody like Christopher Jackson, who oftentimes – he’s not unsung, believe me, but maybe some bigger names get mentioned when people talk about Hamilton, but Christopher Jackson does an unbelievable job portraying George Washington. Christopher Jackson is African American. George Washington owned slaves. But you can tell when you watch Hamilton how much love Christopher Jackson has for Washington. What he’s doing is connecting with him through empathy across these divisions and that is a beautiful thing. That is what the art of performance is.

And these fucking children do not understand. They don’t understand how movies are made. I don’t even think they understand why movies are made. They are ridiculous and stupid. And I’m angry at them and I want to buy Kim Peirce a sandwich. Or something.

**John:** Yes. She likes a beer. Next time we’re all in LA together we can have a beer with her.

**Craig:** Beer it is.

**John:** She’s an awesome filmmaker. Going back to this idea of only blank can play blank, it fails logic on the sort of reductio ad absurdum level. You can always draw more specific characteristics that you’re going to say like, well, you have to be this, you have to be this, until the point that there’s no person – like the Venn diagram does not work. There’s no person who actually falls in there, especially if you’re trying to model after a real person.

So, you know, look at Black Swan. There was criticism of Natalie Portman because she’s not really a ballerina. Well, okay, do you want an actress or do you want a ballerina? You got to pick at some point.

Not everybody in the Godfather movies was Italian. You know what? Coppola thought that was okay. I think it’s okay, too.

**Craig:** James Caan. Not exactly an Italian name.

**John:** Not an Italian name. And the director and two of the main actors in 12 Years a Slave are British, so they don’t have the African American experience. How dare they be in that movie?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s the absurdity that you get to here. Also, when you do the only blank can play blank, you sort of encourage less specificity. You encourage filmmakers to be less specific about who those characters are, so they don’t get stuck in these traps. I worry that it’s these kind of protests and outrage that make people more nervous to make movies like the James Barry movie because they can anticipate, crap, this is going to happen if we do this.

Like what are the James Barry people supposed to do? Are they supposed to cast Rachel Weisz, a very talented actor, to play this? Or should they do this worldwide talent search to find the transgender person? I guess they can do that, too, but Rachel Weisz is producing the movie. So, there’s no great answer for this.

**Craig:** I think that in our desire to advance the cause of people that have been underrepresented in movies and film, to the point where they are almost invisible, we have to make it so that we advance their cause without requiring that some roles be cast with certain kinds of people, because what happens is those movies as you say simply will not get made.

I mean, nobody makes – first of all, the idea that Boys Don’t Cry was some huge cash grab by Kimberly Peirce is fucking insane. The movie cost $2 million. It is the epitome of a passion project where the expectation is no one is going to make a damn penny. And I don’t think anybody did make a damn penny off of that movie. It wasn’t Titanic. You know, it was Boys Don’t Cry. You know who saw it? People like you and me in LA and New York. I mean, come on.

So, these movies are already nobody wants to pay for them to be made. So, there’s a – you have to sometimes tradeoff visibility of individuals with visibility of stories. You and I both know this. It’s hard to get movies made if you don’t case certain kinds of people in them. And then you have people who are brilliant at it, and sometimes it works beautifully. You know, where you have a guy like Lee Daniels and you know my worship of Precious. Like I’m obsessed with Precious. He found somebody perfect, Gabourey Sidibe, to play Precious. But he also put in Monique. And he also put in Mariah Carey. He’s not stupid. Right?

And he got amazing performances out of both of them. He’s not dumb. Right? So there’s certain people – frankly, the bias that we don’t talk about enough is the beauty bias.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** You know, everybody has to be beautiful in movies. That’s the other problem. Everybody. They all have to be. Look at the supporting roles in Boys Don’t Cry. This is a story that takes place in rural Nebraska, and everyone is gorgeous. Chloe Sevigny does not run around randomly in Nebraska. That’s not how it goes. You know, movies make everything glowy and beautiful.

Movies are illusions of reality. They are. That’s just the way it is. And I don’t want to see these stories not get told because there are prescriptions about who can play what kind of actor. It kills me to think that My Left Foot would not exist in our culture and in our world if they said we have to cast somebody who actually has cerebral palsy. Because here’s the deal: there is no one on the earth better at acting than Daniel Day Lewis. No one. The end.

You cast a great performer, always. And while you’re doing that if you can also advance the visibility and the employment and presence of all kinds of people in movies, in all kinds of roles, then you are a good person doing good work.

But to train your laser on this is outrageous and ignorant.

**John:** I agree. So let’s look for some solutions here. Let’s look for a solution if you are an audience member who is showing up at this screening with these concerns. My suggestion would be to start your question, an actual question would be something like, “If you were to make this film now…” Like that’s fine. Then you can ask her, hey, this is the movie you made then, but if you were to make this film, what would that be? Because then you’re actually asking for an answer.

You’re saying, okay, what would you do differently now? Or are there things you’d do differently? You can bring up the issue of casting trans people in this movie that way, rather than slamming her for not having cast a trans person 20 years ago in this movie that was groundbreaking.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That’s my suggestion for an audience.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And another possible question would be to say here are some contemporary criticisms of Boys Don’t Cry. Dada, dada, dada. How do you respond to this? That’s a fair question. And then let the filmmaker answer. The point is don’t – how about this, don’t go to Q&A sessions with speakers if you are disgusted by them and believe they have nothing of value to say.

I’m not showing up to hear David Duke do a Q&A. I don’t have any questions for him. If I don’t have real questions for somebody, I don’t go somewhere. It’s just dumb. [sighs]

**John:** So let’s talk about as a filmmaker and sort of what the solutions are here. I think, you know, I’m calling for awareness. You got to be aware of both what you’re doing right now and sort of the environment in which it’s going to come out in. All of the audiences that are going to be effected by your movie. And make decisions based on that.

So, I think, clearly if you’re making this James Barry movie, you have to be very mindful of how it’s going to play everywhere. And as we talked about on the original episode, like you have to make fundamental decisions. Is James Barry a transgender person or is it a woman who is disguising herself as a man to do this job. And that’s a very different thing. And you’re going to have to make that call. But you’re going to make one narrative choice and the world is going to make a different choice, perhaps. And so it’s complicated.

But you’re going into complicated waters.

**Craig:** You are. I think unfortunately every filmmaker today has to presume that they’re going to upset people. No matter what you do. It doesn’t matter. In fact, weirdly and sadly and ironically the only movies that are immune to a kind of offended hypersensitive backlash are movies that are disgusting, or crude, or cruel, because they’re viewed as dismissible and therefore, you know, so if you make some dumb movie about three muscle-bound dudes shooting at each other in the woods, which actually doesn’t sound that dumb. Actually sounds kind of cool. But regardless, that movie – no one is going to expect that movie to deliver anything of any value. It’s not there to provoke any thought.

So, everyone will just ignore it. But if you dare make a movie that deals with any social issues whatsoever, then you just have to know I’m speaking to an audience. I believe that the audience will understand my intentions and my heart. I believe that this will do some good. I also understand that a percentage of people are going to be upset at anything I do here because of who I am, or because it’s not perfect.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s that.

**John:** That is that.

**Craig:** And there’s nothing you can do. There’s literally nothing you can do. Just price it in. That’s the world.

**John:** Yep. And maybe don’t go to Reed College if they invite you to do a Q&A.

**Craig:** Expel them. I mean it. Ugh.

**John:** Let’s transition from outrage to sadness. You finished a script this week, but that’s not necessarily an entirely joyful thing. So, talk us through what you’re feeling right now, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting, so I call it Post-Scriptdom Depression. And before I thought this would be a good topic to talk about, I checked with you and just said is this just me or do have this? And you’re like, oh no, no, no, I do have it. So, I think–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe if you and I both have it, we’re probably not alone. And it’s this thing that happens when you finish a screenplay or you finish a novel, there’s a sadness that just sort of washes in. And I’ve been thinking about why. And I have some theories. They’re just theories. I don’t know if they’re true.

Well, for starters, there’s this exuberation that occurs when you’re making something, and that is the thrill of boundless possibilities. And when you get to the end of something, there are no more possibilities. It is this. And in part there is a sense of loss there. And in part, also, I think whatever dreams you had of transcending greatness are finally giving way to reality, which is – it’s a book. It’s a script. You know, no matter how wonderful of a job you do, it’s probably not Huckleberry Finn. It’s probably not Chinatown. But it’s, you know, there it is.

**John:** It was always that destination way in the distance, and you got closer, and closer, and you got the excitement, and then you’re there and you’re like, oh, I’m here. It’s no longer a dream. It’s actually a thing. And you stop having the dream. And it’s strange to wake up out of that dream.

**Craig:** It is strange to wake up out of that dream. It’s true. And when you do wake up out of it, you are also required to reenter the world around you. And with that, there is a sense of things that we may have turned away from as we were buried in this thing. It’s a bit of a strangeness as you readapt to your normal life. You also lose that sense of purpose that you had for a while there. Creative people don’t generally show up from 9 to 5 at an office and tick boxes. We have purpose when we’re creating. And when we finish, it’s gone.

**John:** Yeah. That sense of, you know, reentry into the world hit me really hard here, because so I showed up in Paris and I was midway through the book, so this Arlo Finch, the book I’m writing. And I really had to buckle down to finish this book. And so I’m newly arrived in Paris. I’m buckled down into the book. And the book though was at least familiar. So even though everything else around me was really unfamiliar, the book was familiar. So I could sort of just hide inside this book for a while.

And so for several hours a day I was just inside this book. And it was comfortable. It was familiar. But once the book was done, well, I don’t have the book anymore to sort of hide inside. And suddenly I’m looking around and like, oh, there’s all this city and it’s cold and my heat isn’t turned on. But the homesickness hit me really hard. So, people on Instagram sort of saw my homesickness phase, but it really struck me like, oh wow, I’m not actually home. I don’t have all my comfortable things around me. I can’t find a kale salad anywhere.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I think I naturally would have felt some homesickness, like it was about that sort of four-week, five-week time where homesickness tends to kick in for me, but also I didn’t have the book anymore, and it was all just falling away from me. And I got really sad. It was a rough kind of week, until the heat finally came on, and I found a kale salad, and things sort of slowly got better.

**Craig:** I think the French probably don’t have much in the way of kale salads because they appreciate things that taste good, in general. Sorry.

**John:** Kale is delicious.

**Craig:** Blech.

**John:** And I miss my kale salad. Back in Los Angeles, we have a garden. And we grow kale. And so I have kale like three or four times a week. I just love kale. And I was really missing it here.

So, over Thanksgiving I actually found – we went to this restaurant and they had the sweet potatoes I described as being so delicious at Thanksgiving. It was actually a kale and sweet potato dish. And so you can’t do any better than that.

**Craig:** Well, there’s this other thing that writing gives us and that is an easy excuse to avoid things. So, in the case of you arriving in France, there’s a lot of things you could do to confront the uncomfortabilities. Like, okay, I don’t like this, but I’m going to go walk around. I’m going to go try and learn the language. I’m going to go and force myself to live out of my comfort zone, but not while I’m writing a book. I’ve got to finish my book first.

And then you finish it and you’re like, ugh, I have to do these things I don’t like. There’s also – when we’re writing, we have total control over the work. Especially – and maybe almost exclusively when we’re writing the first draft of the thing. It’s ours completely. When we arrive at the end, there is either a conscious or subconscious awareness that that is over. And that from this point forward the world is going to come crashing in on this. And that hurts a little bit, too.

**John:** Well, it’s also the anxiety, because I definitely want someone to read it, because I want someone to tell me that it’s really, really good, because I’ve known just for myself like, oh, this is really, really good for a long time. But now I have to send it out into the world. And I want them to tell me it’s really good, but there’s always the chance they’re not going to tell me it’s really good. And so the minute I am done, that’s closer to I have to send it out to somebody. And I have to address what they’re going to say.

And even if their notes are fantastic and they really like it, there’s still going to be a lot of work ahead. And so I’m going to have to dismantle this thing I just built to incorporate their better suggestions. And that’s horrible. You’re setting yourself up to be judged suddenly. And that’s the hard thing.

**Craig:** And it’s a kind of emotional whiplash, because the only way to finish a book or a screenplay is to believe in yourself completely. And to find your creative courage. And the courage of those creative convictions. And then when you’re done, and you have to send it out, you are required to turn on a dime and face the opposite direction, where you must have the courage of hearing opinions and reactions and allowing those to enter your mind as possibilities. And to consider that maybe you were wrong about things. Totally different.

I mean, it’s always hard to make any kind of turn like that. And yet here we are at the end of these processes required to do so.

**John:** So, I don’t want to get through this topic without saying, you know, it’s also normal to feel elation and joy. I don’t always feel depression when I get to the end of this thing. Sometimes it is just like I’m giddy. Sometimes I’m giddy because I’m finally done with this thing that’s been looming over me forever. Or, I’m so excited to write this next thing that I’m happy to move on. But the times where it hits me, it still always kind of surprises me a little bit. So, I think that’s why I wanted to call it out in this episode.

Everyone assumes like, oh, you must be so happy to be finished. I’m like, yeah, not necessarily. We’ll see sort of how it feels when I get there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I find that the more I personally care, the sadder I feel when it’s over. There are things that we do, of course, as jobs. And when those are over there is often a sense of relief. And, wow, I did it. Because the point was to finish. You know, you have a week to solve this third act. Go. Got it.

Well, it’s not my movie. I didn’t come up with any of this. Let me do Yeoman’s work here. And my week is over. And let’s go get an Old Fashioned here. But, when it’s ours and we care, I think the final bit of sadness that happens is we are saying goodbye in a weird way to characters that we lived and we were talking about actors and empathy – screenwriters when they write something that is original and they’re creating the voices for every person, and the choices, and the needs, and the wants, and the actions, we’re playing every part. We are the entire cast, schizophrenically, I use in the wrong way.

And we empathize with all of them. We feel all of it. It’s a lot of feeling. And then when it’s over you’re saying, okay, I’m not you anymore. You guys are you. And everybody is going to talk about you. That’s hard.

**John:** It’s hard.

**Craig:** It’s hard. Yeah.

**John:** At least with Arlo Finch I have two more books under contract to write, so I’ll be with these guys for a while.

**Craig:** Well there you go.

**John:** There you go. Another thing that happened this week was the Black List. So, this is the Black List, the annual list of the most-liked screenplays in Hollywood. The most-liked unproduced screenplays in Hollywood that our pal Franklin Leonard puts out.

So, this year I was one of the people announcing a script. I announced it on the Champs-Elysees, and it was fun and random. I got to sort of hear all the other people announcing their scripts. I got to see the big list. And, Craig, how many of these scripts on the Black List have you read?

**Craig:** Zero, sir.

**John:** I have read zero. I don’t think I’ve ever read a script that’s on the Black List, which must be shocking to some people who are aspiring writers who want to read all these scripts. But I don’t want to read any script unless I have to. I mean, if you asked me, I would read your script. But like otherwise I’m not going to go out of my way to read someone else’s script.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But these were the scripts that people did go out of their way to read. These are the development executives in Hollywood. It’s their favorite scripts. And so they got to go and pick the screenplays that they most enjoyed out of the year. And so we haven’t read any of these scripts, but I thought we could actually talk through the log lines that were submitted and just see some patterns here, because they’re so different from the things I would maybe have expected them to be.

So, first one I’ll read is Voyagers by Zach Dean. It’s the cosmic love story of Carl Sagan and Annuities Druyan, his wife.

**Craig:** Hmm. Could be good. We have Letters From Rosemary Kennedy by Nick Yarborough. This is a movie “told through a series of letters to family members, the tragic true story of Rosemary Kennedy, a vibrant, passionate young woman and oldest daughter of Joe and Rose Kennedy. Born with a severe learning disability, Rosemary so worried her father with her erratic behavior that he believed the stigma of mental illness in the family would ruin his plans to build a political dynasty. He hid her away in convents and sanitariums and ultimately had her lobotomized.” Yeesh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, screenwriter Nick Yarborough. He’s the guy who is doing the James Barry movie at the start of the podcast.

**Craig:** That, by the way, we talk about this all the time. These screenplays aren’t necessarily sold screenplays either. These are just ones that have been passed around and people like them. The only requirement, I think, is that they’re not produced. I don’t know if Letters From Rosemary Kennedy is set up somewhere. But what I do know is somebody read it and said, “This guy would be a great guy to write this movie we do want to make about James Barry.” So, that’s the name of the game right there, isn’t it?

**John:** Mm-hmm. Next up we have Linda and Monica by Flint Wainess. This is “the absolutely crazy true story of the relationship between Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, the woman who nearly destroyed the Clinton presidency – and herself in the process.”

**Craig:** Free Guy by Matt Lieberman. “A bank teller stuck in his routine discovers he’s a background character in a realistic, open world action-adventure video game and he is the only one capable of saving the city.”

**John:** Yep. The Kings of Maine by Kathy Charles. “Living with his wife and child in a trailer while working as a janitor, Stephen King struggles with alcoholism and his own dark history as he attempts to complete Carrie.”

**Craig:** And the last one we’ll summarize here is Blond Ambition by Elyse Hollander. This one got the most votes. “In 1980s New York, Madonna struggles to get her first album released while navigating fame, romance, and a music industry that views women as disposable.”

**John:** All right. So, this is a little sampling of the much longer list, but I thought it was really fascinating, because I really did grab these kind of randomly, but you notice some trends here. First off, these don’t sound like, oh, it’s a medium idea, maybe it’s competently executed. No, these are sort of swing for the fences ideas. Based on these log lines you can see like, okay, they’re trying something very different. This isn’t like another romantic comedy. This isn’t another action thriller. This is either a super high concept thing like Free Guy was, or you’re basing things around real events and real people and telling the fictionalized or semi-fictionalized story with those real people in them.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a predominance here, and I saw it carries through in the large list, the complete list, there’s a predominance of biopics. There’s a predominance of stories that are telling either a straight-ahead story about people that we know, but maybe we think, oh, wouldn’t normally get a biopic. Or, more frequently, sideways entries into biopics like you could do a straight-ahead story about Monica Lewinsky, but what about Linda Tripp? Well, you could do obviously a million stories about the Kennedys, but what about Rosemary Kennedy? What about Carl Sagan’s wife? What about Stephen King’s wife and his kid?

So you see this comes up over, and over, and over again. There’s a certain kind of movie that – I have to say, I’m a little concerned about the Black List right now. I’m a little worried.

**John:** All right. Tell me.

**Craig:** Well, you know, the sanctity of it is that people are voting on what they feel is the best script. A lot of the people are creative executives. I think maybe some assistants. I don’t know. But I’m concerned that we’re getting a lot of sameness and we’re getting a lot of things that feel like maybe they’re almost designed to be noticed by the Black List. I don’t know how else to put it.

Like, if you see that a certain kind of movie keeps getting picked by the Black List, if you write another one of those, obviously all of these scripts are written well. I’m just getting a little concerned that there’s a certain homogeneity that is starting to filter up here.

**John:** I can see that. But when we were starting out in the industry, it was the spec sale bonanza, so it was things like The Ticking Man, where it’s this guy, this robot man has a bomb in his chest that will blow up, and that was the big sale. So, it wasn’t the Black List, but it was that sense of there was a sameness in like it’s Die Hard but…or it’s Under Siege but on a tram. There was a sameness to that. And that move has passed.

There is a sameness to some of these things where like you’re taking a real-life person and either fictionalizing them or you’re telling a sort of special kind of biopic. But, Craig, I’ll take these over the sort of like ridiculously high concept things that we had sort of when we were starting out.

I think the difference here is these ideas could show really good writing. The big high concept action thriller, it kind of can never show really good writing. You can’t show what a person is capable of because it’s not going to have the time to do the character work, to do the clever humor. All the ones we described, I can imagine really good writing being very visible in them. And that’s what these things are good for. They’re useful for someone to see and say like, oh, I see how this person could write another thing for us really, really well.

**Craig:** I’ll give you a little pushback on that. I think that there are terrific scripts that are action-thrillers or action-adventures that do showcase terrific writing. And it’s not that these scripts aren’t terrifically written. It’s more that I’m just concerned about the Kudzu problem that – it’s the same thing that happens with the Oscars. I mean, we know for instance that certain kinds of Oscar movies are Oscar movies. That’s become a thing. It’s an Oscar movie. They made that to win an Oscar. And when we say they, we don’t mean the creators. The creators made it for love, but whoever put money into it – Harvey – you know, they’re trying to win Oscars. They know how to work that angle.

And we know that certain movies are wonderful but won’t win an Oscar. And movies that are beloved would never, ever win an Oscar, and yet some movie that we’ve sort of forgotten has. So, the only thing I worry about is that because there is this concentration of a certain kind of good writing, we are missing other kinds of good writing.

There is, of course, also – I’m just going to mention it – the Lax Mandis controversy. [laughs] It’s hard to ignore. One of the Black List scripts was titled Lax Mandis. I don’t know the full title.

**John:** I think it was Untitled Lax Mandis spec or something.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was apparently written by a creative executive. And the story is essentially a not even at all veiled swipe at screenwriter Max Landis. And in the screenplay the hero is a beleaguered creative executive trying to make wonderful movies in the world, and his enemy is Lax Mandis who just wants to make crap. Which is a really [laughs] – I mean, whatever you think of Max Landis, that is backwards in general. And I thought, wow, if you were trying to get on the Black List, a thing voted on by creative executives, what a brilliant little bit of pandering there. Wasn’t thrilled about that.

**John:** Yeah. But again, we haven’t read this. So maybe there actually – for all we know–

**Craig:** I read that.

**John:** There could be something ingenious about it. You read that?

**Craig:** Yeah, that one I read. Because I said I read none of them, but I read that one because I saw the controversy and I didn’t want to necessarily have an opinion if the thing was wonderfully written. I don’t talk about screenplays that I don’t like, so I’m not going to talk about that one.

**John:** That sounds very good. We actually had a Twitter exchange about that today.

So, there’s the Black List. There’s also a thing that Stuart sent called the Hit List, which I wasn’t aware of, but it’s a similar kind of list of things that people loved. On both of those lists notably you will find many familiar names from Scriptnotes. So, you’ll see people who wrote in for Three Page Challenges. You’ll see people who wrote in with questions. So, I’m not at all surprised that both the people who listen to the show are really good writers who are on these lists, and also the people who are writing these things that show up on a list are our listeners, too.

So, I think there’s a good overlap between these. I think what’s most fascinating, though, I think for our listeners is we answer so many questions, and the questions we didn’t even answer in this week’s episode were about like, oh, I’m basing it around this real person, but the life rights or whatever – like, who cares. Like, all of these things – they didn’t get Stephen King’s life rights to write The Kings of Maine. They just wrote it.

**Craig:** They just wrote it.

**John:** And so I appreciate the bravery of these things. They didn’t ask Max Landis for his permission either. In many cases, like these movies can’t be made, like Blond Ambition can’t be made unless you can get Madonna’s sort of sign off, or at least her musical rights. You can’t make that movie. But, you wrote a great script, so that’s great. And people like your script. So that’s a good thing, too.

I was heartened to see so many women on the list. I think that’s awesome as well. So, I’m pro-Black List in the sense of at least we’re talking about the screenwriters, we’re talking about the people who are trying to be the next generation of writers. So, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** No question. I’m pro-Black List, too. I mean, specifically this Black List, the voted on/curated list. You know, and Max Landis said, “This is the Black List jumping the shark.” I don’t think so. I understand why he feels that way. I mean, this is a personal attack on him and I get that. I don’t know if it’s jumping the shark.

But Fonzie is definitely like looking at the water right now, like measuring. There is a warning sign here. There is a little bit of a red flag. I think Franklin is well aware. And so it’s something that I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what the solution is. You don’t want to fix what isn’t broken, but some danger signals here. So, hopefully, you know, things get better. But in general, big fan.

**John:** Yeah, I also want to say congratulations to everyone who is on the list, because it’s great that people are noticing the work you’re doing. So, I definitely applaud that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing actually came up this week because we had to pay our rent. So, we – obviously we live in Los Angeles most of the time, but we’re living here in Paris, and so we had to pay our rent here in Paris. And to do so we normally have to transfer money from our Los Angeles account to our French account in order to be able to pay this rent. And whenever you transfer money overseas you get hit by currency exchanges. And it sucks up a lot of your money.

So, this time we did a different service. I’ll talk about the one we use. I think there’s other ones that do it, so I’m not specifically advocating this one. But we used a place called TransferWise. Essentially how it works is a system kind of Hawala, which is another sort of international transfer system where it’s kind of a trust-based thing where we’re transferring our money from a Los Angeles into a US-based account, other people are transferring into a French-based account, and an exchange happens where they don’t actually have to move the money back and forth. Basically, we’re using some of their money to pay our landlord–

**Craig:** Oh, that’s very smart. I see.

**John:** And so that way the money never actually has to be converted from one currency to the other currency.

**Craig:** Kind of brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** And so it was invented by some very smart people out of Estonia. But it’s now I think based out of England. But it was really smart. And I was really appreciative that somebody figured out how to do this, because it saved us a lot of money in paying our rent.

**Craig:** That’s so smart. So, at its basic level, somebody in France is paying your rent in France, and you’re paying somebody’s rent in America?

**John:** Yeah, so it’s not specifically rent. So, basically the wire transfer that would have gone to our landlord’s bank account is actually coming from a French bank account to his account. And so therefore no money had to be exchanged for currency rates.

**Craig:** Great. Brilliant. Well, I have a similar One Cool Thing that is not at all surprising or unknown to anyone under the age of I’ll say 35. But I find it distressingly not known by people over 35, of which you and I are both. So, Venmo. Venmo. This is where everybody under 35, and a bunch of people over 35 go, “What? We already know about Venmo.”

Sorry, not talking to you. But if you don’t, get it now. It’s the greatest. Simplest thing in the world. It’s just an app that you link up to your bank account and you are able to send people any amount of money with your phone, real simple.

So, the horrible thing that happens at the end of some 12-person dinner, where one poor bastard is collecting people’s bits of money, and someone has a credit card, and someone has cash. Ugh. All done. Go away. Everybody Venmo this amount. Boom. You Venmo it to me. I pay the whole bill. We’re done.

Somebody buys tickets for you and you show up at the game. Venmo. Done.

Super easy. Super convenient. I use it all the time. Love it.

**John:** Love it. Yeah, I would not have necessarily known about it, except for Stuart Friedel, who is a millennial, who does use it for all that kind of stuff as well. And, yeah, it’s great for that.

The other thing which while we’re talking about money is I have to – I want one of our listeners to explain why when you pay the bill for the restaurant in the US they take your card away and they swipe it through the machine and you have to wait five minutes for your card to come back. Where everywhere else in Europe they come to your table with a little thing and they swipe your card there. Basically they put the card in there and they do it right at the table.

**Craig:** I think part of that is tip culture. Because in America you’re supposed to leave a tip, and they don’t want to stand there and watch you leave the tip.

**John:** Yeah, but here what they do is they give you the thing, because you have to punch in your pin code. I’m sure there’s a French term for it. The way they look away while you punch in the code. It’s the same thing like the Square Readers where you pop 10%, 20%, 30%, whatever. It would work in the US if someone just had the courage to actually use these machines, because they’re just so much better and so much faster.

Because then once you get the bill you can just do it and leave. It’s lovely.

**Craig:** I know. It’s great. I greatly prefer the European system for that. No question.

**John:** All right. We won’t fix all those issues this week, but we did as much as we could. So, our show, as always, was produced by Godwin Jabangwe. Edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. It’s such a good outro. So, Matthew, please put the long version in. Don’t cut it short. Because it’s so good.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send us longer questions. For short questions, you can hit us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And we might get back to you right away, like we did today.

We are on Facebook. Search for the Scriptnotes podcast. If you have opinions about our discussion of transgender issues, maybe Facebook would be a place you could talk to us about those.

**Craig:** No, I’m sure no one will have anything to say.

**John:** Not a bit. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the Scriptnotes app, which you can download for your iOS device. We’re also in the Android Store for Scriptnotes App. That connects into Scriptnotes.net, which is where you find all the back episodes going back to Episode 1.

As we record this there are 33 USB drives left in the John August store. So, if you want all the back episodes, or the first 250 back episodes, and the bonus episodes, you can get those.

We will not be making any more of those until at least Episode 300. So, if you want one, get them now.

And that is our show for this week. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Hulu Developing Foxy Brown](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/hulu-developing-foxy-brown-tv-reboot-starring-meagan-good-955758)
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* [The sexiest and craziest French film title translations](http://www.thelocal.fr/20161208/the-sexiest-and-craziest-french-film-title-translations)
* [Pardon My Titres](http://pardonmytitres.tumblr.com/)
* Pardon My Titres: [That Awkward Moment](http://pardonmytitres.tumblr.com/image/77185185096)
* [Secret Life of Dr. James Miranda Barry](http://deadline.com/2016/12/rachel-weisz-secret-life-of-dr-james-miranda-barry-maven-pictures-1201868743/)
* [Reed College Boys Don’t Cry Protest](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/13/kimberly-peirce-boys-dont-cry-filmmaker-accused-of/)
* [TransferWise](https://transferwise.com/us/)
* [Venmo](https://venmo.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_280.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 279 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we will be looking at how characters tell us what they’re after, either with or without a song. We’ll also be answering listener questions about how much despair to feel when a movie similar to your spec is announced. How to get started off an improv group. And whether Craig and I are wrong about gurus.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a huge question there. [laughs]

**John:** There’s a giant question mark at the end of that, because it’s possible that we’re wrong about everything.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**John:** One of our listeners wrote in with a question saying like, “These other guys, they think you’re wrong.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And we’ll give you the answer at the end of the episode.

**Craig:** Oh my god, good. I was hungry.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] First off, though, we have a correction. In last week’s episode I misspoke. I said stop trying to make ___ happen was from Clueless. I was completely wrong. That’s from Mean Girls.

**Craig:** Oh. Well, you know, but Mean Girls is from Clueless. They are on a line. They’re on a continuum. So, I think you are all right.

**John:** They are on a continuum. I think you would not have Mean Girls without Clueless, but it is its own movie, and it’s wonderful in its own right. So, people wrote in with that correction and I don’t want to put false things out into this world.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because, you know, everybody else is putting out real things. All other websites and podcasts promulgate accurate information.

**John:** Yeah. We’re trying to be an accurate podcast. So, I want to make that correction. We also had a follow up from a listener. Andy [Keir] in Brooklyn who wrote in, “Thank you, John, for recommending The Good Place as your One Cool Thing. It is beyond cool. Binged it in a couple of days and I love it. It was slightly awkward to notice that on that show, which is brilliantly written, it contained two of the clams which you prescribed earlier in the same episode, which are ‘Wait, what?’ and ‘Good talk.’ I’m not saying you are wrong in any way – I would never – it was just a fun bit of cognitive dissonance. Neither of the clams took me out of the show, it’s just too good, which goes to show you if you’re really good you can get away with it. The rest of us should listen to you guys.”

So. I got to say, The Good Place, got clams in there.

**Craig:** Everybody has a clam. Everybody has a clam somewhere. They’re not something that you have to completely prescribe. I mean, there are a few that I think signify a total lack of effort or care creativity. If you’re saying, “She’s like the blankety blank from hell,” you’re advertising that you suck. But some of them are, you know, in what we’ll call early clam stage. You know, I mean, there’s grown clams, the big gnarly ones with the barnacles on them. And then there’s these baby clams. So, ‘wait what?’ and ‘good talk’ are probably still in the baby clam area. And they’re not toxic to anything.

You know, this is what happens. Sometimes you and I, we do these things, and we forget that people take us very, very seriously. And then they start thinking, oh my god, I have to take this out of script. You know, take it as advice. It’s just advice.

**John:** Yes. So, right before we went to record, I got an email from a showrunner who copied in a long thread of exchanges that happened within his writing staff. Basically he had listened to the episode and passed along to his writing staff like, hey, let’s take a look at this. And there was a considerable discussion.

So, I have not cleared with him whether we are allowed to discuss his discussion. But I thought it was fascinating that a genuine bona fide show that is on the air right now had a discussion about this clam list based on our episode. So, it’s a thing that’s out there. And we weren’t the people who came up with this list. We were just passing it along. So, I would go back to this idea that it’s not – the two clams that he mentions here in The Good Place, those are relatively fresh clams. They haven’t been lying on the beach for a long time. They don’t smell. They’re not brand new, but they’re not horrible things in there.

What you were suggesting about sort of the ‘blankety blank from hell,’ that was such a horrible one that it was not even on the list that we read aloud.

**Craig:** Cause that’s not even a clam anymore. It’s decomposed into some sort of goo.

**John:** Yeah. They grind it up and they use the shells to repave Martha Stewart’s driveway.

**Craig:** That’s right. And then whatever protein was left goes into some sort of slurry for pet food.

**John:** Yeah. It’s really good. Or, the seagulls have just picked it apart, and you don’t want that. If the seagulls are all involved with your joke, it’s a bad joke.

**Craig:** So, the writers that were discussing the clam list, without going into their specifics, where there a few of them that they were defending as maybe not so clammy or–?

**John:** There were a few that I think were being defended, but it was more the idea of whether the list was a good idea or not a good idea. Whether it was calling out a list of things not to do was a helpful or an unhelpful practice.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I mean, look, a lot of times when we talk about things, we are doing a little bit of what Penn & Teller used to do back in the day. So, Penn & Teller, like all magicians, subscribe to a magician’s code, which is to not give away the secrets to tricks. But then there are some tricks that are so clammy they’re like, screw it, we’re going to give it away.

I remember I went to go see Penn & Teller when I was a kid and they did a trick with cups and balls and moving them around. And it was impressive. And then they said, okay, but the thing is the magic part is – obviously it’s a gimmick, right? But the skill is actually in the manipulation. You are not as impressed as you should be, so we’re now going to redo this trick with clear cups, so you can see what we’re doing. And you will be more impressed. And I was. Because there’s a remarkable amount of dexterity. But they’re whole thing there was, you know what, this trick is a clam. We’re going to give it away.

And I’m okay with that. I don’t think we should ever feel like, just philosophically speaking, you and I, as we sometimes pull the curtain aside and reveal some of the tricks of the trade. You know, it’s okay. If they are clammy, you know, what are we really – I mean, I’m not sure what the argument is for not exposing these things as goofy.

**John:** Yeah. And the other thing which came up in this thread, which I think is a good thing worth pointing out, and sort of highlighting for our readers is there are some things that become kind of a meta clam, where they’re not funny anymore, but by repeating them they kind of become funny again. Or they inform a character who thinks that that is funny. So, a great example is on the American version of The Office, “That’s what she said.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s not actually funny, but Michael Scott thinks it’s so funny is part of the joke behind it. And so, you know, there can be reasons why you’re deliberating using one of these things so you know it’s not in itself funny because in a broader context the characters who think it’s funny makes it hilarious.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. I would think the audience understands the difference. Even if they intellectually aren’t quite parsing it out so specifically the way a writer would, they clearly do get it. Everybody knows what’s going on when people on The Office say, “That’s what she said.” Everybody knows that.

I mean, look, think about – when Homer started going, “D’oh,” that was him making fun of goofy sitcoms, where people go, “D’oh.” They were making fun of it. And now it’s his own thing. It’s part of his character and nobody really connects it back to a kind of, well frankly, demeaning swipe at very clunky, poorly drawn characters that had come before him.

**John:** It’s interesting. D’oh I think is a great example because it’s great when Homer says it, but if you have any other character saying it in a Homer Simpson way, it doesn’t really work. But I’ve seen it used increasingly as like a parenthetical, or as a way to express the feeling of D’oh without actually having the character say, “D’oh.” It’s that sudden realization that you’ve made a fool of yourself is well expressed by D’oh, even if you’re not having a character say it.

So, I’ve seen it in scene descriptions, even though I don’t see characters saying it who aren’t Homer Simpson.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the official – I wish that our friend Matt was here. The official term that they use in their screenplays is something like “disappointed grunt.” They don’t actually write D’oh in Simpsons’ episodes.

**John:** Yeah. And a good lesson if you’re writing animation in general is there’s a tendency to write parentheticals for all those things that are said aloud. Basically because you’re recording lines, any sort of sound that a character makes you have to write a parenthetical for them to do that, so you actually get the sound recorded. And so you will see in animation scripts sometimes a bunch of characters talking who don’t actually have dialogue. They just have parentheticals for the sounds that they’re making.

**Craig:** That’s kind of cool. Yeah, efforts, right? I guess it all falls under efforts. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** Our final bit of follow up is Weekend Read, which is the app my company makes for reading screenplays on your iPhone. Every year about this time we start putting up the For Your Consideration scripts. So, there are a bunch of them that are out there right now for big studio features and little independent features, all vying for Best Screenplay awards.

So, we have a new category inside the app for all those scripts. So, if you’re curious to read those scripts and would like to read them on your phone, just download Weekend Read. It’s in the app store. It’s a free download. And you can start reading the screenplays that are going to be up for awards this season.

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. First, I mean, I have to watch the movies, too, don’t I?

**John:** It’s probably a good idea to watch the movies. I think your best bet is to watch the movies and the movies that you think are really good, read those screenplays. If you don’t think the movie is good, I say don’t read the screenplay.

**Craig:** Great point. Great point. I don’t know what to do.

**John:** You don’t read screenplays.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m being honest with you. I get the screeners and there’s one person in my house who is thrilled, every year, and it’s the wife. And some of these movies I’ve never even heard of. Oh god, I’m out of it. I’m out of it, man.

**John:** So, Mike keeps a spreadsheet, because we’re a spreadsheet family, of all the screeners that come in. And because they’re coming to Los Angeles, Godwin is logging them as they come in. And then every couple weeks he sends a package of all the screeners. So, we have a bunch of screeners here now. I have not watched one of them. I’m trying to watch as many movies in the theater as I possibly can because it’s the best place to see them, and it’s also fun to see them with French subtitles. So, like I’m seeing Arrival this weekend, which is finally coming out in Paris. So I’m excited.

**Craig:** What is the French word for Arrival?

**John:** It is Premier Contact.

**Craig:** Oh, First Contact. Wait a second, they’ve already made that movie.

**John:** I know. It’s crazy. So, there was a Star Trek movie, but that wasn’t called that here I guess.

**Craig:** And then there was Contact. There were two movies.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Contact is very, very similar – oh, French. You know that the French title for Hangover is A Very Bad Trip?

**John:** I do know that. And Another Very Bad Trip is the sequel.

**Craig:** Another Very Bad Trip. And that’s not translated from the French. They kept the title in English. They just made it A Very Bad Trip. [laughs] Well, I understand on some level the word hangover is idiomatic to English. There must be a French word for Hangover? Why didn’t they use that word? Maybe another movie had used it?

**John:** A lot of times it’s just because there’s a better term for the French market. This is actually a great segue into what we’re talking about today, because this last week I went and saw Vaiana and you’re like well what the hell is Vaiana? Well, Vaiana is Moana in places that are not the US and some other markets.

**Craig:** Do you know why?

**John:** I do know why. So, a couple of different reasons. So, first off, in Italy Moana is a famous porn star. So they couldn’t call the movie Moana there.

**Craig:** So cool.

**John:** In other parts of the world, Disney couldn’t clear trademark on Moana, so they had to use Vaiana. So, I saw this on posters and clearly it was the same movie. And so I assumed that when I watched the movie, because I watched the movie in English with French subtitles, I assumed that they would actually say Moana but then they would say Vaiana in the subtitles. But, no, they actually recorded the entire movie, every line of dialogue, every lyric, where they say Moana they say Vaiana in the version I saw.

And so in France and other markets where it’s released in English, but not in America or certain other markets, it’s Vaiana. And they sing it. 100% Vaiana when you see it in France or other markets.

**Craig:** I could see that. I mean, Disney, they’re kind of completionists. You know, they’re not going to let you sit in an Italian movie theater, and even though the movie is called Vaiana hear songs referring to their famous porn star.

**John:** Yeah. But I really liked the movie. And so this is where I have to do a full disclosure here. I have a consulting agreement with Disney animation, but I did not work on this movie at all. So this movie was a complete, you know, I had not seen a single frame of this movie. So I sat down and watched it and was surprised and delighted by how much I really enjoyed it.

And particularly I really liked how the I Want song works in this. So I thought this could be a topic for us to discuss is how characters tell us what they want. And there’s a way to do it in Disney movies, especially animation movies, that’s so literal but we also have to be able to figure out how to express what characters want in movies where they don’t have their own big number to express it.

**Craig:** It’s such a big topic because whether you’re writing a script or you’ve written a script and you’re now dealing with other people, producers, or anyone, what your character wants is the easiest, quickest, slam-dunk note you’re going to get if it’s not clear. That’s the one that they’ll just – that’s their right hook.

So, even though you and I try to not be prescriptive about things and rule-based, this is about as ruley as it gets. Your character must want something and we must know what it is.

**John:** Yeah. And so let’s talk about what that want is, and distinguish it from other wants. Because characters are going to have wants in every scene. They’re going to have motivations for what they’re trying to do next, what they’re trying to get out of this sequence, what their sort of goals are, their objectives. But what we’re talking about with want is sort of this big kind of metaphysical want. It’s like what they woke up with in the morning saying like, “This is the vision I have for my life. What is the positive outcome I sort of see for my life?”

And sometimes they won’t have full introspection. They won’t quite know what it was. They couldn’t articulate it to another character. But deep down inside there it’s there and we should be able to see it as an audience. That if the movie succeeds, they will be changed and they will get this thing that they were after. And that’s also kind of a crucial distinction between how movies work and how TV series work. Is that in a movie our expectation of an audience is we’re going to see that character get what they’re after at the end, or fail to get what they’re after.

In a TV series, that arc, that journey, is not meant to be completed. Not in the course of one episode. Or even the course of the whole series necessarily. They’re constantly on that journey towards that thing, but they’re not going to get there.

**Craig:** That’s right. Think about the opening narration to Star Trek. That’s sort of saying we have a general want, to seek out new life and go to new civilizations and boldly go where no man has gone before. Okay. I mean, I screwed that up, so sorry Trekkers, but the point is we want to explore. We want to explore the unknown. That’s what we want. But that’s vague and general. And vague and general is good, because every episode they need to discover some new challenge and overcome it. And have it end. And then a new one begins.

That’s not at all how movies work. That’s not how self-contained narratives work. There is a specific want to a specific character. And when you have the opportunity to express that through song, as musicals do, whether they’re stage musicals or film – and film musicals almost always now means animated – the character is able to sing what’s in their mind. They don’t need to have somebody else there. And in a way where a character onscreen would be a lunatic if they just started monologue-ing to nobody about what they wanted for three minutes, in a musical a character can sing it. And because they’re singing their internal voice, they can be – they don’t have to worry about subtext either. They can be on the nose.

And so you have these great songs like Part of Your World, when we did our Little Mermaid exploration. It’s harder to find a better and more specific I Want song than that.

**John:** Yeah. And you’ll notice these I Want songs, they almost always have the words I Want in them, or I Wish, or I Dream, or If Only I Could. And Part of Your World kind of does all of those things. It’s her vision of I wish I could be part of your world, up there where you can do all those things. She’s imagining her life in this other place, this better place, if only.

And so almost always this is the second song in the musical, we should say. The first song in one of these musicals tends to be this is the nature of the world, this is how the world currently functions. The second song is almost always the protagonist singing the I Want song. This is my vision for what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah. A couple other examples from Broadway that are really clear. Wouldn’t it be Loverly, from My Fair Lady. All I want is a room somewhere far away from the cold night air. And then Corner of the Sky from Pippin. I want to be where my spirit can run free.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Got to find my corner of the sky. So, people will just say I want stuff. Now, sometimes the songs that people sing are about things they think they want, but they’re not really what they do want. And that’s part of what the show is instructing. Like, Fiddler on the Roof, the second song right there is Tevye sings If I Were a Rich Man, and it’s all about wanting to be rich. But that’s not really what he wants.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But that’s part of the point of that show.

**John:** So, let’s take a listen to the song from Moana. It’s just her I Want song. It’s called How Far I’ll Go. It’s written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who did Hamilton, and Mark Mancina. So, let’s take a listen to three verses here and track sort of what she’s saying about where she sees herself and where she’s going. So let’s take a listen.

[Song plays]

I’ve been staring at the edge of the water
‘Long as I can remember, never really knowing why
I wish I could be the perfect daughter
But I come back to the water, no matter how hard I try

Every turn I take, every trail I track
Every path I make, every road leads back
To the place I know, where I cannot go
Where I long to be

See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me
And no one knows, how far it goes
If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me
One day I’ll know, if I go there’s just no telling how far I’ll go

**John:** So Craig. You have not seen the movie, but you’ve only listened to this song, and you were able to just sing it back to me just now. So, it stuck–

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** In your head to some degree.

**Craig:** Yeah. Lin-Manuel Miranda has some meager skill with this sort of thing. [laughs] So, the melody matches the vibe of the words beautifully. These things pair up when everything is working right and they complement each other. And so the melody kind of takes off as she takes off on what is very common in an I Want song, a flight of fancy.

So, you might think if you said to a child, “Talk about something you don’t have that you want,” it could come out whiney. I want this. I want it. And I don’t have it, and I want it. But, typically with these things, people begin to imagine having the thing they want. And you see them light up.

And inside of that is a promise for the movie. Therefore, we understand if they get it, they will be happier. Not just satisfied or not just making something go away. It’s not that whiney, greedy want. It’s this deeper spiritual aching. And we get to see the positive side, the as if.

And so you start typically with a contrast. This is what I don’t have. Dear God, you’ve made many, many poor people. I realize, of course, there’s no shame in being poor, but there’s no great honor either. And you start with the bummer. I’ve been standing on the edge of the water, long as I can remember, never really knowing why. I wish I could be the perfect daughter, but I come back to the water no matter how hard I try. Ugh, sucks.

Then, ooh, but if I were to have it. If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me, one day I’ll know. If I go, there’s just no telling how far I’ll go. That’s just the promise of this brave new day.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And it’s played in contrast to what she has now.

**John:** Yeah. So when you see the movie, or when you watch the screener with your wife, you will see that the song actually repeats twice. And so there’s a recall, a reprise of the song is very classically sort of a – the character has been on the journey. They’ve crossed their first trial and they sing a new version of the song. It’s really good.

This song actually reprises twice. And the last reprise, I thought, was actually fantastic in that it really plays on this idea of call. So, classically in a heroic story you have the call to adventure. In Moana, this is the water, you know, the sort of magical seashell she finds at the water, sort of coming to her when she was a baby. They do a great job sort of paying off the call at the end and her realization that the call wasn’t from out there, that the call was inside her. And it’s a really, really well done emotional amount, both how it’s animated and how it’s structured as a song.

So, this was I think just a slam dunk of an I Want song.

But we should talk about all those other movies that aren’t musicals that don’t get to have an I Want song, and how you can have the same effect, or at least some of the same thoughts behind an I Want song, even if the characters can’t sing their most innermost thoughts.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, now we get to the tricky part, right? You and I when we’re writing things that aren’t musical aren’t allowed to have our characters sing. We still, however, need to communicate this to the audience. So, there are some, well, I guess in keeping with our theme of revealing tricks and clear cups with the little balls in them, these are tricks. They’re tricks, but they work. For starters, the simplest one is to show someone longing visually. If you want to be, let’s say you want to be a great bicyclist, and I see you and you’re on a bike and you’re struggling. I don’t know anything about you yet. Just that you’re struggling on your bike and you’re going up this hill. And you’re sweating. And it’s hard. And you can barely make it. And, finally, you have to get off and walk the rest of the way. But when you get to the top of the hill, I see that you’re watching the Tour de France, and you’re seeing these great, great bicyclists go by. And in your eyes there’s just this longing. I know what you want now.

I know it as much as I would have from any song. I know why you don’t have it, and I know what you want.

**John:** Yeah. Those visuals where like the character doesn’t have to say something, but you sort of see them doing the action is fantastic. It’s weird, before you brought up the bicycle example, I was thinking of the kid who is leaning across the handlebars of his bike, watching the thing go by. That’s a very classic kind of image that we’ve seen. We saw it in the Star Trek movie, we’ve seen it in Star Wars as well.

You also see kids imitating the thing that they want to be, even though they don’t have the tools. And so they see the great violinist and they’re trying to play violin with two sticks. That’s that sense of this is a vision they see for themselves. And you’re establishing really early on who they think they could be, if only.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s certainly a goal.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes in comedies you’ll see characters, when you meet a character you meet them as the person they want to be. And then you realize that they’re pretending. Very common, frankly somewhat clammy way of meeting a character in a comedy.

Now, there is a helpful thing that we have that typically I Want musicals don’t have. Because the I Want musical is about the internal voice, it’s very rare for someone to sing it with someone else. Or even in the presence of somebody else. It’s almost always, you know, Ariel drifts off to her little cave of stuff and sings by herself. And Tevye is singing alone with his broken down horse. And Moana is singing alone on the beach.

Well, we have other people. And sometimes the best way to find out what our main character wants is for another character to figure it out for us. Or, for them to already know and say it. A very stark example of this is The Matrix. So, we meet Keanu Reeves, Mr. Anderson, and he’s somewhat troubled, but we’re not sure why, nor do we know what he wants. But then he is contacted by this mysterious woman, Morpheus, and then also Trinity. And she literally says, “I know what you want. You want the answer to the question, what is the Matrix.” And he says, “What is the matrix?” And I’m sitting there going, what? What is the matrix? I don’t know what the matrix is. Why do you want to know what the matrix is? Who is that? What’s happening?

These are good mysteries that will be solved, going back to our mystery versus confusion. But here’s one thing that for sure I now know that is not a mystery: that guy wants to know what the matrix is. And I know it, because somebody else said it.

**John:** Yeah. There’s another version of this which is the time traveling version of that character comes back and sort of tells him what it is you want. Basically a character who clearly can identify with this kid’s situation says like, listen, this is what you need to do next. Really it’s conflating sort of the call to adventure with the wish, basically saying the person who shows up to say to get the story started is the person who says like this is what you want, even though you don’t even know you want it yet.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. And we get all this extra yummy juice out of that because we get to see our characters react. Sometimes they react like Mr. Anderson does where he just says, “Yep, you got me. That’s what I want.” Sometimes they deny it. In fact, sometimes that’s the most interesting way to reveal what a character wants is to see them say no. Somebody makes them an offer of some kind. And this is – I guess the Campbellians will call this Refusal of the Call. Refusal of the call is little different. Refusal of the call typically is will you do the following things required to maybe get what you want. And they say, no.

This is, do you want this? No. No. But we see that they do. So, that’s an interesting way, and a very, I think, real way to start to see a little bit of an insight into somebody by playing them opposite.

**John:** The other form of kind of negation to make it clear what your characters actually want is when they are offered something that any normal character should want. And so an example, the pilot for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s offered a partnership at the firm. This is what she should want. She is a lawyer. She should want this. And she doesn’t want it. And she’s wrestling with herself of why don’t I want this. And that’s the moment where we break out into, again, it’s a musical, so she gets to sing her I Wish song. But even if there hadn’t been a musical, her turning this down is a way of framing what she wants. It’s a scenario in which she has a chance to explain what she actually wants. So, you’re creating a place in which it’s okay to speak things you would not otherwise say.

**Craig:** Right. So here we find out what somebody wants by hearing what they don’t want. And that’s closely related to something I call wanting by subtraction, where instead of showing what somebody wants, we show what they lack. So, there is a – if there’s a Broadway version called I Want, there’s a movie version called I Used to Have, or I’m Missing, or I Don’t Have. And it’s a slightly different vibe. But characters will reveal what they miss.

So, let’s go to our clam-o-vision here. We meet a guy and he seems bummed out and he goes home. And he looks at a picture of his dead wife and starts drinking. Lethal Weapon. It was awesome in Lethal Weapon actually. It was amazing back before it clammed up. But we see it’s not so much that they want something specifically. It’s that they – something has been taken from them. And that is a version of a want. It’s a wanting to go back, essentially.

Which is a psychologically involved one. I like that one.

**John:** Absolutely. So, in any of these wants, it’s important to remember that you are establishing a contract with the audience. So, when you make it clear that the character wants this thing, your function is to get them that thing, but to make it very difficult for them to get that thing.

And so a lot of times we get those studio notes saying like, “I don’t know what the character wants.” It’s that they thought they understood what the character wanted, and then they kept looking for the character trying to do that thing or get that thing, and they weren’t doing that thing, and then the studio got confused. And so being really clear about what your character wants is step one. But step two is actually making sure that the movie tracks towards them trying to get that thing that they want.

It doesn’t mean that every scene has to be on point for how are they moving forward to the next thing, but the overall flow of things has to be directed towards that overall want that you’ve established at the start of the story.

**Craig:** It is, I think, a very good philosophical, fundamental approach to say that when you are writing a movie, the most important thing is the character. And it’s hard for a lot of people, because the plot is the candy coating. And we get that medicine very subtly sometimes as we watch movies. And so when we sit down to write them for the first time, we’re writing candy coating. But, if you do that, then what you describe is going to happen. Your character will announce something they want and then shut up about it until the end when they go, “Wait, I want a thing. I have it now.” That’s not – you have to keep the character’s want prime in your mind. That, as you said, doesn’t mean it’s constantly being addressed, but essentially the plot that you’re building around your character is aware of that.

**John:** It’s as if the want is its own character, and you have to keep that character alive throughout the course of the story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We talk about keeping characters alive in that if a character hasn’t shown up for a long time, you sort of forget they exist. And you have to figure out scenes where that character can be in that scene, or else that character just doesn’t exist in your world anymore. It’s the same thing with the want. You have to find a way to bring it up again, to make it clear that it’s still in play. And so it can be directly addressing it, like, you know, the horrible clammy version is like, “Hey, didn’t you always want to do this?” Or, like, you know, “Oh, you’ll never do this thing.”

If it’s really clearly tied into the plot, where like the kid wants to be the karate champion, well that’s obviously going to be there. Except that you have to make sure that you’re not mistaking plot for this inner motivation, this inner drive. How the character sees themselves.

Because, you know, I try to distinguish between a goal, which is like I want to get this karate championship to the real wish which is like I want to prove that I am worthy of my father’s love or attention. That’s the thing you’re going to want to make sure you’re constantly tracking throughout the story, and finding those scenes which you can check in and sort of show these are the milestones we passed along that journey.

**Craig:** Exactly. See, goal versus want is a really important concept for people. A goal is a thing you can do. A want is something inside of you. It is a desire. One is action and one is psychological. In fact, I think the best wants are the ones that are disconnected from plot, meaning it’s not that they’re not related to the plot. They’re very related. The plot is there to ultimately get you to a place where you finally get what you want. But the nature of the want is not the same as the nature of the plot.

What Danny wants in The Karate Kid, ultimately, is to be worthy of respect. To grow up. To be a young man and stand on his own. His goal is kick a bunch of guys, right? Those are two different things. They’re disconnected. And I think the best – what is Luke Skywalker’s goal? Well, in the end of the movie his goal is shoot thing down hole. What is his want? His want is, well, sounds familiar, grow up. Stand on his own two feet. Be his own man.

So, that disconnection I think is vital to helping bridge the gap between the extraordinary actions that we see onscreen that are probably quite foreign to our own experience, and then our empathy for the people involved.

**John:** Yeah, it’s their wants that make them relatable. Because everybody watching the movie won’t be blowing up the Death Star, but everybody watching the movie has wanted to prove themselves worthy. Let’s take a look at what are some good wants then. So, what are characteristics of good wants for your protagonist to have?

**Craig:** Well, for starters, I think they need to be simple. And I think they need to be honest. There is no need to be tricky or clever about wants. I think plots often do well when they’re tricky and clever and twisty and surprising and intellectual. But wants are basic. It’s best if they aren’t so basic as to feel kind of elementary and easily solvable, but then again, you know, “stand on your feet/grow up” is incredibly basic and can be teased out in so many different ways.

So, for starters, I think, honest and simple.

**John:** Great. I would also say look for wants that can be looked at from multiple perspectives. Because whatever your protagonist wants, you’re going to have other characters in the movie and they’re going to want things, too. And it would be fantastic if the other characters in your movie have wants that can reflect aspects of that want. So, look at who the love interest is. Look at who the villain is. Look at ways in which the other characters in your story can reflect the broken, the damaged, the alternate versions of those wants, so that, you know, not only so that thematically everything can sort of tie into like one bigger question, but also so that you have a good reason to bring up those wants along the way, that you can see emotionally that characters are having similar journeys. And there’s ways to sort of explore how they’re impacting each other.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, when you look at the case of Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson lives alone in a trailer by the sea, mourning his dead wife, suicidal. And his new partner lives in suburbia with his wife of many, many years, and his two children. And so the Murtaughs’ existence is kind of designed to reflect this deeper aching loss/want for Riggs. It makes their relationship interesting.

So, this is an area where you say, okay, if my character wants this, let’s provide him with somebody that has relevance to what they want.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if I’m this farmer who dreams of flying, you know, in space and being on my own, then pair me with a guy that basically knows everything and is telling me, “Nah, calm down. Slow down, kid.” In this sense, part of what I look for in a want is something that’s psychologically challenging for the hero to achieve. It has to be achievable, but it needs to be difficult to actually get.

If we feel like they could just get what they want fairly easily, we’re going to be wondering why the movie is struggling so hard to make it hard.

**John:** Yeah. There’s three words which are sort of the bane of every one of these kind of situations. “Comes to realize.” You’ll hear this in a pitch where two-thirds of the way through the movie, or near the end of the movie the hero comes to realize that he actually had it all this time. Or basically like, you know, the change that happens in the hero is basically like the character going like, “Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Great. I guess I don’t need that thing. Or I guess having a family is really important.” Something that is so obvious that the character could have just like stopped to think about it for a while early in the story and like, oh, it would have been done.

It has to be a real journey to get there. And they could not have done it at the start. The plot that you’re creating for them to go through has to be able to service this journey that gets them to where they need to end up.

**Craig:** Service is a great word. And I would also use the word instruct. Right, because if you end up in that horrific place of comes to realize, then you think, “Oh, okay, you wanted something. You weren’t sure how to get it.” Then a story happened. You finished the story. And then you went, “Okay, now back to – oh…”

No. The point of the story is to get them to that place. The point of the story is to demonstrate to them through the people that they meet and the situations that they’re in that what they want is achievable like this. Or, as is often the case, what they wanted was wrong. And what they really need to want is this. And you’ll see that in – a lot of Pixar movies work that way. Finding Nemo, for instance.

**John:** Absolutely. When it’s done right, it’s never simplified down to “comes to realize.” It’s that process of recognizing that what they wanted is not what they should have really been going for. That doesn’t just happen – they don’t just pivot on a dime there. It’s the ongoing journey that did it. It wasn’t like they got to one place and it was a sudden plot reveal, a twist, like, “Oh, I don’t really want that thing anymore.” That’s when the audience goes crazy on you, deservedly, because it wasn’t earned.

**Craig:** It wasn’t earned. Exactly. I guess the other huge mistake you can make is to give your character a want that is so specific that it really won’t be relevant to everyone. And you might think, well, it’s hard to be relevant to everyone. Not really. Not really. Most things that people want, most unfulfilled desires, if they are the kinds that we respect, are things we all want. Some of us have them, but we wanted them. We all want love. We all want to belong. We all want to believe in ourselves. We all want to be brave. All of these things – and grow up – we all – they’re universal.

And this is why sometimes the best way to think about what your character wants is to imagine them as a child, because most of what we want we’ve always wanted, from the start. And thinking about it from a childlike point of view keeps you out of the tricky clever zone and gets you into the honest, true, and simple zone.

**John:** I agree. Great. So, if all else fails, I would say add some songs. Because songs will do the work for you.

**Craig:** [laughs] They will.

**John:** Get Lin-Manuel Miranda in there to write you a song. It’s all done. It’s all set.

**Craig:** Throw a little Lin at it.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. So, Patrick writes in. he says, “I’m a 27-year-old retail worker who has written four screenplays over the last nine years. One of the screenplays I’ve written has a specific untapped subject matter. Earlier today, it was announced that a rather prolific comedic actor is attached to star in a movie about that exact subject. This isn’t an email about what I can do from a legal standpoint or professional standpoint. I just want to ask you how I should feel personally. Have either of you spent years working on a project, only to find out that a similar idea was happening elsewhere in the industry? Should I be upset? Is heartbreak reasonable? Should I feel hopeful that a movie about a subject I’m passionate about could possibly get made?”

Craig, how should Patrick feel?

**Craig:** This is the air we breathe, sir. There is no such thing as something that doesn’t have a competing version. Everything that you’re working on, everything – if you are writing the story of your own mom, I guarantee you someone else out there is writing a your mom movie. It’s just the way it goes.

So, of course, you should feel upset. Why wouldn’t you? And, yes, heartbreak is a reasonable feeling. Any feeling is reasonable, meaning no feelings are reasonable. That’s why they’re called feelings. It’s just a feeling. So you have the feeling. Okay. But, yes, you should be hopeful, not because someone is making a movie about a subject you’re passionate about. That doesn’t necessarily validate you as a writer, you know, or anything really. I mean, lots of people look at things and go, “We’re all interested in that.”

You should be hopeful because more than one movie comes out about things. I don’t know of any one thing that has gotten one movie and then everyone else said, “Nope.” In fact, quite the opposite. Usually when movies are successful, people start hunting around for versions of it.

So, I would not be depressed about this, Patrick. And I also would say, as we’ve said many times on the show, that your screenplay as a 27-year-old guy, your screenplay is most valuable to you as an advertisement of your ability. It is less valuable as a specific piece of material to be exploited into a film. And that, no one can take away.

**John:** The other thing I would focus on is that remember that an idea is just an idea. And it’s the unique expression of an idea that gives something its value. And so, yes, this comedic actor is making a movie about whatever, but your script about that same topic may be fantastic, because it’s going to have your unique voice.

And so there are many movies about dancing and dancing competitions, but they’re each unique and they’re each specific to their own story. And that’s what’s going to be special about your movie. So, I would certainly not give up hope. Your script probably has a little bit more value today than it did yesterday, because it’s out there in the world. Like, someone is making a movie about this kind of topic, so people might read it because it seems like a topic for a movie. So, I would not despair too much.

It’s okay to feel a little hit. And I was hit personally. I’ve definitely been through situations where like clearly, well, if that movie is going to be made, then my movie is not getting made. And I had all this psychological energy pent up in my one movie that’s no longer going to exist. There’s a reason for that grief. That’s fine. It’s acceptable.

But I think you’re jumping the gun here on assuming that this other movie is going to preclude your movie from getting made.

**Craig:** Or even get made. That’s the other thing. This other movie, you’re saying that a prolific comedic actor is attached to star in a movie. Uh…

**John:** What percentage of attachments do you think result in a movie? Maybe 10 percent?

**Craig:** Maybe. I mean, attached doesn’t mean a damn thing, just so you know.

**John:** So, just this last week there’s an actor who I genuinely like. He’s a really good actor, he’s just never become a big star. But on Deadline it was announced, oh, he’s attached to this movie. I’m like, really? That’s a Deadline-worthy story? Because he’s in four movies last year that no one ever heard of.

And so it’s so weird when an actor being attached is actually news. And in some cases like writers get attached to things. I’m like, really? I know for a fact that they’re never going to write that, but it comes out as being news.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Patrick happened to notice this one thing happened and it caught his eye, but if he hadn’t noticed that story would he have felt any different about his script? No.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just so you know, for those of you who don’t know, the word “attached” in our business means that an actor said, “I’m interested in playing that part. So you agree and I agree that if this movie is going ahead, I’m playing the part.” Now, what happens is they take that actor’s attachment and use it as leverage to try and get financing or a green light from a studio. And they might. And maybe they do and maybe they don’t. But even if they do, then they have to make a deal with the actor. And the actor has to be available. That is – half the time that’s what ends up unattaching that attachment. And then the whole thing falls apart.

So, don’t fret, Patrick. Prevail.

Jonathan from Los Angeles writes, “You have touched on getting staffed as a sitcom writer. It seems like studying performing at one of the local improv theaters, UCB, IO, Second City, is the most common method right now. On the other hand, you always hear about writers who started as writers’ assistants. And as you mentioned, everyone blazes their own path up the mountain, so there are countless other ways to get read and staffed. Which do you think is most fruitful?”

**John:** Yeah, so I’ve actually heard of this staffing out of improv groups happening a lot more now. I think it’s probably because of the kinds of shows that are getting made. It’s also because some of the shows are being created by folks who grew up through that business.

You know, I think any situation in which you can throw yourself in, where you’re writing and performing things with clever people, you’re more likely to get noticed, and that’s a great thing. I wouldn’t say that it’s the right path for somebody who is looking to do non-comedic stuff, for example.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree. And it’s also not the right path for somebody who is a very funny writer, but not a particularly good performer. That said, if you can perform, I would absolutely go the improv route because you are essentially joining an alumni network.

Very famously the Simpsons drew from Harvard, from the Harvard Lampoon. This was very frustrating to me when I moved out here. I’m like, does Princeton count? No. I would see some of these people writing for the Simpsons, and I’m like, well, they’re not funny. I guess they went to Harvard. That’s worth something. Obviously most of the people writing for the Simpsons are brilliant.

But this is a similar situation where you have these feeder organizations where their alumni have gone onto create their shows, star in their own shows, develop their own shows, and they naturally will start, even if they don’t come and look back at specific shows themselves, they talk to the higher ups at those places. They employ the higher ups at those places to be on their shows, even if it’s for guest spots or something like that.

So, they’re going to hear. And I think that makes total sense. If you can be a writer-performer, yes. I would recommend it.

**John:** Here’s my other theory, is I think it may not be that they’re looking at this pool because it’s just convenient. I think they may be looking at this pool because this pool was actually genuinely good and talented and has actually proven that they can work really hard. So, think about being in one of these groups. If you’re starting out, you’re having to write and perform a bunch of stuff all the time, you are having to really make something new every week or every couple of weeks and really show your craft. It’s really clear sort of what you can do.

Plus, a lot of these groups have kind of hierarchies. You move from one company up to the next company, to the next company. You’ve put in the time, you’ve done the work. So if you are a writer who has graduated up through that system, they’re looking at you and saying like, okay, well this person has done a certain amount of stuff and they’re going to have a good collection of samples to look at. I think they’re just going to – they’re probably going to be pretty good writers.

So I think there’s a reason why they’re looking at this group, not just because they are from this background, but because being in this background, they’ve actually done a lot more work.

**Craig:** Yeah, precisely. There’s also a certain comic philosophy that emerges from these individual organizations. The Groundlings very much jibes with the comic philosophy of Saturday Night Live and not surprisingly they’ve fed a lot of their talent to Saturday Night Live. UCB jibes more with the kind of Amy Poehler world of comedy. So, you learn a philosophy as well, kind of a school of comedy, and that also makes you more suitable for those employers.

But, you know, let’s keep it all in perspective. There are not a lot of employers, there are not a lot of jobs. You have to be really, really good. Ultimately what we’re talking about is something that gets you successful six months earlier, maybe. But if you’re really, really good, you’re really, really good.

**John:** I agree. Last question is about people who are really, really good. Eric writes, “I wanted to ask your thoughts on the fact that your peers in the industry, who you both have mentioned with admiration on your podcast, have offered advice directly in opposition to your advice. While you two have approached screenwriting books and seminars with great skepticism, mega-writer Billy Ray has said, ‘I don’t think I’d be a writer if I hadn’t taken the Robert McKee class. My debt to him is huge.’ In a long form interview with Billy, he also repeatedly extolled McKee’s book’s story and its lessons.

“And while Craig has repeatedly addressed listener questions of what topics to write about with some form of ‘write what’s in your heart,’ Terry Rossio says in his Wordplay blog that it’s a waste of time to write scripts that don’t have ‘strange attractors in the premise if you want to get executives interested in you quickly and make a sale.’ Similar to Save the Cats’ advice on aiming for high concept.

“Since these two writers are on equal footing with you two as screenwriters, I just wondered what you thought of their advice to aspiring screenwriters that runs counter to yours. Perhaps they can appear on your podcast in the future to discuss and debate with you. I think that would be super useful.”

**Craig:** Well, let me start with Billy. So Billy says he, “I don’t think I’d be a writer if I hadn’t taken the Robert McKee class.” That is absolute bullshit. Billy is my friend. I know him well. First of all, Billy’s father was a legendary agent in the movie business, so it wasn’t like Billy was growing up in Omaha, pushing grocery store carts around, dreaming of the Hollywood nights.

Listen, all of these books – it’s not like you and I didn’t read them. I mean, I didn’t read Robert McKee. But I read Campbell and Vogler and Syd Field. You know, when you’re starting out there’s a correlation, but it’s not causation. Of course you’re going to start to read some books, because you want to be a screenwriter, and people are saying read screenwriting books. And you go, okay, I’ll read some screenwriting books.

By the way, there’s probably now a correlation of people starting to be screenwriters who listen to our podcast. That’s not causation. Robert McKee did not cause Billy Ray to be the writer that he is. That’s outrageous. If that were true, then Robert McKee would be writing Billy Ray movies right now. But he’s not. Billy Ray is because Billy is really good.

In fact, I’m seeing Billy Ray in a week. I’m going to say to his face that’s a bunch of bullshit. There is absolutely no – no way.

**John:** So, on Episode 255 of Scriptnotes, Billy Ray was the guest. Craig wasn’t there. And we talked about this. And so Billy Ray started quite young in the industry and he worked his butt off. And we all read books that were incredibly important to us, and were helpful in getting us thinking about how we were going to do this job of screenwriting. So, I don’t fault him for saying that Robert McKee was a huge influence to him, but like he would be a screenwriter regardless of Robert McKee.

**Craig:** Of course. Now, the Terry Rossio advice is slightly different. Because Terry’s column was written quite a few years ago. I suspect, just knowing, because I’ve known those guys, Ted and Terry, for a long time. I’m fairly certain that that article, I don’t know if there’s a date on it, the strange attractor thing, but I think it was written in the ‘90s. In fact, it was, 1997.

My friend, that’s 20-year-old advice. Right? Now, it seems, well, yeah, but is it still? No. It’s not relevant anymore. And we know this, because we see writers selling screenplays all the time that are not what we call high concept, big hooky things. That article was written in the era of the big spec sale. And, of course, Terry and Ted wrote a certain kind of movie as well and they had a lot of success with that. And at times I think it’s a tempting thing to want to generalize your success to everybody else and say, “Here’s what I did to be successful. You should do it, too.” Doesn’t quite work that way.

I don’t think the 1997 article here would explain something like the success that Kelly Marcel had with Saving Mr. Banks, which is not a strange attractor/high concept/big gimmick plot twist. Unless, look, you can also play the game of shoving everything into that box in which case, yeah, they all are. And then what you quickly get down to is don’t write a bad script. Write a good one. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that that article is 20 years old.

**John:** Yeah, so Terry started doing his Wordplay blog even before I was doing johnaugust.com. And he and I were both sort of people who were offering advice to aspiring screenwriters online. And I totally admire what he’s done and I think Terry has a certain philosophy, and he’s sort of staked out a lot of ground that was really helpful and I love it when he talks at Austin and other places. So, his opinion is not wrong, I just don’t share his opinion that a person should aim for high concept because that’s where the sales are. I don’t think aiming for a high concept sale is the best first goal for a screenwriter right now.

I think the best first goal for a screenwriter is to write something that’s so good that people want to hire you to do things. And the thing that is so good that people want to hire you to do things is going to be something that is uniquely yours, that expresses your unique voice.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, in 1997 the business was highly oriented around the veracious consumption of original stuff to put onscreen, not necessarily creative original, but meaning new titles and new IP. And because of video and all the rest, they were releasing an enormous amount of movies. And you had to kind of stand out from the crowd by being something that people wanted to produce. Like, great, this is a great idea. That’s how I got started. You know, my writing partner and I came up with a big hooky/strange attractor concept. We had an actor and off we went. And made the movie.

But 20 years later, the studios are equally obsessed, but in the opposite direction, with generating movies based on not-fresh IP, existing IP. And so what they’re looking for are writers that they can assign to the material they want made. And that means – and Peter Dodd said as much. They’re not necessarily looking at specs as make this, they’re looking at specs as writing samples for their things. For their big things. So, I think that Terry was probably dead spot on when he wrote that, but I would be surprised if he didn’t at least acknowledge that now 20 years gone by the situation is a bit different.

**John:** I agree. So let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article in The Atlantic where John McWhorter, he’s the linguist we talked about on a previous episode, he traces the evolution of the word Like. And so the word Like is really fascinating. So, it starts from an old word that was related to the word body. It then got its sense of meaning similar. I didn’t know this, but you may have known this Craig, that the LY, the adverbial LY is actually Like. It’s just a shortened form of like.

**Craig:** I did not know that. But that makes so much sense.

**John:** Yeah, so like saintly, is saint-like. All those words, it’s just an adverbial form of the adjective, and that’s how it got there. Or, noun, so, that LY is a just a Like.

So, the way that we sort of use like now and we sort of hate the way use like now sometimes is really fascinating. So, there’s the way we use it to quote speech, and so she was like, and I was like, and so it’s quoting speech but not directly quoting speech. It’s useful for that. And I kind of can’t fault it for how we use it for that.

But McWhorter singles out two other ways we do it. There’s the way we use it to hesitate, we’re sort of using as a pause word. There’s also a way where we’re using it to mean like I know this doesn’t sound true, but it really is true. I opened the box and there were like 20 scorpions inside. And so that like is meant to sort of emphasize that I’m not saying as if there were 20 scorpions, there really were scorpions inside. I know it seems unbelievable, but that like is there to make clear that it really did happen.

So, anyway, it’s a fascinating article. McWhorter is always great at identifying sort of new trends and old words. So, I point you to this article.

**Craig:** Well, that’s fascinating. I did not know the LY thing. I like things like that. I like trotting things like that out at parties, mostly to bore people, but also because somebody somewhere is going to go, you know, I’ve heard this so many times. Someone will say, “You say stuff like you know it, but you’re just making it up.” Because it does sound like something you could just make up and say, but I believe it. I believe it.

Well, my One Cool Thing is fairly mundane. Let me ask you a question, John. Do you and Mike wake up at the same time each day or not?

**John:** We wake up at the same time almost every day, but that’s partly because our daughter has to go to school. So it’s when the alarm happens.

**Craig:** Got it. So, I take the late shift in the house and Melissa takes the early shift. So, she does the drive to school, I do the “Oh, you’re vomiting at midnight, or you have a fever, whatever.” And she goes to bed before our son does, so I also handle him at night.

So, we have two different alarms. And so it was really frustrating for a long time because what I would do is I would just leave a note like set the alarm for 8:30, you know, because she’s going to get up at 6:30. But I found this clock and it’s Brookstone. You know, Brookstone, they got a bad rep, you know, because it’s a lot of plastic, junky baloney gimmicky stuff in a mall. And massage chairs and baloney. Bu this clock, it’s the only one I’ve found that does this. So, I don’t know, maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough. But it’s a Bluetooth alarm clock with two alarm settings and you can control it with an app, as long as you’re within Bluetooth range.

So, when I get into bed, I open up my iPad, the screen on dim, and she’s got alarm one set to 6:30, and I go to alarm two and make it whatever I want. And it does it. And it’s great. You’d think other people would have that. No, anyway.

**John:** Craig, right now it’s my function to be the voice of everyone listening in their cars right now, Craig, alarm clocks have done that for forever. Like, literally our 20-year-old alarm clock–

**Craig:** No, no, no, I know they have two alarms. I’m saying, it’s dark. I walk into the room. She’s asleep, right, because I’m coming in at midnight. The room is dark. The alarm is by her bed. I got to turn a light on by the clock, hit a thing. Because I change my time all the time. I change my wake up time all the time.

**John:** We have little glowing buttons. We just push the little buttons.

**Craig:** No, I don’t want to get near her face and start doing that. I want to be able to control it with my phone.

**John:** Oh, so I see. This is the crucial geography I was not understanding in the scene you were describing. So, in your scene geography, the clock is by your wife, and therefore you don’t want to be anywhere near your wife because she’s asleep and she’s like a bomb that could go off.

**Craig:** She’s like a bomb that can go off. Exactly.

**John:** So therefore you can use this device, it’s a remote control for the bomb by your wife.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you could change the timer so it counts down differently, so that she will blow up earlier, and you could blow up at a later time.

**Craig:** I think you finally understand. First of all, you understand the danger I’m in.

**John:** Oh, I know your wife. I know you don’t want to cross her.

**Craig:** I’m not going to wake her up. I don’t want to wake her up. And this way it’s great. And also the actual process of changing an alarm on most alarm clocks is horrendous. You’re tapping buttons and you’ve got to figure out who to enter this one, this one. The app is lovely. You just go and you scroll like any other time alarm app and hit save. And so I love it personally. And it’s cheap. It’s like $60.

**John:** Craig, my question for you is you’ve already established that the iPad is in the room, so why don’t you just set the alarm on the iPad and have the iPad wake you up?

**Craig:** Okay. Great point. I will tell you why. Because sometimes my iPad isn’t plugged in and the battery is low and I’m a little paranoid that it’s going to run out, but also the iPad just does not generate a loud enough alarm for me because I have ear plugs in. And why do I have ear plugs in?

**John:** Because your wife wakes up early.

**Craig:** Well, and, you know, there’s–

**John:** She snores.

**Craig:** Meh. I don’t know what you’re talking about and I didn’t say anything.

**John:** [laughs] All right. I’m a big believer in ear plugs as well. I think ear plugs are a good invention. I remember the first time I used them on planes saying like, oh, this is so weird and uncomfortable, and then – they’re great. So, I do believe in ear plugs. I believe in eye shades. I believe in anything that helps you sleep. So, I’m fine with it.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** Boom. That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For shorter questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. But don’t leave any fake news here, because we don’t want any fake news on our Facebook.

You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment because that helps people find the show.

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

You can find all of the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find a USB drive in the show notes here for all the first 250 episodes of the show.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a lot of episodes of the show.

**Craig:** So many episodes.

**John:** So we have to decide if we’re going to make the 300-episode USB drives. And if we’re going to make them that have the new USBCs. We just don’t know what we’re going to do.

**Craig:** Well, I know what we won’t do. We won’t funnel any of that sweet, sweet profit to me.

**John:** Uh-uh. Not a bit of it. It all stays in Godwin’s little coffers.

**Craig:** Oh, Godwin’s coffers. Godwin’s coffers sounds like some sort of Shakespearean outcry. Godwin’s coffers!

**John:** I think it’s pretty fantastic. Craig, thank you for a fun episode. I hope it was everything you wanted.

**Craig:** D’oh.

**John:** See you next week.

**Craig:** See you next time.

Links:

* Download [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* Auli’i Cravalho – How Far I’ll Go from [Moana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UpGDU9kFho)
* Terry Rossio’s [Wordplay](http://wordplayer.com/)
* [The Evolution of ‘Like’](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-evolution-of-like/507614/)
* [Brookstone App-Controlled Bluetooth Alarm Clock](https://www.amazon.com/TimeSmart-App-Controlled-Bluetooth-Alarm-Clock/dp/B014I7N5ES/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1481561313&sr=8-2&keywords=brookstone+alarm+clock&refinements=p_89%3ABrookstone)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_279.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 278 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we are looking at phrases that have been banned from comedy writing rooms.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** And more generally why making a list of what you will never do could help you figure out what you actually should do. We’ll also be answering listener questions about character names, life rights, and sticking to a genre.

But first up, some follow up. Craig, did you get your Scriptnotes t-shirts?

**Craig:** I did. Apparently I made a mistake.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** I ordered my – so Melissa wears medium.

**John:** Does she wear a woman’s medium?

**Craig:** There, you see, you’re already a better husband.

**John:** [laughs] I’m already a better husband.

**Craig:** She does not like the women’s cut. She likes the man’s cut. So, she put on the women’s – she’s like, oh my god, this is so small. So I’m like, “Put it on.” She put it on. It was so hot. John, it was hot. And she’s like, “I’m never—“

**John:** So it wasn’t a mistake. It was a win.

**Craig:** For me it was. But she’s like, “I’m never leaving the house with this.” I’m like, come one. “No.” So, yeah, those are useless to me. I don’t know if there’s any – there’s no more, right? I can’t get the medium regular?

**John:** So there is a possibility of more. So, the Scriptnotes t-shirts were so successful that Cotton Bureau says that if they get enough requests for t-shirts, they may start printing another batch. So, if you are interested in more Scriptnotes t-shirts, you can go to the same page where you order them. There’s a place where you can put your email address. If they print another batch, they will email you to see if you actually want one. So, Craig wants one for his wife.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** If other listeners out there want them, they should put in their email addresses on that little form and tell Cotton Bureau that they want them. So there will be a link in the show notes for that.

But more crucially, if you got your Scriptnotes t-shirt and want to show us in your Scriptnotes t-shirt, please tweet us a photo, or send it to us on Instagram. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We would love to see you wearing your Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** Yeah. Especially those, and I’m not going to even say it. [laughs]

**John:** Just stop.

**Craig:** Just stop. Why should I care? Especially the male XXL. That’s what I meant to say. I like men in burly shirts. That’s all I like.

**John:** Absolutely. Because we create large sizes because we have a diverse range of body types who listen to our podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I assume that all the guys that listen to our podcast, if they’re wearing XXL it’s because they work out. They have just massive pecs.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Huge, huge shoulders.

**John:** Because normal t-shirts, like their arms wouldn’t even fit through the holes.

**Craig:** No way.

**John:** No way.

**Craig:** No way.

**John:** So, long time listeners will know that Craig often mocks me for stealing all his money for all the millions of dollars we make–

**Craig:** It’s not mockery. It’s accurate.

**John:** It’s not really mockery. It’s basically – what is the proper verb for what you are doing about the money we make?

**Craig:** Exposing you. I’m exposing you.

**John:** Exposing, yeah. Really, accusing, because exposing would mean that you actually had some facts.

**Craig:** I do. I have facts. You’re selling t-shirts. What other facts do I need?

**John:** So, I thought we’d have a little transparency on the podcast right now and we’ll talk about how much money we made off the t-shirts.

**Craig:** We…

**John:** Well, the podcast made. Because there’s you, and there’s me, and there’s also the guys who actually do the hard work of putting the show up on the Internet.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** That’s true. So this was the profits that occurred. We did two t-shirts. The first one was the midnight blue t-shirt. We sold 511 of them.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** We made $6 per shirt, and so that totaled $3,066.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So that’s great. That’s money in the bank. They literally PayPal’d that to us.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** The other t-shirt, the gold standard, we sold 282 t-shirts. That was $1,692. So, that money also got PayPal’d to us. So altogether off t-shirts, because of you guys being awesome, we made $4,758.

**Craig:** I’m already spending my $2,380-something dollars.

**John:** That’s good. You absolutely should. Except that we also have to pay for the people we have to pay for. So–

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** Yeah, see? So, we have to pay for our editor, Matthew Chilelli. We have to pay for John Morgan, who does the transcripts. We have to pay for hosting, which isn’t a huge expense, but it’s some expense now. And we have to pay for Godwin Jabangwe, the producer of Scriptnotes, who puts all the stuff online and answers email questions, and does all that–

**Craig:** Wait, we’re paying Godwin. I thought he was just going to be a permanent intern.

**John:** Yeah, a permanent unpaid intern. That’s the way Hollywood works. Wouldn’t that be great?

**Craig:** It would be amazing.

**John:** It would be amazing. So the t-shirts are great. And so we mostly make the t-shirts because we love seeing people in the t-shirts. We make some money off that. Between that and the people who are the premium subscribers, the people who are paying $1.99 a month, we get $1 of that. Libsyn who hosts our podcast gets the other dollar of that. But we have 2,569 premium subscribers, and so those are really paying for the bulk of Matthew and Godwin and John Morgan, who does our transcripts. So, thank you everybody who is a premium subscriber. If you are interested in becoming one of those, it’s at Scriptnotes.net, and you get all the back episodes, plus the bonus episodes, the dirty episodes, all the special episodes we did along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know what, here’s the thing. If you’re listening to this and you’re not a premium subscriber for $2 a month, all right, just rest assured, and I don’t know how this couldn’t be clear to you now, I don’t get any of it. Okay? That’s the important thing. You’re not giving me money. I have not seen a dime. John does receive this money and then immediately disperses it to the people that help make this program. And we have no advertising. None. Give us an example of one other podcast that is at our level of popularity that doesn’t have you, or me, or people like us breaking into the middle of the content to talk about how delicious an iced tea is, or how wonderful Mail Chimp is?

We don’t do that. Right? So, just give us two bucks. Oh my god. I want my $2. I want my $2. Just do it. It’s $24 a year. What? I mean, compare that to – what does film school cost? Like $28 a year? We’re cheaper, right? What does it cost? I don’t even know.

**John:** Yeah, probably. On a minute per minute basis, I think we’re significantly cheaper than film school.

**Craig:** We’re significantly cheaper than film school. Come on, people. Come on. Come on. I promise you, this money will never end up in my pocket. Ever.

**John:** [laughs] Not a chance.

Last week’s episode we talked about Scorpion, which we were both – you were bewildered it was a TV show, and I had discovered it was a TV show because I saw it on a plane. Not only is Scorpion a TV show on CBS, there is a Twitter feed for the Scorpion writers’ room. And so we have listeners to our podcast who were surprised to hear we didn’t know about their show. So, this is a shout-out to Scorpion writers’ room. We’re really proud of you guys.

**Craig:** They were amazing, by the way. Because it was like, “We are honored, humbled and honored, to have been mentioned on Scriptnotes.” It was the most side-eye – I mean, it was actually the perfect tweet. Like, I read that and I was like, “Oh dear.” Look, it’s honestly not my fault. There are a lot of shows that I don’t know exist. I mean, theoretically, if somebody says Cheers to me, I might go, “Was that a show?” I’m the worst with that. But you have no excuse. You watch everything. So, shame on you. Shame on you, John.

**John:** I watch very few procedurals. Actually, I think I watch no procedurals. So that’s my excuse.

**Craig:** Is Scorpion a procedural?

**John:** It’s a procedural. It’s an investigative procedural. They are cyber sleuths. I’m going to get this so wrong and Scorpion writers’ room is going to be so upset with me.

**Craig:** I can’t wait.

**John:** My perception is, having watched an episode without the headphones in on a plane–

**Craig:** To which they totally roasted you on.

**John:** Which is great. My perception is that it is a team of specialists who do some computer stuff, does other technology stuff, some sort of game theory stuff, who get called in for very extreme situations where lives are on the line. That is my perception of what Scorpion is. And I get that because the actual title treatment for Scorpion is sort of like closed/slash Scorpion, like as if it’s the end comment on something.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So it feels cyber-ish.

**Craig:** Very cyber-ish. Well, happily for the writers of Scorpion, A, apparently their show has massive ratings. B, your awareness of it, and certainly my awareness of it, completely irrelevant to the quality and success of a television show. We have proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt. So, thank you for – I mean, I’m sure that the Scorpion writers don’t listen to the show, but somebody was like, “Uh, you guys should listen to this.” Hey, well, you’re listening now I bet. I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t know.

**John:** If Scriptnotes were the key to success of a television show, then Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would be the biggest show on television.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure. For sure. What do we know?

**John:** People watch what they want to watch. I want you to talk about how you were wrong about yams on last week’s episode.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, according to this guy I’m wrong about yams. I don’t know, is he writing from the Yam Board?

**John:** I was pretty sure last week you were wrong, but I didn’t want to call it out on the air, because we were going long as it was.

**Craig:** Oh, sure.

**John:** So, Craig, why don’t you tell us what Christopher wrote in to say.

**Craig:** Okay, well, Christopher writes, “Craig’s potato primer,” by the way, that’s how you pronounce that word, did you know that?

**John:** I say primer, as if you’re priming a car.

**Craig:** It’s primer. By the way, somebody next week will write in about how I’m wrong about that. “Craig’s potato primer was consistent with how most grocery stores label their products and therefore wrong. It’s extremely unlikely that most Americans will ever encounter a true yam, originating in Africa, unless they actively seek one out generally at a specialty store. True yams have a very thick, almost bark-like skin, and very firm white purple flesh. Both the orange and yellow tubers commonly encountered are varieties of sweet potato, originating in the Americas, although in America the term yam does colloquially refer to orange sweet potatoes. If you want to be pedantic, like me, you can call orange sweet potatoes ‘soft sweet potatoes,’ and yellow, ‘firm.’”

Christopher, I can’t make fun of you for this. I want to. But, this is the sort of thing I’m constantly saying to other people, so I can’t make—

So, here’s the situation. The mistake I made was I thought that the orange sweet potato was a yam and what we’d call the white or yellow sweet potato was the sweet potato. But apparently they’re both sweet potatoes and nobody has yams, ever.

**John:** Yup. No one has yams. So, I knew that yams were from Africa. I would say that I can understand the sense of just call them yams because everybody calls them yams, the way that words drift in meaning because culturally words drift in meaning. But I will say that the whole topic came up because I’ve always despised sweet potatoes, and for some reason now twice there’s two things I love potatoes now. I love sweet potato fries, and I loved the sweet potatoes I had at Thanksgiving this last time. So, I don’t think I have changed. I think the sweet potato has changed for the better. Somehow, whatever work the chefs of the world have done to the sweet potato to make it a delicious food, I salute you.

**Craig:** Well, thank you, Christopher, for writing in from the Yam Institute. Surely he has nothing else that he could add to our discussion – oh wait, he does. [laughs]

**John:** He does. So in that same email he went on to talk about CPR. So, let’s talk about CPR, because Christopher has a lot of information.

**Craig:** So, Christopher writes, again, “Anyway, my real motive, and consistent with my prior motive, was to write about clarifying about CPR. When Craig talks about success rate of CPR, I hope we can be clear that he’s addressing the overall survival rate of patients who receive CPR among other treatments. The purpose of CPR is not to get a person back up and walking after their heart stops. It’s to serve as a life support system until professional medical help can arrive. You are literally acting as the victim’s heart and lungs, pushing oxygen to their brain and other tissues to keep the body alive. Brain damage is not a consequence of CPR. It’s a consequence of oxygen deprivation to the brain, which proper CPR prevents. So, success is just doing proper CPR until a medical professional can take over.

“That said, it’s totally accurate that the victim will almost never wake up during CPR as they do in TV and movies. Even if you get their heart beating, there’s a good chance they’ll stay unconscious. It’s also important to note that modern CPR should only be administered until someone can retrieve an AED. And AEDs have been show to – that’s defibrillators – have been shown to increase survival rates as high as 40 to 70%.”

**John:** We should stop here to clarify that the AEDs, I think he’s also referring to a lot of places, a lot of restaurants now will have that sort of red box behind the counter which they can pull out to do stuff. That’s one of the kinds of AEDs he’s referring to.

**Craig:** Yes. “The American Heart Association found that when AED is applied within one minute, survival approaches 90%. This is why CPR trainers teach you that step one is to make sure someone calls 911. Step two is to send a bystander to go find an AED and bring it back.”

Yes. When I was talking about the overall success rate, I was saying do the people survive. That’s what that means. And generally speaking they don’t. That’s just the deal.

**John:** Yeah. So I think what Chris was trying to clarify was that all the different times where CPR is used, some of those situations are not the bystander who fell on the side of the road. And so my two friends who are both trainers, their experience of having saved a person who collapsed and then they gave them CPR, that actually can happen. But if you want to take all the different instances where CPR was administered, including in a hospital setting, the success rate is going to go down because some of those people were never going to make it.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I mean, some of the CPR statistics are impacted by the fact that they’re dead. They’re just dead-dead. And you’re doing CPR on a dead body. Obviously that’s factored in. I mean, that’s really part of the discussion. The point is that when you’re doing CPR, there’s a chance that nothing is going to change what’s going to happen. It’s just – that’s the myth. I hope no one was thinking I was saying, “CPR is stupid. Don’t study it and don’t do it.” I’m just saying that the success rate in movies and television is absurd.

**John:** Yes. I agree.

**Craig:** What else does Christopher have to complain about?

**John:** [laughs] I think we’re done with Christopher. But we had a lot of people write in this last episode because we were talking about the difference between fantasy and reality and what we see on screen versus what happens in reality. And Tim wrote in to say, “An example of how doing the research can improve a scene was shown to me recently when I was writing a moment where a wife has to identify her dead husband in the morgue. The body, however, has been switched,” in his story. “Having watched the moment in countless Hollywood films and TV shows, the coroner lifts the sheet, the grieving wife nods, et cetera. I thought it would actually be better off to visit a morgue. Here in Britain, at least, a family member is never allowed into the morgue. You briefly glimpse the body through a small window. And there are other touches as well. [Unintelligible] curtains in a crematorium whisked back. An ominous box of tissues on the table. All of which made her misidentifying her husband much more plausible.”

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if that’s consistently true here in the United States, but it was certainly true in the morgue where I was an intern at the age of 16. Because, you know, I was going to be a doctor. So, I spent a summer assisting the Mammoth County Medical Examiner doing autopsies, which is how every 16-year-old boy should spend a summer.

But there was one time, and I had to wheel the body. So, there’s a big freezer room, and you wheel the body up to that little window. And they come to the little window. You definitely don’t want to walk through a morgue, because you’re going to see dozens of dead bodies stacked up in what looks like basically a large supermarket freezer. And then also other bodies in various state of disassembly on tables. So, you wheel them up to the window and then you pull the sheet back. That actually was the worst thing that happened to me that summer.

It wasn’t doing the autopsies, and I saw some gross stuff. It was watching a grown man cry looking at his brother.

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** Yeah. Through the little stupid window. It’s exactly right. And you can – by the way, yes, I remember little curtains. I don’t know if they were pink, but I remember little curtains. And I remember a box of tissues. And I remember also thinking that medical pathologists are not who you want doing your interior design. It’s just really bad. The curtains already were like, yeah, abandon all hope.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry. You’re already down in a morgue, so you’re probably not having a lot of hope.

**Craig:** They’re so – the people who work in a morgue are the least sentimental people in the world. Surprise. Whatever sentiment they had was beaten out of them after, I don’t know, their 1,000th dead body. So, now it’s just like, okay, here you go. And the tears come. Here’s your tissue. You walk that way. I close the curtain. Back to work.

**John:** Yup. All right, our next listener writes in because he’s on the other side of this. He’s talking about how screenwriters have made his job difficult. Do you want to try this, or should I try this?

**Craig:** I might as well. I’m on a role. So Kent writes, “Hollywood script writers have made my job very difficult. I develop robots for the US military. Unfortunately, Terminator and 100 other movies have made the specter of killing robots a powerful meme, obscuring the real issues. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching Terminator, but I know it’s fiction. The level of artificial intelligence in those robots is complete fantasy, something that’s not just decades away, but almost certainly centuries away.” I don’t know, Kent.

“The boring truth is that people in my field have struggled for years to get a robot to recognize the difference between a bush and a rock with only limited success. The widespread fear that we are secretly building Terminator-like autonomous killing machines is laughable. At least this idea should be laughable, except that screenwriters have successfully convinced the public that killer robots are indeed possible. Robot insurance. There is now a complete disconnect between what is really going on and what the general public knows about military robots. This disconnect makes it nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation about the role of unmanned systems in combat.

“There are indeed serious issues that need to be faced with how robotic systems are used by the military. Unfortunately, these real issues bear little resemblance to the sensationalized fears that originated in a screenwriter’s keyboard.” Nothing originates in the keyboard, by the way, Kent.

Anyway, “Any policy level discussion about unmanned combat systems are warped by these misperceptions which make it very difficult to get to the real issues.”

John, does Kent have a point do you think? Or is it foofaraw?

**John:** I think Kent has a very, very good point. Is that by putting this one idea in our heads, it’s obscuring all of the other possible realities, and the true real world realities, because we’re only focused on this fiction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I – kind of. I’m going to challenge Kent a little bit here. I think that the American people, and frankly people everywhere all over the world, don’t really need our help to suspect the worst of government military organizations. That’s sort of baked into their minds. If Disney started making robots, nobody would think ill of it. And, in fact, Disney has. Right? They have their little animatronics and everybody thinks they’re adorable. And no one is suspecting that they’re actually, you know, going to go on a rampage. The problem is military. The problem is military. The problem is people assume that if you’re building something in the military, it’s to hurt other people. Now, that is a misconception. But that’s not a Hollywood misconception. That’s just a human misconception.

Military applications are enormous and there’s a sector of them that are obviously about inflicting injury and quite a few of them are not. They’re about gathering intelligence or helping save lives. So, I’ll take a little bit of blame, but I really don’t think anyone is walking around thinking, “Oh yeah, the government is going to be releasing a wave of Terminators on us.” I’ve never heard anybody think that.

Have you seen the videos, John, of the robot competitions where the whole point is just to get a robot to kick a soccer ball into a net?

**John:** Yeah. I love those. I also love robots trying to open a door and like failing miserably.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And inevitably while you’re watching and laughing you think, oh, this won’t be so funny 20 years from now when the robot is my primary care physician. But, and you know, Kent sees it as a century away. Let’s split the difference. It’s not decades away. I don’t know if it’s centuries away. But in a hundred years, right? I don’t know. Thinking about what the world was like in 1916 is hardly recognizable to what it is now. So, I’m going to go halfway with Kent on that one.

**John:** So this afternoon I was at Shakespeare and Company which is a famous English language bookstore here in Paris. And I was eavesdropping on these two women who were having a conversation. And they were talking about this news report they watched. And the sensational lead is like, you know, Man Killed by Robot. And basically do we need to start worrying about Terminators and robots in our future? And it kicked back to the anchors, so I’m hearing this recap of these two women talking about it. And the anchors were like, “Well no. Actually there was a man operating the robot. The robot was controlled.” So like a person did it.

And so basically it was an accident that happened with a remote control robot. And so there was this pressure to sort of make it seem like the question being are robots going to kill us. No, it’s an industrial machine, and an accident happened, and it was remote controlled. And like the robot was not sentient in any meaningful way.

And so it was that pressure to build the narrative around like a robot killed a man, but it really wasn’t that at all. It was just a robotic arm and the guy got hit by the robotic arm and died. So, that’s said, but it’s not a robot uprising. It’s not Westworld.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, don’t blame screenwriters for the exogenous stupidity out there. I mean, it just is. There is stupidity out there. It’s not our fault. Dumb people will say things like, “A robot killed a guy.” Well, no, somebody pushed the wrong button and a dumb lever moved an arm that you think of as a robot because it’s an arm. But it’s really not. It’s just a bunch of metal. You know, I don’t know. Kent, I’m not going to take the blame here. In fact, I want more robot movies now. More.

**John:** Quickly going through the rest of the follow up, Colin wrote in with a link to a Wired article that looks at the impossible physics of tightropes in an episode of Gotham. And so–

**Craig:** Gotham is a show? That’s a show?

**John:** Gotham is a show. Craig, what is Gotham about? I’ll wait here while you tell me what Gotham is about.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to just wing it here. Gotham is a show from the DC universe.

**John:** Correct.

**Craig:** It is a show about the city of Gotham and the various superheroes and super villains that populate it. And sometimes–

**John:** Yes, what is the special thing about Gotham? What is the unique point of view of Gotham?

**Craig:** Gritty.

**John:** Well, it’s gritty.

**Craig:** Was I right?

**John:** Who was the biggest star in the first season of Gotham?

**Craig:** Well, the biggest name in Gotham City is Batman, of course.

**John:** Well, yes. So Bruce Wayne is a character in it, but Bruce Wayne is a child in this. And so it’s Commissioner Gordon’s point of view. So, what actress who is married to an even more famous actor was the primary villain in the first season? Or a primary villain in the first season?

**Craig:** Angelina Jolie. Oh no, they’re not married anymore. Oh, boy, that’s a tough one. Let’s see. Who’s married to William Macy again?

**John:** No, no. Felicity Huffman is great, but no.

**Craig:** It’s not Felicity Huffman? That’s it. I’m out.

**John:** Jada Pinkett Smith was the villain.

**Craig:** Oh, Jada Pinkett Smith.

**John:** She played Mad-Eye Mooney or something. And I have not seen the show either, but at least I know what the show is.

Our final bit of follow up comes from Jay Allan Zimmerman who writes, “I admit it, I’m a Scriptnotes addict. To be clear, I am deaf. So, technically I’m a Scriptnotes transcript addict. Meaning the Sexy Craig voice in my head could be too dirty old man-ish. And the Colorado John accent could be too Montana.”

I don’t know if I could hear a difference between a Colorado accent and a Montana accent. I’m sure there is one. But I couldn’t pick it.

“Anyway, it has been nearly a month since I had my drug and I’m having serious withdrawal issues. Especially since all meaning in the world suddenly ceased and a cloud of despair descended upon us here in New York City. And there has been a collective weeping and great gnashing of teeth. And yet every day I’m teased by the title This Feeling Will End.”

So, Jay is pointing out that our Scriptnotes transcripts got a month behind, but Godwin has done a hero’s work to get them all back up. So as you are listening to this episode we should be caught up. So, John Morgan has been doing the transcripts and Godwin has them all up now. So, sorry for people who are waiting for transcripts, but they are there.

And if you have not read the transcripts, basically if you’re looking at the episode on the blog, when there is a transcript at the very bottom of the post there will be an update that says here is a link to the transcript. So, if you’re a person who wants to read those transcripts, they will always be there for you.

**Craig:** Hey, I have a question for you.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Is it possible to have people subscribe in some way to an alert so when the transcript goes up they receive an alert?

**John:** That is theoretically possible. We will investigate this week a system for doing that. And if there is an answer, on next week’s episode I will let you know what that system will be.

**Craig:** Because I definitely sympathize with Jay’s predicament here. Because I’m not deaf, but I like reading the transcripts better than listening to the show. I love that we have transcripts.

**John:** Yeah. Transcripts are good.

**Craig:** Every podcast should have a transcript as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Increasingly, more and more podcasts are having them. So, I definitely applaud the trend towards transcripts. We’ve had them since the very beginning.

Last little bit about Jay Allan Zimmerman. “If by chance you and/or Craig happen to be in New York City over the holidays, my concert is at Lincoln Center this year. And I would be very happy and honored to save seats for you.” So, Jay is a songwriter in addition to being a listener. And he’s a songwriter who is now deaf.

**Craig:** Perking up. Hold on. What’s this about?

**John:** So click through the link and you will see. So, there will be a link to his show in the transcripts, but also in the show notes for this week’s episode.

**Craig:** This is so cool. All right. Great.

**John:** Yeah, so that intersection of Scriptnotes and Broadway.

**Craig:** You kind of got me right there. Scriptnotes and Broadway. Makes me happy.

**John:** So our main topic this week is clams. So, back in Episode 52 we looked at clams, which are jokes and phrases that have been overused so much that they’re not only not funny, but they’re sort of anti-funny at this point. They’re painful to hear. But you still do hear them because writing is hard and sometimes writers are lazy. And those clams are sort of joke-oids that serve as placeholders for actual comedy that is meant to be written at some point.

So, this past week John Quaintance on Twitter published photos from two whiteboards in the Workaholics writers’ room. And so these were a list of phrases that were basically banned from their scripts. Like we are not allowed to use these in our scripts. And so those photos got widely circulated, but I asked Godwin to type up the list. And I thought we would take a read through this because it has been 220 episodes since we’ve done this list last time.

We will read these things aloud, and as we read them aloud one by one you will say like, “Oh you know what, you’re right. We should never put those in our scripts anymore.”

**Craig:** I agree. Let’s do it.

**John:** Let’s do it. So I’ll start.

___? More like ___.

**Craig:** Can You Not?

**John:** I Can Explain!

**Craig:** Let’s Not and Say We Did.

**John:** I Didn’t Not ___.

**Craig:** Va-Jay-Jay.

**John:** Wait For It…

**Craig:** Just Threw Up In My Mouth.

**John:** Really?

**Craig:** Good Talk.

**John:** And By ___ I Mean ___.

**Craig:** Check Please!

**John:** Awkward!

**Craig:** Shut The Front Door!

**John:** So, pause here. Do we all know where Shut the Front Door came from? So, it’s Shut the F Up. And so it was a common way of looping over Shut the F Up. So the looping was so funny that people started just using that as a line. But it’s not funny anymore.

**Craig:** No, it’s not funny.

**John:** Lady Boner.

**Craig:** Rut-Roh!

**John:** I Think That Came Out Wrong.

**Craig:** Uh…Define ___.

**John:** No? Just Me.

**Craig:** Why Are We Whispering?

**John:** That Went Well…

**Craig:** Stay Classy.

**John:** I’m A Hot Mess!

**Craig:** That’s Not a Thing.

**John:** It’s Science.

**Craig:** Bacon Anything.

**John:** Cray-Cray.

**Craig:** Real Talk.

**John:** Nailed It.

**Craig:** Random!

**John:** Awesome Sauce.

**Craig:** Thanks…I Guess.

**John:** Little Help?

**Craig:** Laughy McLaugherson.

**John:** ___ Dot Com.

**Craig:** Oh Helllll Naw!

**John:** Epic Fail

**Craig:** Did I Just Say That Out Loud?

**John:** Food Baby.

**Craig:** Douche (Nozzle). Douche anything.

**John:** Soooo, That Just Happened.

**Craig:** Squad Goals.

**John:** I Just Peed A Little.

**Craig:** Too Soon?

**John:** Spoiler Alert.

**Craig:** Um…In English Please.

**John:** Note to Self.

**Craig:** Life Hack.

**John:** Best. ___. Ever. Or Worst. ___. Ever.

**Craig:** It’s Giving Me All the Feels.

**John:** Garbage People.

**Craig:** Garbage people?

**John:** Yeah, like referring to people as like they’re garbage people.

**Craig:** Oh.

That Happened One Time!

**John:** Well Played.

**Craig:** I’m Right Here!

**John:** Hard Pass.

**Craig:** Are You Having A Stroke?

**John:** Go Sports!

**Craig:** Zero Fucks Given.

**John:** We Have Fun.

**Craig:** Who Hurt You?

**John:** I Absorbed My Twin In The Womb.

**Craig:** I’ll take ___ for $500, Alex.

**John:** Thanks Obama.

**Craig:** That’s Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.

**John:** I Think We’re Done Here.

**Craig:** Wait, What?

**John:** Shots Fired.

**Craig:** Sharkweek.

**John:** You Assclown.

**Craig:** Ridonkulous.

**John:** Bag of Dicks.

**Craig:** Hey, Don’t Help.

**John:** Debbie Downer.

**Craig:** I Can’t Unsee That.

**John:** That Just Happened.

**Craig:** I Could Tell You but I’d Have to Kill You.

**John:** See What I Did There?

**Craig:** I’ll Show Myself Out.

**John:** Here’s The Line, Here’s You.

**Craig:** ___ on Steroids/Crack.

**John:** Swipe Right.

**Craig:** White People Problems.

**John:** Oh man. That’s a god list of terrible things.

**Craig:** Seriously. A long, terrible list of terrible. Yeah.

**John:** And none of those things were bad the first time they were done. They were actually probably pretty clever the first time they were done. But now you just don’t want to hear those. And so why I wanted to talk through those is like not just those specific phrases, but in general why it’s a good idea sometimes to make that list of let’s not do these things. Because that general category of bad things, it’s not just necessarily dialogue, but it could also be ideas, or sort of script scenes, or script moments that are just so cliché and overdone. It hurts you because it takes a moment that could be specific to you as a writer or specific to your project and just makes it generic. It robs it of a specialty, of a moment that could be unique to you and makes it common to everything.

**Craig:** It’s so true. The price of the clam isn’t so much that people think, “Oh, the writer is lazy, or the writer is not funny.” Because people aren’t really thinking about that when they’re watching things. There’s a much quicker subconscious injury that occurs when we see or hear these things. And that is a sense that we’re now watching a thing. It has that classic, clichéd, bad move of taking you out of something. Because suddenly I realize, oh, that’s right, this isn’t real. I mean, I know it’s not real, but my little paper thin veneer of verisimilitude has been punctured because I’ve heard that so many damn times.

The use of these clams is – I always think of it as music. I think that people are, well, you know what we need here is we need something to kind of give us a little ramp in. Well, if you’re writing music, here’s what you wouldn’t do. Oh, I know, let’s start the song like this. [hums] But that’s what a clam is. It’s the comedy version of [hums]. It’s just so overdone as to be, oh my god, really? That – see, I just did it. Really?

**John:** Yeah. So, the reason why I think it’s good that they made this list for this writers’ room, and why I think writers can do this for themselves or for the group of the room that’s working on a project is it sort of forces you to step up your game. Say like these are obvious things that we could do that we’ve decided we’re not going to do. And that could be choices you’re making about what dialogue you’re using or not using, but also things your characters are allowed to do or not do.

Or, like you are not allowed to start a scene with like, “To recap…” You’re going to avoid those hacky things that make life easier for you because they are robbing you of moments you could have.

It also is a signal to your staff that you’re watching, that these things are important. And that your show, your movie, whatever you’re writing is not going to be like everybody else’s thing. So I really applaud them for keeping this list and also letting us see their list, because that was really, really helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, if you are hanging out with somebody and they start saying things like, “I can’t unsee that.” In fact, you’re not hanging out with this person. You’re at a coffee shop and you’re listening to two people having a conversation. You don’t know them. And they’re like, “Well played. Really? Are you having a stroke? Note to self…” you think, oh my god, these are the two worst people in the world. They’re so fake. Nobody talks like that. Well, why would you do that to your characters? Why would you turn them into the worst people in the world?

There’s a long tradition in television comedy for characters to have catchphrases, which sometimes are words, and sometimes they aren’t even words. Lucille Ball famously would do this. When she would get I trouble she would go, “Ewwww.” Right? Now, maybe that became a clam by other people copying her, but that’s real. Like I believed her when she would go, “Ewwww.” It was unique to her. Do that.

**John:** Do that. Let’s talk about how you kill these clams. So you detect one of these in a script and you feel yourself about to write one. What are the ways to get out of it?

So, some ideas I have for you is to really examine what is the purpose of this clam. So, let’s say you find one in the script. I would say really examine what that clam is trying to do in that moment. So, is it there so you can get a breath? Is it there to close a thought? Is it there to keep the character alive in the scene? Basically someone who hasn’t spoken, or doesn’t have a purpose to be there, and so they need to say something funny so they stay alive in the scene. Is it to keep the ball in the air? I just read A Woman of No Importance, the Oscar Wilde, and after that I went back and read The Importance of Being Earnest, and a lot of times characters in there are just keeping the ball up in the air. It’s like they’re playing badminton and they have to keep saying a funny line so the ball stays up in the air.

Sometimes that clam might be there to do that. And oftentimes I notice the clam is there really to pivot between two parts of a scene. Basically there’s the business of the first half of the scene, and there’s the business at the second half of the scene, and that clam is to work as a sort of closer and a transition point to flip you to the second part of the scene, so you can be done with the first bit of business and then on to the second bit of business.

So recognize what the function of that clam is. That’s why it’s there. And then find a better thing to put there so you don’t have to use that hack phrase.

**Craig:** Right. So, sometimes – and John knows – I’m having a sneezing fit, so if I start to sound really weird, or vaguely like I’m on the edge of an organism or something, it’s not Sexy Craig. It’s just Sneezy Craig.

**John:** But sneezes and orgasms are neurologically related, are they not?

**Craig:** I guess they’re involuntary spasms of your body. I much prefer the other kind than this, but–

**John:** [laughs] To each his own.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nose-gasming. I have multiple nose-gasms.

Sometimes in comedy, what the clam is really doing is serving as the landing point for a joke. We think sometimes that the clam is the joke. It’s not. The joke is whatever has happened before the clam and people tend to laugh on reactions to things. So a character does something funny, and in movies we do this all the time. Movies are less inclined towards clamminess because they are – it’s not to say that they’re immune. They’re not. But they’re less inclined because there’s no laugh track and there’s no sense of that laugh rhythm being required.

So, in a movie, somebody will do something funny and the editor will cut to another character just starting. And that cut is where you get the laugh from the audience. This is very, very – this is just a true thing. You don’t even realize when you watch movies. Watch what happens when people do funny things. You will immediately cut to somebody going, “Whoa.” So, the look of Whoa is kind of the – that’s the landing spot.

In television comedy, I feel like a lot of times what ends up happening is they can’t just keep cutting to people and reacting because there’s so many jokes and they’re so rapid that they need these little clammy lines to serve as landing places for the audience.

So when you look at clams like for instance, “I’m right here,” or, “Wait, what?” Or, “I can’t unsee that.” I can’t unsee that is obviously referring to a joke, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Something funny happened and that’s their attempt to land. You have to find other ways to land.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk through what you could do to replace that I Can’t Unsee that. So, if that showed up in your script and like you have to make this line better, I would say really look at what is it that you’re trying to say there and see if there’s a way you can say that idea without saying those words. Or at least use what was there to form a better joke, or better moment.

So, I Can’t Unsee That, does that mean I want to damage my eyes? Is that a way to sort of get at that moment? Is it I want to erase that memory? Is it saying like I am emotionally traumatized? Or are you saying I want to reverse time to a moment before that happened. So none of those are the actual line you would say, but they could do down any of those paths to sort of get you to, okay, there’s a good idea for a line down there.

And that’s really hard work. You have to do all the work of trying all those things and say what would actually work in this place. But, I really strongly suspect you will find a better line than, “I can’t unsee that.” And it will be original to your script and will fit the situation. And that’s the crucial thing. You want it to be specific to your script and this moment and those characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also, that’s the thing, it’s the characters. Right? It lets the characters be unique. Every time a character says a clam, you are reminded that they’re just fake. That there’s nothing really that special about that character, because they’re saying the same damn thing 4,000 other characters have said.

And I think that there’s a temptation to go towards clams because you’re worried that if they say something unique to them, it won’t be funny. But, again, remember, that’s not the part that’s funny anyway. It’s just where it’s landing. If I’m writing a sitcom script and I get to a place where something crazy happens and you could have a character say, “I can’t unsee that.” You could just as easily write in, “I hate that I was alive to see that happen.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anything. Now, that’s not great. I’m not saying that’s great. I’m saying just start writing other things that mean the same thing and add a little bit of a zjoosh to it and you’re going to get the same thing as, “I can’t unsee that.” There’s nothing wrong with the concept of it. It’s just the damn words.

**John:** It’s just the damn words.

**Craig:** It’s just the damn words.

**John:** Let’s take a look at “that’s not a thing.” So the sense of that could be, “You’re stupid.” Or you could be saying that mean like, “Stop trying to invent popular culture,” which is basically stop trying to make ____ happen, which was Cher’s line from Clueless. Which was great when Cher said it, but you can’t say that again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or it could be like, “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Like basically I’m confused by this approach. Any of those could be good avenues for what the actual real line should be. But those lines are going to be better than, “That’s not a thing.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like “that’s not a thing,” somebody is saying something as if we all have a common experience with it when we don’t. So, somebody could say, “You’re deeply invested in something that does not exist.” You can come up with all sorts of ways of getting to the heart of what that is without saying, “That’s not a thing.” You know? And the shorter the better, of course.

**John:** Yeah. And finally, “Debbie Downer.” So Debbie Downer was a character on Saturday Night Live. And so it was played wonderfully by Rachel Dratch, but don’t just quote a character from a decade ago on Saturday Night Live. That’s not a great choice. So, what are you saying when you’re saying Debbie Downer? Are you saying you’re not fun to be around? You’re saying don’t kill my idea. You’re saying you’re making me feel shallow and superficial. Those are all valid approaches to this, but look at it from the character’s perspective of like what is it that the character could say in that moment that is unique to that specific character and that specific moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really hate this one because now you’re just saying you are a downer, but that’s not even helping the joke land. It would be much better if in any case like that the character could express how what this person has said makes them feel. Right? So you say you’re making me feel – you know, somebody says something and then you just get up and start walking away. “Where are you going?” “I have to get a prescription for every antidepressant.”

Do something that makes me understand what the joke land recipient is feeling rather than, “I have a name for you that we all have heard.” And by the way, Debbie Downer is the most ironic clam because Debbie Downer itself was a great example of Saturday Night Live catching lightning in a bottle and then stupidly trying to do it over and over. One sketch amazing. Second time you saw it, it was like oh no. Like, they’re smart, they’re never going to do David S. Pumpkins again. If they try, I’ll go down there and I will start cracking skulls.

**John:** That’s going to be a good idea. So, anyway, those are our new suggestions on clams. We went through this whole bit without even talking about the origin of clams. I don’t know where the first term came about. I first heard about it through Jane Espenson, who was a previous guest, who is so smart about writing about writing. But she has a big crusade against certain clams. And is very good about sort of spotting clams as they are about to be formed. She was a writer on Buffy, which again, doesn’t have a normal comedy structure in their scenes, but relied on a lot of comedy writing in order to get through a lot of difficult exposition stuff. So, you know, you got to be vigilant about this even if you’re not writing strictly comedy like Workaholics. You have to be mindful of those things that are going to have the feeling of a joke but are not going to be funny anymore.

**Craig:** Is there a word for a baby clam?

**John:** There should be a word for a baby clam.

**Craig:** Like a young clam.

**John:** A clam that’s going to come. A clam in development. Like how do clams even form? I don’t even know. I know nothing about clam biology.

**Craig:** I’m looking right now. I just learned that clams have an anus.

**John:** Well, yes. You got to poop somewhere. Everybody poops.

**Craig:** Well, I guess that’s true. I don’t know, I thought maybe clams just sort of, you know, just all sort of leaked out from everywhere.

It’s not like a calf, like a cow has a calf, and a sheep has a lamb. Clams have small clams.

**John:** Yeah. All right, next topic. We have a question from Kota Hoshino who asks, “I have a question about naming characters. How do you decide on a name that is good, unique, and not clichéd?”

Craig, what thoughts can you offer for Kota about naming your characters?

**Craig:** Well, this is an endless bane of screenwriters. We have to come up with names all the time. And you’re kind of stuck, because you don’t want to – I mean, look, here’s crime number one. Jim Patterson. Right? No one should ever be named Jim Patterson. Crime number two, and unfortunately this is committed frequently by movies that are successful, so hey, what do I know, but I cringe every time I hear any action hero named Cutter McGonagall, or Razor Edge. You know, and you hear it and you’re just, “What?”

**John:** You still hear it.

**Craig:** And then there’s these really purple prose names like, you know, Ecclesiastes Phosphorus. So, I don’t like names to smack me in the face with their pomposity, or their manliness, but I certainly don’t want these generic names. So, the first thing I do is I ask questions about my character. Where are they from? How old are they? Where were their parents from? Because remember, parents name children.

Every character to me, this is an opportunity to imply something about ethnicity. Apply something about class. Race. Geography. So, then what I do is I research. And I try and find interesting examples that land in that happy little space that is to the east of boring and done, and to the west of “oh beat it.” Right?

Now, sometimes you’re writing stories that are in fantasy world, so then your names have to feel like they’re part of a common language that you’ve invented. Even if that language is English, for instance, JK Rowling has a kind of language for the world of wizards, even though they live in our world, whether they are English wizards or French wizards, there’s a certain aesthetic to the name.

So, that’s – I kind of just start asking a lot of questions about the character. And then I think how can I be purposeful with the name I choose.

**John:** Absolutely. And character decisions for me are really fundamental. I generally will not start writing a character or write scenes unless I really do know the characters’ names, because it’s just so hard for me to think about that person without their name. And the situations where I’ve had to go through and rename a character after the fact, it always kills me because like, no, no, I wrote that character to be this person and if I change the name they’re no longer this person.

So, I really do need to know the characters’ names before I get started there. Other sort of good general suggestions – as much as you can avoid, don’t name two characters with the same first letter of their name, because people are going to be seeing that name and hearing that name and you just want them to have as much differentiation. So, if you have Adam, don’t also have an Aaron in your script, because that will just get confusing.

Now, sometimes it will just happen. Like Aladdin has both Jasmine and Jafar. But everyone knows who they are so it’s fine. That’s not going to be confusing. But if were to add another character, I wouldn’t give him a J, because that would just be a mess. And you’d subconsciously get them confused with the two characters.

Also look at sort of whether you’re using the full version of the name or the short version of the name. We talked about race and class, but there’s also sort of the intersection of education and status. And so in Big Fish we have Edward Bloom, and he’s always Edward. He’s never Ed. He’s never Eddie, except for Jenny Hill can call him Eddie. And it’s Will Bloom. It’s not William Bloom. If you have an Edward and a William, you will get them confused because they feel like the same kind of fanciness of names. But Edward and Will you won’t get confused. So, look at that. So varying the length of names can also help distinguish them on the page.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point about the name changing and how traumatic that can be. When you get to a place where you’re about to go into production on your screenplay, someone at the studio has the unenviable task of clearing the names. And there’s a whole science to clearing names, but basically the idea is they don’t want to get sued. They don’t want to get sued. They don’t want to have somebody out there say, “You named that character after me.” So, either there has to be no one named that, or a whole lot of people named. You get in trouble if like one or two people are named that. So occasionally what happens is they’ll clear a whole bunch of names but come back to you and say you can’t name this person this. You have to change their name. And it is traumatic.

Even, before that on the sheep movie, I was adapting a novel and one of the important characters in the novel, a sheep, was named Othello. And Lindsay and I, from the start, we were like we don’t want to do – we don’t want any kind of black sheep/white sheep racial metaphors in this. We want our sheep to be all different colors. We don’t think sheep have race problems, and we don’t want to imply that they do. They have other – they have like a whole other weird set of biases that are so specific to sheep that when we hear them we go, “That’s the strangest thing. Why would that be a problem for you?”

But, not color. And Othello is so, you know, literally is identified by race. So, we wrestled, and wrestled, and wrestled, and finally – dozens of names, and eventually landed on one that we were okay with. But it took months to stop calling him Othello. It was hard.

**John:** I totally get that. And I would also say from Big Fish, some of the characters I pulled from Daniel Wallace’s novel are actually completely different characters, but I loved the names so much. Like, Amos Calloway does not own a circus in Daniel Wallace’s novel. There’s no circus there. But Amos Calloway was exactly the perfect Big Fish name. And so there had to be an Amos Calloway in the movie, and so it became the Danny DeVito Amos Calloway circus owner.

So, those names have to fit within the world, and that fit very well within the world of fantastical south.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** All right, we have two more quick questions. The first one is about life rights. Let’s take a listen.

Questioner: I’m currently working on a documentary in which the idea has been tossed around to turn the story into a feature length film. A couple of the characters, however, are quite a bit older and the question has been asked what happens to their life rights if they pass away before we can attain them. Also, how do you attain someone’s life rights if they’ve already passed away?

**John:** So, Drew is asking about life rights. And life rights is complicated. Again, we always have to remind you we are not lawyers. What I would say in general about life rights is that you are getting a person’s life rights when you want to tell their story, and you’re telling a part of their story that is not part of the public record. Very specifically, you are Charles Sully Sullenberg and you are telling the story of Charles Sully Sullenberg. Or, you are important person in that story and you have sort of the right to publicity, you have the right to tell your own story. And so therefore I’m coming to as a person trying to tell your story on film, or in a TV series, and therefore I’m asking for your rights to tell this part of the story. So, basically, they’re giving up the opportunity to tell their story in another movie to let you tell their story in this movie.

In terms of the legalities of a person who has already died, well, my understanding is that like life rights in this sense do not carry over after your death. But, Craig, tell me that I’m wrong.

**Craig:** I can’t. I think that that’s true. But, you know, Drew, the thing is none of this is – there’s the law, and then there’s the practice. And in practice what ends up happening is if you want to tell the story of somebody who is dead, and recently so, a lot of times you’re going to want the cooperation of the estate. Even if the estate is as simple and small as a surviving spouse. Because that person will be able to help you. And they will have letters, and information, and all sorts of little bits of stuff that you can use. And, of course, even further down the line playing the larger game here, you don’t want to make a fictional movie about somebody and then have that person’s real life husband or wife start yapping in advance of your movie saying it’s a bunch of crap.

So, a lot of times what happens is people don’t get so stuck on the technicalities of the law and try and work with, well, what will make our lives easier creatively and financially. So, a lot of times people will just work out deals.

**John:** The other thing we should stress is that a lot of times while you’re getting some life rights is that there’s always the possibility of libel. So, a real life living person, if you say something that is provably, demonstrably untrue about that person, under American law and under international laws they can sue you for libel. And in the process of getting life rights, you may have contractual language in there that sort of protects you from libel lawsuits from that person, which can be useful, and helpful.

Dead people don’t have libel. Dead people cannot sue you for libel. And that is a useful thing that will hopefully continue under future administrations.

**Craig:** So then there’s a P.S. to the question. “What is the difference between posthumous and postmortem? I wasn’t sure which made the most sense in this context. And the all-knowing Internet was of no help.”

Well, I would think posthumous here would make sense. Postmortem is really specific to the moments immediately after death. So, a postmortem is what happened in the days or hours after somebody died, or describes any kind of examination or investigation related to a dead body, or dead thing. Posthumous is really more about events in the world that occur after the life of a person has ended as opposed to while they were alive.

**John:** Absolutely. So like a posthumous honor was bestowed upon this person. And so think about posthumous with a person. Postmortem is with a body, I think, is sort of a useful way of thinking about it.

And so after a certain point, postmortem doesn’t really make sense to be using as a term.

Our final question comes from the wonderfully named Telly Archer. Let’s listen to what she had to say.

Telly Archer: My question is about picking a genre. Do I need to? I’ve heard a lot of people say that you’re supposed to pick one genre and stick to it when you’re trying to break into the industry so that you can become somewhat of an expert or go-to person in that area. And then once you have a good reputation, then you break out into other genres. However, what makes more sense to me is the people who say just write wild. Let your voice be heard. Write the script that only you could write and not care about how similar it is to the next one you do. I made a list of the most me ideas that I have. There’s two comedies. One light. And one very dark. And then a horror, a thriller, and a rom-com.

So, I’m hoping you’ll say write wild and not pick a genre. Because I don’t know how I’d do that. But I do want to know the actual answer. So, any advice you can give would, of course, be appreciated. And thank you for all you do. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye…I love that. I also liked, sooooo. I do that myself.

Here’s my answer, Telly. I think you’ll be happy. Write wild. What is writing wild really mean? It means writing the way you’re insides are directing you to write.

Now, you can say, “Do I have to stick to one genre?” Well, first of all, what is your genre? You don’t know. You have genres that you want to write in, so let’s call those part of writing wild. You want to write a romance. You want to write fantasy. You want to write a thriller. You write it. Okay. That’s now a genre you’re interested in.

The business, if they discover a script of yours and love it, they may say, “Oh good, now give us another one of these.” And you can say, “Well, how about this? Do you also like this? If you had seen this first, maybe you would think you would want another one of these, right?” They may say to you, “Actually we just like the thriller that you write. Not so big on the romances. Love the thrillers.”

Okay, well, write one or don’t. And you can choose that when you get there. But, I believe you should write what you want to write as long as you’re not hopping around from subject to subject to distract yourself from the fact that you’re maybe lacking some discipline. If you feel disciplined and interested in a genre, write it.

**John:** Yeah. So, when we had our agent on the podcast, Peter Dodd, we talked a little bit about this. The sense of like do you want to have a writer who writes just one kind of thing, or writes a whole bunch of different kind of things. And my recollection was he was upfront about the fact that it’s easier to market you in the town as the person who does X, Y, or Z rather than sort of does everything. But, I guess don’t worry about being pigeonholed until somebody is actually interested in reading you. So, write the things that you think you can write best. And that means experimenting with some different things and seeing what it is that you love. But, obviously, write the script you’ll finish. Write the script that you’ll kick ass on. The one that gets you sitting down at the computer every day, because that’s the most crucial factor here.

Once you know you can do it and you know what it is you like to write, there may be situations where you kind of get pushed to writing one kind of thing. And if that’s paying you and you’re going to be paid to write, congratulations. You’re now a successful screenwriter. Down the road you could bend a little bit.

Previously on the podcast I’ve talked about how the first jobs I got were adapting kids’ books. And so I did How to Eat Fried Worms, A Wrinkle in Time, and I got pegged as being the guy who adapted kids’ books. So I got sent books about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas.

And I wrote Go largely to break out of that cycle. And so that was a lovely opportunity I could break out of that cycle and I had something new I could show people. But, I got to break out rather than sort of just trying to break in. So, write what you love. Let people respond to the things that are so uniquely you, the thing that you are clearly passionate about writing. And don’t worry about picking a genre right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s a problem for later on down the line. If you have that problem, “Geez, I feel like I’m being pigeonholed by Hollywood. The keep sending me blah-blah-blah jobs.” Not such a bad situation. But we are the only creative job in Hollywood that can write ourselves out or into trouble. Actors have to wait for roles to come to them. Directors have to wait for scripts to come to them. Same with producers. Same with studios.

We can reinvent ourselves every single day if we choose. The key is to do so in a way that is impressive. Simple as that.

So, I wouldn’t worry about this one at all.

**John:** Yep. My One Cool Thing this week is The Good Place on NBC is which is, wow, talk about a show that is not worried about genre. It is writing itself into a very specific, unique thing. So, this is the show that stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson and a lot of other talented actors. Created by Michael Schur. The pilot was directed by Drew Goddard, who is fantastic, and a fantastic writer in his own right. Had episodes written by Alan Yang, Megan Amram, and a bunch of other Scriptnotes-adjacent people.

It is just phenomenal. And I would not have found out about it if it were not for Malcolm Spellman, one of our favorite Scriptnotes folks, who was talking about, “Hey, this show is really good.” And he’s right. It’s really good.

So for people who don’t know, it’s a half-hour serialized really strangely structured, brilliant written, just fantastic. So, we’re watching the season here on iTunes. I strongly recommend people check out The Good Place on NBC.

I’m delighted that it’s actually doing well in the ratings, because usually if we recommend a show, it doesn’t help it. But this one is doing great.

**Craig:** Usually a show is helped by the fat that we’ve never heard of it. [laughs]

**John:** That’s absolutely true. The thing is that I had not heard of this show until this last week, and now I heard about it, and I love it. So, I’m a late adopter, perhaps, on The Good Place. But if you are not watching it, or if you are one of our international listeners who would otherwise not know about the show, check it out, because man, it’s just really, really smartly done and very, very funny.

**Craig:** Megan Amram is the best. We got to get her on the show one day. She’s the greatest.

**John:** We absolutely do. I feel like she’s been a guest, but I don’t even know her. I just talk about her as if I know her.

**Craig:** No, she’s the greatest.

**John:** I have one other thing to plug. My very smart husband, Mike, was a guest on a podcast called Join Us in France this last week, where he talked about what it was like to do all the visa applications and apartment hunting and all of that stuff for this year that we are spending in Paris. And it was a really good podcast if you’re at all curious about the process of us moving to France. He sort of describes it all and really talks you through the kind of stuff you need to do if you’re planning to do what we did and come to Paris for a year.

**Craig:** And that’s in English?

**John:** That’s in English. It’s an English podcast, hosted by a French woman with great English. So, if you want to hear what my husband sounds like, he’s on that podcast. So, there will be a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** He sounds dreamy.

**John:** Oh, he’s dreamy.

**Craig:** Dreamy Craig is a whole other – we’ll get to him sooner or later. My One Cool Thing is the videogame Watch Dogs 2. But specifically the writing of the videogame Watch Dogs 2. I don’t know if you played Watch Dogs Uno.

**John:** I have not.

**Craig:** You know, it was good. It was a fine game. Really, the game – Watch Dogs was entertaining and fun to play because of the mechanic. Very simply you’re a hacker and your phone can essentially control everything around you and you’re breaking into things. It’s fun.

But the character and the story were quite heavy and somber. And Watch Dogs 2 has taken all the same mechanics, you know, jazzed them up a little bit the way they do for sequels, but the characters are so much more interesting because they’re young, and they’re vibrant, and they’re funny.

But here’s the part that’s kind of amazing to me. Now, Watch Dogs 2 is written – it says written by Lucien Soulban. The game was made at Ubisoft Montreal. I can only imagine that there are many writers, not just Lucien, because there’s so much in the show. Sorry, in the game.

But here’s what kind of amazed me. You meet these characters and there are some things that jumped out right off the bat. One, there’s a character named Josh. And, you know, I’ve played my way probably through half of the game. And about 20% of the way through I thought am I looking at the first legitimately autism spectrum disorder character I’ve ever seen in a videogame without it being like, “Look at me, I’m an autism spectrum…”

It’s like this guy, they’ve nailed it. They’ve nailed exactly what Asperger’s is. And around the middle of the game he just casually refers to himself as an Aspie. And I was like, oh my god, that’s incredible. So, that was awesome. The lead is a character named Marcus who is black and there’s another member of their little hacking crew who is black. And the two of them have discussions about race. And it’s fascinating because it’s a great example of code switching. One of them is working at the videogame’s version of Google. And the two of them have a whole conversation about what it’s like to work at that company, which is incredibly white, and he has to represent – he says at one point, “Every meeting, I have to represent all of Blackdom.”

And they have this fascinating conversation and then code switch when other people come by. And then they go back to being themselves. And there’s also a trans character that shows up. And none of it is like, look at me, I’m a trans character. Look at me, I’m black guy. Look at me, I’m Asperger’s. It’s all done kind of just in the most brilliantly casual way.

It’s kind of the ultimate wokeness. So, I’m loving that. I’m just loving the way that they’ve made the world – and it takes place in San Francisco, which kind of helps it a little bit, but they’ve made the world so realistic to actual people that are in the world that you don’t often see in videogames. And then not sort of sledgehammer you in the face with it. They’re just casual. It’s great.

**John:** Great. That sounds great.

**Craig:** Watch Dogs 2.

**John:** Watch Dogs 2. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re actually kind of running low on outros, so come on, send in your outros.

That’s also the place where you can send in your questions like the ones we answered today. Short questions are great on Twitter. So, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are Facebook. I actually update the Facebook and put some stuff there, so please come talk to us on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes podcast there.

You can search for Scriptnotes on iTunes and leave us a review, a comment. That always helps people find our show. That’s also where you can download the Scriptnotes App that lets you get to all of those back episodes. You subscribe to those back episodes through Scriptnotes.net. And so as we talked about at the head of the show, it’s $2 a month. It gets you all the back episodes and the bonus episodes. It’s so good. So useful.

We also have a few of the USB drives left which have all of the back episodes, up to Episode 250. And the transcripts there, too. We try to get transcripts up on the site four days after the episodes aired. They fell behind, but I think we’ll be able to catch them back up.

That is our show. So, I should say, links to all the things we talked about on today’s episode you can find at johnaugust.com. They’re also probably below this episode if you scroll in your player of choice. And we’ll try to have links to many of the things we talked about including John Quaintance’s original tweet that started this whole clam discussion this week.

**Craig:** Clam.

**John:** Clam.

**Craig:** Clam.

**John:** Craig, you got over your sneezes. Congratulations. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Midnight Blue T-shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-midnight-blue)
* [Scriptnotes Gold Standard T-shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-gold-standard)
* [No, Gotham, That’s Not How Tightropes Work](https://www.wired.com/2016/11/no-bruce-wayne-thats-not-tightropes-work/)
* [Jay Allan Zimmerman’s Broadway Concert](http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Jay-Alan-Zimmerman-BringsThe-Holiday-Songs-of-Broadways-Beethoven-to-Lincoln-Center-as-Part-of-Broadways-Future-Songbook-Series-20161201)
* [John Quaintance’s Tweet](https://twitter.com/John_Quaintance/status/799751549610168320)
* [The List of Clams](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-workaholics-list-of-banned-phrases)
* [The Good Place on NBC](http://www.nbc.com/the-good-place/episodes)
* Mike on [Join Us in France](http://joinusinfrance.com/moving-to-france/)
* [Watch Dogs 2 Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh9x4NqW0Dw)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_278.mp3).