The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listen to episode 664 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you handle the anxiety of uncertainty? At times in life, particularly in this industry, you’re waiting around for an answer that’s going to have a direct impact on you. We’ll talk through strategies for navigating those situations. Then Craig, do you want to feel old? The president of production at New Line is 27. That guy at Fox, one person 28. Paramount Studio chief is 31, and by the time he’s 35, he’ll be the chairman of Disney. Craig, does that surprise you?
Craig: It doesn’t surprise me. It delights me because the odds that all of those people have been listening to Scriptnotes for the last 10 years is pretty high. I’ve always said this gig is our best job insurance.
John: Well Craig, unfortunately, we have traveled back in time secretly because that was actually true in the ‘80s and ‘90s, because all those people are well-known names you recognize, like Jeffrey Katzenberg or Mike De Luca, those folks were all running these studios when they were in their 20s and early 30s, and they’re no longer doing that. Now, Hollywood is run by folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s.
Craig: Basically, nothing changed. Those people that came along– You know John, when we started in the ‘90s, it did feel like there was– maybe it’s generational, there was this group of 20 somethings coming and going.
John: That was my Stark class coming into the industry.
Craig: “Everybody get out of our way. We’re taking this,” and then we did. We haven’t apparently let it go.
John: We have certainly not. We want to talk about the impact of that generation and how it influences what gets made and who gets to make it. We’ll also ask the question, Craig, is development wage theft?
Craig: Oh, well, strictly speaking those aren’t wages at all because it’s unemployment.
John: Yes, exactly.
Craig: It’s an independent contracting.
John: It is, yes.
Craig: It is technically.
John: We will talk through those and answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, which aspects of pandemic life are we still practicing in 2024?
Craig: That’s some thought.
John: First, we have some actual news. We have some events coming up. We have our live show December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter here in Los Angeles. Tickets are now on sale for everyone.
Craig: That’s great. Now, we don’t have guests to yet announce.
John: Not yet announce. We have one who’s confirmed, who’s fantastic. I’m very excited about that. We’ll match folks in who will be great and equally fantastic.
Craig: We’ve never failed to get great guests. Even when we had trouble, we were going to have the-
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: -Larry Kasdan on and then he was not feeling well, so we just threw in some Jason Bateman and some Benioff and Weiss. We can do things like that.
John: We can do things. So I’m excited for our live show and excited for our guests. I’m also doing a second little event on November 22nd 6:30 PM in Village Well in Culver City. This game we make, Alpha Birds, they’re having a night which is just playing Alpha Birds. We’ll be there.
Craig: Oh, cool.
John: Folks can have a drink and play some Alpha Birds. We’ll show you how to play it.
Craig: I love a game store.
John: Game stores are good. Game stores with a liquor license, even better.
Craig: I was confused there, but if they can afford that, amazing.
John: That’s good stuff. You’ll find links in the show notes to both of those events if you are in Los Angeles and want to come to those. Now, Craig, we are recording this episode on a weekend. Drew is not here, so it’s just the two of us.
Craig: Finally.
John: We have no supervision.
Craig: We can just do whatever we want instead of mommy yelling at us.
John: This episode will come out on Tuesday, which in the United States is election day. We’re not going to talk about the election, but I do want to talk about anxiety as a general phenomenon because independent of what day or what’s happening in the world, there are moments, especially as a screenwriter or someone working in this industry where you are waiting around for an answer to come or something to happen.
It could be that you’ve turned in a scripture waiting for notes, you are waiting for the results of a medical procedure, and sometimes those are worse than the actual news itself, is the anxiety that builds up about waiting around for that. I just want to talk through some general strategies you’ve learned over the years and things I’ve found to be useful.
Craig: Sure. You put your finger on one of the biggest challenges we have as human beings, and that’s uncertainty. We really struggle with it. What we try to do, I think instinctively is solve it. There’s a problem. I’m scared of blank. It always starts with fear. I’m scared of blank. How do I solve that? Maybe if I just ruminate and perseverate, and think it through and seek reassurance, which is our number one strategy, then I can make the fear go away. In fact, reassurance seeking really is just pointless. It’s not going to change the reality of what happens.
John: I think let’s look at it from a point of view of screenwriters, because as screenwriters, we are problem solvers. We see situations out there in the world. We’ve created these situations for our characters or in our scripts, and we are looking for what those solutions are. We talk about it on the podcast, sometimes you just need to stop and think and actually work through it and figure out what that is. That is true and useful in fictional worlds in which we’re creating where we can change all the rules. But in this real world, we can’t change those rules.
I think, Craig, one thing you’re saying is, we are trying to solve a problem that we cannot solve by accepting that there’s not a solution to the problem that is in our control is a crucial first step.
Craig: It’s hard, because you’re right. We are used to being in complete control of the narrative. We can go around and change things and do whatever we want. We are all of us living inside a reality that we narrative eyes, but it is not a narrative, and we just don’t know. The things that we don’t know, we don’t know are vast. You and I have been in positions before where we may see people worrying about something that we are making. It hasn’t come out yet, but they’re worrying.
They’re worrying because they care, which is a good sign. It’s better than them not caring, but sometimes they will express their fear in statements of certainty because they’re looking for certainty. It is sometimes easier for them to say, “You know what? This is going to be bad and I’m going to hate it. I’m not going to watch it. I’m not going to care,” because the alternative was just to sit in my uncertainty for months and months and months is intolerable. But what we know on our side of things is, “Hey, we actually made something good. Wish we could show it to you right now to calm you down. Can’t, but we will.”
I think sometimes that’s how things work with politics. All we see is what we’re shown, but we don’t know. We don’t know what they know.
John: Absolutely. Pulling it back to more our industry, we are waiting for an answer sometimes from a decision maker, and that decision maker is also facing uncertainty. That decision maker is like, “Am I making the right choice? Am I not making the right choice? What is the safest course? What is the most likely course that is not going to result in a disaster?”
Recognizing sometimes from their point of view, they don’t know either. It can be frustrating, but also reassuring that we’re all feeling our way around in this situation.
Craig: We want to believe that the people that control things are supremely confident, and they’re not, nor are they perfect, nor may they even be confident in what they are doing. And they may also be struggling with those problems that we don’t know about. They may want to say yes. The problem is they’ve been told they’re not allowed to say yes currently because they’re in a fight with somebody over something they just said yes to. How that all functions and flows is really hard to comprehend, so don’t. Don’t bother. The waiting, in and of itself, disappears as waiting if we just stop waiting. Don’t wait. Just move on with your life.
John: Let’s talk about the moving on of it all, because there’s the moving on you can do with the actual situation you’re faced with. With the project that you’re waiting for an answer from this one person, it’s worth interrogating. Like, “Am I actually waiting for this person? Does that yes or no really matter, or could I be doing something else that’s useful and productive on this? Am I waiting for this person to give me a thumbs up or thumbs down, or should I be showing this to other people, because that may be the smartest thing to do, or should I just be working on that next project?” And that is often really the best choice.
Craig: You can’t go wrong doing more work.
John: Yes.
Craig: That’s generally speaking a win-win. I think that agents and managers who listen to this are probably very familiar with the feeling of a client calling saying, “Why aren’t we doing anything?” The answer is there’s nothing to do, but that’s not a great answer to give a client because, A, they’re looking for reassurance, reassurance through action. The notion that we are in control of things, if only we did A, B, or C. Also, it’s not an easy thing to say to a client that right now you have no utility to them. This is something that I think representatives struggle with a lot of times.
They know there’s nothing to do, or they know that maybe there will be something to do, but in a month. The stuff again that we don’t know, what we don’t know is that five days from now, somebody’s going to mention this to somebody, who’s going to mention it to somebody, who’s going to mention it to Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is going to say, “What? Let me read that,” and reads it and says, “I want to do this.” Then everything changes. We have no way of seeing any of that because it’s in the future. It hasn’t occurred yet, nor is it predictable.
We have to unfortunately accept that we are only in control of what goes on the page, and very little else.
John: For sure. What I don’t want anyone to take from this conversation is the sense of that you have no agency, you have no control, you have no ability to make decisions yourself. You absolutely do. If you are getting no answer from an agent or a manager over a period of time, and they seem to be doing nothing, and you write in a letter saying, “My agent or manager seems to be doing nothing,” that is a concern. Then you should bring up that concern and consider looking for new representation. That’s a story as old as this time.
What we’re I think trying to stress is that, it’s worth asking, what is the roadblock? When you find out what that roadblock is, you realize there’s nothing I can do about that roadblock. I have a project right now that we should be going out to the town with, but there’s a roadblock based on the rights holder that has to be resolved, and there’s nothing I can do to force that to happen more quickly.
Craig: Exactly. There is nothing you can do. The people that work for you, you do have control over. You pay your agent. You pay your manager. That is an enormous amount of control. If they’re not fulfilling what you think is a service that you’re paying for, then you fire them and you find somebody else, but the people that we’re asking money from, and I don’t know if you’ve– I think you must have experienced this, as time goes on, we get more and more comfortable with the practice of submitting something and then literally forgetting you submitted because there’s something else to do.
When you get called about that thing, it is a pleasant surprise, but if you have kept yourself moving, if you get a call that’s an unpleasant surprise, well, let’s now talk about what else we can do there, or do we just end it? Either way, I’m moving forward. I’ve already been moving forward. What I haven’t been doing is sitting by the phone, chewing my fingernails.
John: Yes, for sure. There’s a general framework in terms of thinking about what’s on your side, your circle of control. What are the things you can actually control versus your circle of concern? There are things in the world that you are concerned about. You have strong opinions about things you want to see happen in a certain way, the health of your family, the environment, our general political system, those are issues that are well within your circle of concern, but they’re not necessarily in your circle of control.
There’s not a thing you can do specifically to solve that problem. So it’s worth interrogating, well, what are these small actions I can take that will advance that goal? That’s great because that will make you feel that you have some utility and some agency in that cause. Tomorrow, I am phone banking. Phone banking is like, “Listen, I might talk to three people and nudge them on, but that’s great.” It’s going to make me feel better and could potentially be helpful in a swing state. It’s recognizing that there’s limits to what I can do. There’s no more big checks I could write that would actually have an impact.
Craig: Yes. And I think often of the lesson that our grandparents must have faced when they lived through a war, which you and I have not lived through, not on the scale of World War I, World War II. We were barely alive for Vietnam. We weren’t around for Korea. The wars that followed, the engagement by United States forces were so limited compared to those. No drafts. There has been a draft since Vietnam war.
John: We had 9/11 and it was the closest we had to be an assault on us.
Craig: 9/11 actually, in and of itself, is a pretty interesting lesson in uncertainty because if someone had said two weeks earlier, something horrible was going to happen on United States soil and we’re counting down and you all know what it is, that would have been a horrible two weeks. But the fact is, the act itself would have been no different. Anticipation and uncertainty, in and of themselves, are a kind of torment. We are capable of withstanding a lot of it, more than we think, but part of withstanding it is recognizing for what it is, something over which we have no control.
John: Let’s talk about why we worry and why anxiety exists because I think it is a useful evolutionary function. We have it. Other mammals have it. Clearly, other things, too. Can be stressed out about the future. As humans, we have a much stronger vision of the future. We can narrativize these things and catastrophize these things, but in some ways, that helps protect us and helps keep us alive. The challenge is, it was designed to keep us away from predators. It was not designed to deal with weird nebulous existential threats.
Craig: Yes. We have a system in place neurologically that keeps us alert and creates a state of vigilance. Vigilance, on some level, is important. If you cut yourself and then just ignore it, your arm’s going to get infected. Gangrene will sit in. You’ll either die or lose your arm. If you get a sense that your spouse is spending a whole lot of time with someone else, you may want to investigate that. There are reasons for vigilance, but hypervigilance over your life is toxic. I know this because I’ve literally had to deal with this in therapy.
The notion of over-vigilance in the sense that if you do not provide Ryan Reynolds style maximum effort to self-examination and the state of your career, your life, whatever it may be, it’s all going to fall apart. Problematic. Not helpful. Doesn’t actually keep you any safer. Just blows those circuits out and you end up spending all of your time scared.
John: I think it’s worth thinking about, how do we put some limits on the time and space we’re allowing ourselves to worry or letting ourselves worry at places and then also not worry about places. Things I do for myself is I basically will not look at social media on my phone after 8:00 PM just because I know that I recognize that creates a pattern of a doom loop that it’s hard for me to break out of.
Rachel Bloom in her special on Netflix, she talks about the huge grief she was going through and the fear about her daughter, and her daughter just being born right at the start of the pandemic and losing Adam Schlesinger, her therapist would say, “Have a room in your house where you can go and cry and cry in that room, and give yourself that space, but then leave that room and leave all that anxiety in that room,” which is a useful way of thinking about it. Just actually put that in a place and recognize that that’s the place for that, but don’t let it infest the rest of your world.
Craig: Yes, you need a chance to feel what you’re feeling. You can’t beat anxiety by yelling at it, but putting it in perspective, which is what that sounds like is what you need to do. Part of it is just recognizing what it is. It’s a bunch of feelings that are happening, like having to cough. If you have to cough, cough. Get it out. But while you’re coughing, don’t think I’m dying because I’m coughing or I’ll never stop coughing. I guess my life is now coughing. It’s not how it works.
John: It’s also worth recognizing that sometimes you feel a physical thing and then you reverse engineer that to say this is anxiety. Last night, I was like, “Oh my God, my anxiety is off the charts.” It was like, “Oh, no, I’m actually just cold.” I haven’t turned on the heat in the house. I’m actually shivering because of that. That’s actually what’s doing it. It felt the same as my anxiety felt. I put on a sweater.
Craig: My version of that is sometimes I get that butterfly in the stomach feeling, jittery, and I presume immediately that there’s a reason I’m scared. What is the reason? Why am I scared? I’m not scared. I’m experiencing a physical symptom of fear because some adrenaline is squirting out errantly. Happens to me all the time. I’ve come to notice there are moments where something suddenly triggers “fear” in me that is nothing, like looking at a tree and I suddenly, “Something’s wrong.” I’ve come to understand, “No, nothing’s wrong.” Something hormonal in my body just went blah.
I don’t have a good alarm system. My alarm system is broken. In fact, and I don’t know if this is true for you, since we both suffer from anxiety, where I excel is when there really is trouble. In those instances, I am incredibly calm, clear, direct, problem-oriented, no panic, nothing. It’s the tree, or I don’t know, something, a smell that just suddenly makes me think, “Oh, no, I’m dying.”
John: It’s more like, how could I have possibly said that thing to that person 20 minutes ago?
Craig: Or 20 years ago.
John: Yes.
Craig: Oh, absolutely. Listen, we also have shame loops on our heads and all that stuff. It’s just, we have to deal with it. When we’re talking about writers, people who their brains are attuned to imagination and whose brains are attuned to finding horrible things, that’s what we do with our imaginations. Horrible psychological things, emotional things, incidental things, then, yes, surprise, we don’t feel so good sometimes when we have to fill a space of unknown with potentials.
Yes, people are sitting around right now, thinking, “Well, if the person that I don’t want to be president is president, I am imagining the following horrible things happening.” Our imagination in that fear is not particularly useful. What is useful is just good old-fashioned dispassionate planning. Preparing, helping, strategizing.
John: Yes, for sure. Last little things I’ll say. If you do find yourself in that doom spiral loop, some tricks to get out of it, and you can google other ones too but things that I found are useful, literally dunking your head in ice water, sounds crazy, but it kicks off this primal, like that. I don’t know. That sounded like drowning, but there’s some primal thing it takes off. It’s like it can snap that for a second. I will listen to my political podcast while I’m running because it doesn’t have the same valance when you’re running.
Just things that you can do to make sure that you are inoculating yourself as best you can from those ups and those downs.
Craig: I’m not surprised that that’s the experience you have when you’re running because perhaps the single most effective anxiety breaker is oxygen. We stop breathing. And as you experience a minor hypoxia, the panic will increase because your brain is also designed to have you panic if it thinks you’re drowning. So as stupid as it is, deep breathing works 100% of the time. It is so frustrating that that is the case. While you’re doing it, it’s not working until suddenly, it’s worked, and it’ll be a minute maybe.
John: Yes, or someone tells you to drink a glass of water and that’s the stupidest thing ever and yet it still, it does help.
Craig: There are these things because what we’re experiencing is a simple mistake in the wiring. We don’t like thinking that we’re that dumb of a machine, but we are. We are that dumb of a meat machine.
John: Yes, for sure. All right, let’s move on to our next topic here. This is inspired by an article by Mia Galuppo, writing for The Hollywood Reporter. Her article is titled The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck, but what’s really about is this sense, as we were talking about in the lead up here, is that when we were entering the industry, it felt like there were a lot of young people, a little older than us, but our age, who were suddenly running the town, they’re presidents of production, they’re heads of studios, they were doing all those jobs.
Over the years, we talk about the ladder and we talk about the importance of making sure those lower rungs of the ladder are actually available for people who are entering the industry, but I don’t think we talk enough about like, “Well, the upper rungs of the ladder.” If people are just staying on the ladder, there ends up being no place to climb to. When we see executives who are now turning 70, running those jobs, the people who used to be 35 in those positions are now in their 50s and 60s. It creates this log jam where there’s not a space for the folks who should be climbing to climb to.
Craig: Well, there is a space, the space is the same. That was always there. The space is I’m going to kick this old man out and take over. That’s why CAA exists. Four agents said, “We’re leaving William Morris, screw this old man. We’re starting our own place. We’re taking all these clients with us and now CAA is the biggest agency in the world.” I think after it bought ICM, it’s at least maybe endeavors, I don’t know, but they’re up there. Point being, they were called the Young Turks.
John: They were.
Craig: They are all not young. One of the things I’m wondering about is the state of ambition. Along with ambition is its opposite, which is, I guess I would call despair or helplessness. The sense that what you’re trying to get is impossible to get, but you’re trying to break into an impervious vault. Sometimes I wonder if it is generational, because when you and I started, our ambition was to be something in the entertainment business. What we didn’t have was the distraction of everyone else’s life on 24/7 in a reality show.
We did not have any need nor ability to document our lives for other people to see what other people were doing. There are so many distractions, and in a way, I think also– Are you familiar–? We talked about this with Rebel Wilson, Tall Poppy syndrome.
John: Oh, for sure.
Craig: Tall poppy syndrome, I think grows pretty well in social media. The sense that, “Oh, someone’s getting too good or too fast, or they’re too ambitious or whatever, let’s knock them down.” That becomes an ingrained feeling you have when you enter a business like, “Oh, we should all just sort of be leveled out here.” Whereas when you and I started, it was a law of the jungle.
John: Yes, for sure. Thinking back to when I was entering the industry, it felt like it was musical chairs and there were actually just plenty of chairs. There was space for everybody was entered into the industry as things were expanding and more opportunities were opening up, television was expanding. The boundaries between film and television were collapsing. There was opportunities to do new things. I do feel like that time is also happening now in terms of whatever you want to say about YouTube or sort of all the creator-generated videos, which is a whole sort side industry that’s there and it’s actually successful.
What is different about the industry now versus when you and I started though, is even though the big corporations had boards of directors, and they were publicly traded companies, they weren’t publicly traded companies in the same way. Disney was not as big as it was. Warner’s Discovery was not as big as it was, and there wasn’t the expectation that the people who were at the helm of those companies had to be titans of industry for Wall Street.
Craig: Right. The ladder ended at a certain spot, and that spot was movie mogul, I’m in charge of the studio. And now, you’re absolutely right. I think when Sony came in and bought Colombia, it was the beginning of something, although Gulf Western Oil had bought Paramount, but still, when you read about the creation of The Godfather and Charlie Bluhdorn, who’s going back and forth from East Coast to Hollywood and trying to broker peace between all these people and Bob Evans and everybody, yes.
It definitely had a little bit less of, I’m trying to run for president of this nation-sized corporation, but still, we make more television now than we ever did before. I think where the squeeze happened is mostly in the area of producing. When we started, there were 4 million producers and all of them had a deal somewhere because the way the business worked was there were five executives who couldn’t handle everything, and then there were 100 producers on the lot.
All of them shoved into some space with an assistant and a creative executive, all of them absorbing massive amounts of money and almost all of them worthless. That is an area where contraction occurred and did eliminate a lot of pads for people to excel because a lot of people went to those useless places, clearly out shunned the people that had hired them and went on to bigger and better things.
John: Now, a person who enters the industry saying, “I want to make movies.” If they’re not there to be a writer director, if they’re there to be because they want to be a producer or they want to be a studio executive, I think that’s a very different and very frustrating path ahead for them versus my Stark class, when we came out of there, that was technically a producer’s program. We had four people who really became producers quite quickly, others who became agents. There was just a sense of like, we are going to take over this part of the town, and it’s so much harder now.
Yes, there’s other paths. There’s independent film, there’s ways to make things that are exciting. You’re not entering into the classic system to make a thing.
Craig: Yes, I think the rise of management companies has largely replaced the massive tide of questionably valuable production companies. Now, managers are producers as well, and there are more of them than ever. Managers seem to want to take on writers sooner than agencies would. If you wanted to be a manager, I suppose that there are a lot of find your way onto a desk, work your way, but I talk to agents at all the agencies, and when I’m talking to senior agents or partners and things, there is a theme. It’s not from all of them, but it’s from some of them.
The theme is, we’re worried, well, let’s go back to anxiety about the future, because the people who are coming in don’t seem to have the same insatiable hunger for success that we had. We’re not sure there’s any way to succeed in Hollywood if it’s not with an insatiable hunger. You can’t half-hunger your way to success in Hollywood.
John: I think I hear that sometimes with a sense that a generation wants permission to do a thing. They’re always looking for approval, rather than just like, “Screw you, I’m going to do this thing anyway.” I was watching Saturday Night, which is the Jason Reitman movie about the creation of the first episode of Saturday Night Live. What is notable about that is that everyone in that story is in their 20s.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: Which is absurd. It seems really crazy now that you would trust a person in their early 20s with this big swath of television live, and it’s a big risk. The movie pauses that there was a calculation behind that, that made sense. I do think that the equivalent person now is not trying to do that on NBC. They’re doing something completely different on a YouTube or whatever. I was talking to two friends this week who I ended up connecting, one of whom works in this YouTube space and works with a bunch of creators and they can just make anything. They can do anything.
They have money and they’re successful and they can do stuff. He’s like, “Oh, I need to hire a showrunner for something.” I’m like, “Okay, well, tell me what that means.” He was describing this thing. It’s like, “Okay, that’s not actually a showrunner. I think you want a non-writing producer who can godfather and sort of be a creative liaison.” It’s like, “Oh, yes, okay then, that’s what it is.” I talked to my friend who is probably the right person for that, but it comes out of the classic studio system.
I had to warn both of them, make sure you actually are figuring out what your common language is, because I don’t think you’re using the same terms for nearly anything. I do wonder if it’s going to be a really parallel thing that’s going to rise up and we’ll have to figure out how it fits back in.
Craig: Well, and it might not.
John: Yes, it might not.
Craig: Of course, you and I don’t need to figure it out. Other people do, but there is a question of what is it that people do want? The insatiable hunger people have reasonably, I think, drifted to a place where their hunger will pay off quicker and perhaps more. I don’t know if it will stay as steady as some Hollywood success can stay. If you really can find your way into this business, prove that you have great value, you will have length. It’s hard because a lot of people who I think are worthy just can’t get to that place where they’re able to Velcro on.
In YouTube, yes, I think it’s a little trendy. So people light up and sometimes they explode because of bad behavior. We see that quite a bit. Sometimes people just start laughing at them. You started as something, you became a discovery, you became super-hot, you were an incredible trend, and then the memes began, and now, you’re a joke. That cycle is going to have to happen a few times for people to start to question whether or not it’s worth it.
The amount of money that can be made does seem to make it worth it but there is something about the legitimacy of what we do in Hollywood. The world still takes it more seriously. There’s no question about that.
John: You look at like the success of a Mr. Beast and what he’s able to do and you have the spotlight on you and so you as an individual are such a focus, but he’s both like the star and the Jeffrey Katzenberg of this studio that he is built. There’s something very great about that and something that an only person in their 20s is able to do. That’s notable. It’s a question of like, is that sustainable, is it repeatable for other people?
Craig: Right now, he’s in some trouble. This does seem to happen quite a bit and I’m not surprised because people are in their 20s. This often happens to them in Hollywood as well.
Mike De Luca is a very interesting story, because in his 20s, he was suddenly boom running something and then there was some scandal and there was a bit of an explosion and he crashed to Earth and then got himself well, did the work. It was decades. Now, he’s-
John: Running a studio.
Craig: -one of the people that runs Warner Brothers. That can happen. There are also some really tough stories out there, Maloney and other guys like that. Was Maloney, who died?
John: Jay Moloney?
Craig: Jay Moloney, just superstar agents. Don Simpson, superstar producer went kaboom and that was that.
John: I don’t think we have a great takeaway for this segment other than to recognize that the individuals who would’ve been the executives in Hollywood just I think recognize that there wasn’t a space for them there and they found other industries, they found other points to do it. I think tech took a lot of them.
Craig: Tech did take a lot of them. I do think still there are people in our industry who are in their 20s who are perhaps a little over-intimidated. Because of the size of our business, they feel like it’s impossible to slash and burn your way to the top. It’s not. Somebody has to. I recommend ambition. I recommend thinking big. It’s the only way it’s going to work. When you have a system where everyone gets comfortable with 32-year-old assistants, that system is broken.
John: Agreed. Let’s talk about this next article. This is from Elaine Low writing for The Ankler. The provocative headline is Development is Wage Theft. Let’s talk about what we mean by development. Development is I am bringing in a writer and talking with them about this project that we want to do together. It might be developing it internally and then we’re going to go out and take it on the town and pitch it or it’s a project that we’re developing internally to the studio. We own a book and we are going to figure out a way to develop it into a TV series, into a movie. That’s classically development.
Development can be paid. Development largely classically was paid where there was a sense of, “Okay, we are going to go through multiple drafts on this thing and get it to a place where you can fill it into director.” There’s a lot of unpaid development, which happens because you’re figuring out what is this thing we’re then going to pitch up to my bosses to other people.
This article is really focusing on the collapse of the traditional TV cycle, where we announce these are the fall shows, and then in the spring, we go through a cycle, where we have people write a bunch of pilots, and then we shoot some of the pilots and we go through. With that all collapsing, the time spent in development on stuff has just escalated beyond the normal boundaries of how much time writers are supposed to be working on things.
Craig: There are so many different aspects of development. Let’s talk about the pre-sale development. Is pre-sale development wage theft? No. Because you are creating intellectual property yourself. Nobody gets paid to imagine dream or write anything. They get paid when they license it for a publication or they get paid when they transfer copyright to somebody. That’s how that works. There are no wages to steal there. Nobody is entitled to be paid while they think of maybe something that could be a book.
When it comes to development underemployment, now the company owns the copyright and now you are going through drafts of things. In movies, we’ve always had this issue because we were paid for a draft. We used to be paid for two, then they started saying, “We’re just going to guarantee you one.” Then you would do a gazillion drafts before you turn that draft in mostly for one of these useless producers. All of whom were terrified that if this movie didn’t get made, they were never going to get paid anything themselves.
In certain cases, when people weren’t paid very much, when you broke it out over the course of weeks, they were dipping below WGA minimum. And we’ve been struggling with that since as long as you and I have been in this business. It helped a little bit. Something that I’d been pushing since 2004 when I was on the board, and now, if you are near a certain amount, you get a guaranteed second step, which is helping. Television suffered a far more serious situation where the advent of mini rooms, which is the stupidest name to describe what that is– I’m going to stop calling them mini rooms.
Let’s call them development rooms. Let’s call them pre-green light rooms. The network or streamer is saying, “We’re going to pay you. We own this idea now. We’re not sure if we’re going to make it. You guys go work on it for eight weeks and then we’ll decide if we’re going to make it. At that point, we’ll probably fire seven of you. The one of you that’s left will write this thing.” Is that wage theft? Not necessarily. It’s wage limitation. It’s a lack of job security.
But that one person who’s left over now may have so much time to work on stuff under one aspect of, yes, it can turn into wage theft, but what the Writers Guild needs to figure out — and this is where we are complicit — is how to solve the problem of writers being paid like producers because we don’t have any control over that. And for the longest time and continuing, networks and streamers say, “We’re going to pay you Writers Guild minimums or roughly minimums to make sure you get healthcare and pension. The rest of all the money we pay you will be as a producer.” That’s the wild west.
Writers and agents have generally liked it because it means they didn’t have to pay as many dues. While you and I were paying 1.5% of every dollar we made on movies, people who are making $50 million a year, were paying less than dues. We still have this problem. We’re complicit. I don’t know the answer to this.
John: We talk about mini rooms and how they divvy up the labor in ways that it is so frustrating. The other problem is just time. Classically in television, because there was a cycle, you knew when you were done and you just don’t know when you’re done now in television because we’re developing this thing, but we don’t think it’s quite ready yet, or it’s not the right time to go to this thing, so you’re just being strung along for a long time on a project in ways that is familiar to feature writers, but is new to TV writers.
These TV writers are like, “I have this thing that looks like it’s maybe going to happen, but is it going to happen? Should I try to staff on another show? What should I do?” It’s creating these impossible situations where you’re trying to figure out like, “I want to be available to actually run my show, should the opportunity come up. But I don’t know whether this is going to happen.” Year-round development makes that much trickier. There’s generally not a clock on these things. It doesn’t stop at a certain point.
Craig: No. The season still exists for network television because network television is reliant on ads and that’s when the ad cycles new cars come out in the fall and all that. But the vast majority of streaming is not on any kind of calendar. There is no predictability. The Writers Guild has done some good work in helping writers not get trapped by exclusivity where you say, I’m going to be exclusive to this thing for as long as it gets developed and then the development phase stretches out in an insane way and you’re sitting around doing nothing but you can’t go anywhere else.
John: You’re not contractually barred from doing that thing, but there’s a soft way that you’re stuck to a thing.
Craig: We’re trying to work on that. I think also, the business representatives aren’t stupid. They are trying to make money, too. What I think is going to start happening is a little bit like when you get on a Southwest flight from Burbank to Las Vegas and they get on the thing and say, “Oh, we have overbooked this flight. We’re going to need two people to volunteer to get the F off this flight.” We’re going to overbook people. It’s inevitable. We’re going to overbook people because this is the behavior it is, because they’ve created that situation.
If you are successful enough to be, to have multiple people interested in you, that’s what’s just going to happen. You’re going to have to double-book stuff. I don’t know how else to get around it. They’re going to have to deal with it. If you are, however, a writer that is psychologically reliant on the notion of a cycle, well, it’s over. Welcome to the world that you and I lived in and continue to live in, which is there is no cycle, there is no calendar. There is a constant entrepreneurialism that is required.
John: It’s a hustle. Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one comes from a person you and I both know, but we’re not going to use their name. M writes, “My writing partner and I were sent a feature script by a producer we’ve worked with before. He has his producer set up at Studio A and is looking for a rewrite. Now, what he doesn’t know is that about 10 years ago, my writing partner and I, wrote a script for Studio B with virtually the same premise. It’s not the most original premise. We know of another project out there with the same basic idea. Our scripted Studio B is dead, as far as we know. In fact, the division it was written for no longer exists.
If we were to get this rewrite job at Studio A, I imagine that we’ll be borrowing certain themes, ideas, and jokes that we used in our old script for Studio B. Are there any legal issues we could face doing that? Should we inform Studio A about the situation? If so, can we wait until after we get the job? Any thoughts, Craig, would be appreciated.
Craig: Well, it is something that should be disclosed. If you do it after you get the job, you can still get in trouble because everybody’s contract very clearly states that you warrant this work is wholly original that you’re going to do. It is important, yes, to disclose it. I don’t think it would be anything anyone will be scared of, but the studio and business affairs would need to take a look at that other script to make sure that in the new script, you’re not taking anything that is intellectual property from that first one. If it’s possible to go and buy that one from the defunct or whatever the inherited company is, that might be one way to get around this.
Personally, I think it needs to be disclosed because the worst possible situation would be to get all the way to a movie about to come out, and whoever does own that script, they’re just waiting. If they see this happen, they don’t do anything. They wait. They’re waiting for the moment of maximum leverage, which will be three weeks before your movie comes out, and then they will file an injunction, and now everyone’s in trouble. And Studio A is going to have to pay a ton of money to Studio B to shut them up and let the movie come out, and then you will be blamed.
John: I think, Craig, you’re envisioning a scenario which you’re taking stuff from the other thing. You’re recognizing that there’s things that are going to be naturally lifted from that first script into that second script. I think I’m seeing this in a different way. It’s like, we wrote a baseball movie for Studio A and now they’re hiring us to write a baseball movie for Studio B, do I need to disclose I’ve ever written a baseball movie before? No, I don’t think so.
Craig: Well, yes, if it’s that broad, of course, no. I wrote a comedy for this [unintelligible 00:42:16], I can write a comedy for you, a sports baseball movie, I could write 12 baseball movies. Ron Shelton has written dozens of sports movies, but this sounds a little more specific. The thing that made me nervous was when they said jokes. When you’re talking about stuff that is a unique expression in fixed form, you’re now talking about material that is copyrighted, and then you do have a problem.
Furthermore, people don’t need to have an airtight case to sue, they just need a good enough reason to sue. I would be concerned enough to just say, “Actually, we want to be fully forward about this. We did this, we can’t use any of that. What we can do, however, are things that aren’t copyrighted, theme, ideas, of course.” Personally, I would disclose it. I don’t know who their lawyer is, but if your lawyer says, “No, don’t disclose it.” They’re their lawyer, they know better than I do, but I would.
John: The reality is, as Craig says, you can get sued for any reason.
Craig: Sure.
John: Ron Shelton could get sued if there’s someone saying like, “This baseball movie you wrote for us is too much like the baseball movie you wrote for somebody,” or something like that. It can happen. It’s not likely to happen.
Craig: Every time something happens that’s successful, somebody sues somebody. That’s inevitable, but most of the time, 99% of the time, it’s just dumb phishing expositions that get chucked out of court. You and I have reported so many times on these things. Not once, not once has anybody won one of these things, but that’s different than a studio suing a studio. That’s a very different thing. When studios sue studios, they have a case.
John: They do.
Craig: And that means there’s going to be some sort of settlement, and the closer it is to that moment where you are going to suffer tremendous financial loss if your movie cannot actually be shown in theaters on the weekend you’ve booked, you’re going to pay.
John: Can you think of any examples where a studio has sued another studio over –?
Craig: I don’t remember a specific case of a major studio suing a major studio openly. I think there have been situations where major studios have called major studios and said, “We’re going to sue you, let’s start talking about this before we file an injunction, and so forth.” But Major studios have sued small studios repeatedly, repeatedly.
It’s because smaller studios, and when I say– I’m not talking about independent studios making art films like A24, I’m talking about, for lack of a better term, schlockmeisters, who are selling rip-offs anyway.
Well, you can rip off to a point, and then when you get into that area of intellectual property, that’s when they come up for you and that’s what they get you, and they typically win.
John: Let’s try one more question here. This is from Michelle. She’s writing, “I would love to hear more about the pros and cons of the cost-plus model and how it’s calculated. I’ve heard general discussions about the lack of residuals, but I don’t understand how the math maths. Is it more money upfront? Does this help shows with modest viewership, but hurt big hits? If Netflix takes the risk on whether it will be a big hit, is it helpful to the average show or new writers? Does this affect writers differently from actors? It sounds like the industry was hoping that Netflix would change its model, but didn’t. What does someone like Shonda do?”
Craig: Well, Shonda is certainly in a different situation because Shonda is getting paid an enormous amount of money just to be there at all. The cost-plus model basically says, “We’re going to give you the amount of money required to make the show, and then we’re going to give you a certain amount on top of that to put in your pocket, and that’s the last time we’re going to pay you.”
Cost-plus models is– a lot of general contractors will use this. They come to say, “Okay, here’s the budget for your renovations. It’s going to cost $300,000. We’re going to charge you $350,000 and you’re never going to see a penny more. Then that’s it. Unless you change something significantly, that’s what we’re going to be.” Rather than coming to you in the middle and going, “The price of wood just went up.” The problem with the cost-plus model is that it limits the upside dramatically, and it’s particularly punishing on those runaway hits.
The question is, is cost-plus good for us? Well, if Netflix wants to do it, then the answer is no. If a corporation is really dead set on imposing a financial model on artists, then it’s not good for artists. Otherwise, why would they want to do it? Of course, it’s beneficial for them. Of course, in the long run, they’ve run the math and they know they’re going to save money. It’s the question of gambling.
Like, “Okay, we can let everybody play these slot machines and pay one person a million dollars every week when they hit a jackpot. Or we can let everyone play these slot machines to guarantee that almost all of them will walk away making $10 and we win.” Cost-plus is not anything that anybody in the creative community wants. The agents don’t want it, the managers, nobody wants it, except for people who are thinking to themselves, “This is going to be a loser.” Then, sure. Like, “I think this is bad. We got away with it. We’ll take whatever the–”
John: Yes. It has perverse incentives, so there’s no incentive to make something amazing because the success on the streamer does not reward you. It can reward you with future projects down the road, it’s only your own reputation that’s going to succeed or fail because of it. That’s the basic complaint against this cost-plus model.
Now, when Netflix is first starting out, I can understand why people would take those deals and why it makes those deals because we didn’t know what is success. We have no idea what success is. Is that backend going to be meaningful at all? Those first couple of years, I get why we’re going to overpay people basically and do it that way.
Craig: Yes. We did– I’m not sure how it’s working out so far, but the writer’s guild in the wake of the strike and then the contract that ensued did get some kind of method for success-based payments in streaming. They’re hard to hit. The success has to be really big. My guess is we probably haven’t even started to generate enough data to see how that’s working out.
John: I think also by breaking through that seal, it also means that superstar actors and directors, and other folks can start to get paid some backend that’s independent of residuals based on a huge success.
Craig: What Netflix has started to do is create a sports-style model of free agency where what you do is reward people that are creating things that are very popular with an enormous amount of money just here. Like boom, here, Shonda, boom, here. Ryan Murphy, boom, here, Rian Johnson, boom. Then everybody else is just kind of, it doesn’t matter whether you do well or not, that individual project, whatever money they make from that, they take that money.
Then you’re just waiting around for them to go, “Okay, we’ve decided now you’re so valuable to us, we’re going to give you this big dump truck of money here. Boom.” That is not helpful for most people and it doesn’t seem like it’s sustainable anyway. I think Netflix has probably left the era of that kind of payment. I don’t think we’re going to be seeing the billion-dollar deals or the $500 million deals anymore from them. I don’t think they can sustain that. I think they know that.
Then the question is, how do we maybe start breaking through more on that cost-plus thing? What it comes down to is basically whether or not other streamers can effectively compete to the level that they have the financial security to lure people back. HBO has made an investment in me. That’s great, but Max is not the size of Netflix. They can’t do that with 12 other people. That’s where it’s gotten interesting. I don’t know how this will all work out other than to say that agents seem to always win in the long run. Let’s see if they can beat Netflix. I don’t know.
John: It is time for our one cool things. I have two cool things this week.
Craig: Okay.
John: First off, Craig, do you like Tower Defense games? Do you know the genre Tower Defense?
Craig: I do, and I don’t.
John: The general idea of Tower Defense is that you are trying to protect some area, generally the center of your map and there are invaders. You’re trying to set up obstacles in their way and towers that will shoot them down before they–
Craig: Very anxiety based.
John: Yes, anxiety based. I’m playing a new one called Isle of Arrows, which is not actually brand new, but it’s new to me. It’s roguelike in the sense that after every round, you have cards, you can draw it and you can set like, “Okay, now I can set a path. I can set a tower.” You’re really constrained in how you can do it. It’s also roguelike in the sense of this is too hard, so you’re like, “Why can’t I win?” Then you realize, oh, that’s actually–
Craig: That’s the point.
John: That’s the point, is you get better. You accumulate better cards along the way. I’m enjoying that a lot. The other thing I’m enjoying a lot is this book by Tony Tulathimutte called Rejection. It’s a collection of four or five short stories all on a theme of a character who has a worldview and about how the world should treat them, and they are wrong. It pays off in great ways. It reminded me of our conversation last week at the live show. We were talking with Rachel Kondo about how the ideal short story has that sense of surprise and inevitability. These stories are delightfully that.
Craig: Oh, I love that.
John: It’s really fun. It’s described as a comedy and it’s like the stories are you win so much that it’s almost not a comedy, but they are very well done.
Craig: Cringe comedy.
John: Cringe comedy, yes.
Craig: Cringe comedy.
John: Yes.
Craig: My one cool thing this week is a documentary series, I believe there are four, I don’t know, say five episodes, possibly six. It’s on aforementioned Netflix and it is called Mr. McMahon.
John: I don’t know, what is this?
Craig: Mr. McMahon is the documentary about Vince McMahon, the Impresario of Professional Wrestling WWF, WWE, all its various names.
John: Let’s get ready to rumble. The trademark phrase.
Craig: Well, let’s get ready to rumble. Yes, some of that was in boxing and in UFC, which they ended up buying. I’m guessing you didn’t watch much professional wrestling.
John: I did not. Yes, of course.
Craig: Like Hulk Hogan and all that nonsense. Enormous business. Huge. What it is a study in is a– well, I’m just going to go out on a limp here. He seems like a sociopath. What he locked into for the first time made me go, “I think now I understand the whole Trump thing.” Obviously not in support of Trump, but rather trying to figure out why. Why is everybody falling for this? Vince McMahon lays out this remarkable point of view that entertainment and engagement with people comes down to causing real emotion in them. Disgust, hatred, rejection, betrayal, those work just as well, if not better, than positive emotions.
In fact, what he did was, as his business was being challenged by another wrestling organization, he began to create himself as a character in WWF called Mr. McMahon who was a villain. Did everything he could to make people hate him. The more they hated him, the more intuit they got. And it is pretty startling to watch how brilliant and terrifying he is. The context for the whole thing is that all the interviews with him and all the interviews with everybody else occurred before, I believe it was February of this year, when Vince McMahon, it was revealed that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking.
The specific allegations are horrendous. Horrendous. This, by the way, not the first time that he had been accused of sexual assault or coercing employees or anything. This was like the 19th time. These allegations are so lurid and barf-worthy, and you realize, okay, actually, he is a villain. Man, he encapsulated something about American culture and how to get people to get into you that is so horrifying and insightful. Well worth watching. You don’t need to know anything about wrestling to watch it. It’s a slow-motion horror movie.
John: Maybe not this week, but another week after.
Craig: Yes. Let’s see maybe if next week’s–
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Troy. This week it came from Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We get so many great outros, but we always love more. Please send them through. ask@johnaugust is also where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You can find links there for our live show, which is December 6th, and for this Alpha Birds play thing that we’re doing in Culver City.
It’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and such. They’re great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. The one we’re about to record on things we learned during the pandemic that we are still doing. Craig, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Okay, Craig. There was a point as the pandemic was descending where everything changed. We started staying at home, and we’re no longer staying at home. We were out socializing. We were seeing folks at the Austin Film Festival. I want to talk about the things that changed and stuck, and things that we’re still doing post pandemic. I’ll start with Zoom. Zoom was not a thing we were using before. You and I were Skyping before.
Craig: Oh, yes. Stupid Skype. Zoom, a conspiracy minded person might imagine that the Zoom Corporation invented and released COVID-19 into the wild because it came along right around when we needed it. Prior to that, video conferencing existed. No one liked it. No one.
John: No one.
Craig: No one used it. It’s a little bit like the way no one really likes calling each other on the phone. That’s the way video conferencing was. Then suddenly, Zoom came along and that’s all we did all the time with everyone. I don’t know what it was about Zoom, but that’s what happened.
John: Before the pandemic, there were a couple of WJ meetings where I had to call in to it. It was this system called BlueJeans, the absolute worst.
Craig: I remember BlueJean, yes.
John: All just like audio conference calls, which were absolutely the worst. There was something about Zoom, which just, it all worked. You could actually have conversations that were real-time because you could see people’s faces. You could not talk over them. I’ve never met Tina Fey, but I met her on Zoom in the first week of the Pandemic.
Craig: Obviously, we played D&D on Zoom. One of the things that happened in the Pandemic was we went from a difficult to schedule once a month D&D game to a regular weekly D&D game.
John: It was great.
Craig: Awesome, and we still, because so many of us are scattered around. Maybe I’m off in Canada working on the show or somebody’s somewhere else on vacation. A lot of times we still Zoom, and that works. So I think, yes.
John: We also moved over to Roll20, a virtual tabletop. Rather than looking at a physical map, we are all looking at maps on our screens. Even now that we’re back in-person playing, we’re still looking at Roll20 because it’s just better.
Craig: It’s just better. We all sit there in the same room together, but with our laptops. That is much better. That has changed. And of course, working from home, which I think a lot of businesses now are really struggling with. Somebody told me– I won’t say which company or what department, I’ll just say somebody said that there’s a department in their company, and a big one, where no one really came back. Everybody was like, “We like working at home.”
This person said that department just doesn’t function because there is no cohesion whatsoever. No one knows what anyone’s doing, but everybody suspects that the other person’s doing nothing. The only work that happens are meetings, which is just vaporous nonsense. Nothing actually gets done because you’re not sitting in the room looking across at somebody saying, “I am disappointed in this, make this better.” I understand why companies are saying, “Hey, sorry, you got to come in.”
John: Megan, when she was working for me as my assistant and as the Scriptnotes producer, she came in every day. Then during the pandemic, of course, she was not coming in, so she was on Zoom. Then as Drew got hired on to work this job, we realized it’s actually better that he is not here every day. Drew’s like three days a week and other things are on Zoom because the rest of the team is all on Zoom. Recognizing that when some people are in person in a room and some people are on Zoom, that’s a mess.
Craig: That’s the worst. We really try and avoid that. For instance, in prep and production, we’ll have some big meetings. The big production meeting, there’s like 50 people there. Seven of them are remote because they’re scouting or they’re off doing whatever. Well, 19 people get into a boardroom and then the seven people are on a big screen there. That’s the only way to get it done. Is just, what we can’t do is have everybody in their own office on Zoom or two people together sharing. None of that works. It is impressive how video conferencing was a zero, and now it’s just this accepted part of life.
John: Another thing that changed a lot was Keynote for me. Keynote or any slide decks because I wasn’t doing those at all before, I knew what Keynote was. I could do it if I needed to. I’d done some talks with Keynote, but the idea of building something in Keynote to show something for a pitch or for a meeting, which is now going to be on Zoom, was suddenly so useful and practical. Not for every meeting or every pitch do I need to do something, but for a lot of them I was, and so I was going out pitching around town with a Keynote.
This project, I’m doing. This video game, I’m working on, the proposal for the proof of concept, this is what the game is. I built that out as a deck. It was super useful. Then yesterday, I needed to show something about the scoring mechanism, what that was. It’s like, oh, it makes much more sense for me to do that in a Keynote than to try to type it out because I can actually visually show that thing. Pre-pandemic, I wasn’t doing that and now I feel like it’s maybe 5% of my job, but a significant portion of my job is building and running a Keynote.
Craig: I think it’s a great way for people, we’ve talked about this before, who may not necessarily communicate best in a steady verbal flow, but rather communicate better in an organized fashion connected to slides in a deck. If you are the person that just loves to do the talking, do the talking. Don’t be afraid. “Where’s your deck? We’re not going to hire a room without a deck.” Now, if you’re awesome, then believe me, it’ll be fine. The existence of that and the delivery mechanism, is harder to do, I imagine in person. To sit there and turn your laptop around. It may be awkward. On Zoom you just hear like, “So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen.”
John: Here’s what I always say. It’s like people now who like, listen to this podcast who are in meetings with like, “So I’m going to share my screen now.” When I do that, you’re going to get small. Just make sure if you have a question, just speak up because I can–
Craig: You’re going to get small. We’re used to all of that now.
The thing about the pandemic that didn’t stick around, I think really is a sense of paranoia in public. Which is different than a reasonable concern about yourself. If you have a compromised immune system or you think maybe you have been sick, or you live with somebody who really can’t afford to get ill, most normal people aren’t going to give you a hard time. Yes, they’re idiots in fricking Mississippi, like “get your mask off.” Most people are like, you get on a plane, there’s one or two people wearing masks. No one gives them crap but most people don’t.
John: Yes. Mike and I are sometimes there’s one or two people on a plane with a mask, and the calculation I do is like, how much would it suck to get sick at that destination? What is my risk tolerance here? I will tend to do it in a crowded airport when I’m on the plane. Once the plane is actually up and running and the air filters are going, I feel pretty good taking my mask off. What I do notice is that if I’m feeling sick, I will default to going for a test just because I don’t want to spread it around or be the problem.
Craig: I think testing for COVID is something that is permanent now. Whereas nobody ever tested to see if they had a cold. Occasionally, you would test to confirm that you had the flu, but really only when Tamiflu came around. Prior to that, it didn’t matter. You’re sick. Probably the flu, nothing you can do. Rest and drink lots of fluids.
John: Now that there actually are solutions to some of these diseases, that’s what made a difference.
Craig: Then it’s worth testing. But for COVID, first thing you do, and it’s this strange thing where you don’t feel good and then you take a test, and it’s not COVID, and you’re like, “Awesome.” No, not necessarily. You’re still sick.
John: I got a shitty goal. It was a hassle to get through.
Craig: You’re going to make other people sick if they’re not aware. That strange COVID exception still exists. Testing still exists.
John: If there’s a person you’ve only talked to on Zoom, have you met them?
Craig: There is a person I’ve only talked to on Zoom.
John: Would you say that you’ve met them and you know them?
Craig: I know them very well. I’m thinking particularly of Mark Halpin, who is one of the best puzzle constructors on the planet. He lives in Kentucky, just south of the Indiana border. He teaches, I believe, theatric production design or stage design at the University of Cincinnati, I want to say. He’s a genius. I have been on a gazillion Zooms with him as our puzzle crew. Either works on puzzles together, works on puzzles he’s created that he’s just watching us, or we had a crew that played a lot of Codenames a lot of Decrypto together. I feel like I know him very well and I have not met him in person. It’s been many years.
John: There’re executives who I’ve been on a project with like two years, never met him in person.
Craig: Well that’s a delight.
John: It’s how it goes though sometimes. I think I’m okay with that in a way that I wouldn’t be okay with that on a phone call. Here’s the other thing I would say is like, when people will have a four-person phone call, why is this not a Zoom? That drives me crazy.
Craig: There are some people that still want to do the conference call.
John: Yes. I think about Zoom, it’s like you’re going to a destination. It’s like you’re going into a room and everyone’s going to be in that room at a certain point in time versus like, a call is like, someone’s joining the call.
Craig: Because it’s–
John: Be in a middle conversation.
Craig: No one knows when to speak. Two people start talking once then stop, then start together again, then stop.
John: “Now you go.”
Craig: Then there’s always one person who’s somewhere noisy and doesn’t understand how to mute their phone. It’s just like– and I’ve always hated conference calls. They always just seemed awful. Zooms feel so easy. If you’re somewhere where you don’t want to be seen, just turn your camera off.
John: Totally. The last thing I’ll say is that correlates to that is there’s definitely been situations where this Zoom could have been not just an email, like a text message. It was literally like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe we scheduled this thing because you had 30 seconds of information to give me.”
Craig: It could have been an email.
John: At least I didn’t have to drive to Disney for it.
Craig: At least you didn’t. Can you remember driving in traffic? Didn’t know necessarily there’s two ways to get to Disney. I’m going to pick this one. I think, oh, picked wrong.
John: You picked wrong.
Craig: Oh my God, this is horrible. Get there. Then someone’s 20 minutes late, then you sit down, then they say something and you’re like, what? No, this. They’re like, “Oh, great. Okay. Meeting over,” and then oh my God.
John: I’m trying to think, have I been on every studio lot since the pandemic? Have I been on Sony’s lot? I’m not sure.
Craig: I’ve been on Sony’s lot. I don’t think I’ve been on the Fox lot since the pandemic. I’ve definitely been on Universal and Warner Brothers.
John: I’ve been to Fox.
Craig: Oh, and Disney. I’ve been in Disney. No Fox. I haven’t been to Fox. It’s weird. What is Fox lot?
John: Fox is Fox.
Craig: Is it?
John: It was Ghosty before the pandemic.
Craig: Yes. I don’t actually know what goes on on the Fox lot anymore. I know that they still make the Apes movies. The Simpsons folks are there. I think the Family Guy people are there.
John: Have you been to the Amazon MGM offices?
Craig: Not yet. No.
John: The absolute craziest places I’ve been because like there’s not– so it’s the old Culver lots, so it’s Gone With the Windy kind of lot. They have some old bungalow buildings, but they also have these big modern things. The meeting I went there for, I parked in this garage. Sure, fine. Whatever. They’re like, “Okay, go to this thing. There’s a bungalow.” I check in an outdoor place, then check in an indoor place in the bungalow, and they’re like, oh, someone will come and get you.
This was a scenario where I’m the only person in this room, but there’s a security guard who’s sitting there. She’s with a little iPad and I think I cough, but like, not in a COVID way. Just clear my throat cough. She takes out a bottle of Lysol and sprays the air around her.
Craig: That may be about her.
John: That may be about her.
Craig: It can’t possibly be policy at MGM.
John: I don’t think it was a policy at MGM, but then a person comes to get me and then takes me into one of the crazy glass buildings. Then up through a magical elevator. It was weird.
Craig: Yes, I do remember going at some point, but I don’t know if it’s still the MGM offices or not. I remember it was in a glass skyscraper building.
John: It felt Amazon in a way where it was a very secure fire doors.
Craig: Yes. Somewhat sterile.
John: Yes.
Craig: The HBO offices — tragedy. I’m just going to go — listen. I don’t care. I don’t think I go to those offices very often, so I can’t imagine that I’m going to get in trouble for this. We’ll find out. The old HBO offices were in this Warren in a building in Santa Monica.
John: I remember that.
Craig: You couldn’t find anything. An assistant always had to guide you to the bathroom. There was like, “And here’s a map to find your way back.” It was the hallways and there were, but, but. Had a little bit of character. People had offices with doors that could close.
John: Nice.
Craig: There were meeting rooms. Now, they’re in this monstrosity in Culver City. It is an open plan. It is the most open plan I’ve ever seen in my life. Most people are in cubicles. Then the people that have earned offices, it’s basically all the doors are glass, all the walls are glass. They can all look into each other’s eyes all the time.
John: Classic UTA, yes.
Craig: Horrible, UTA-ish. If you want to make a phone call and you don’t have an office, they have little booths that you can go into. It’s almost like they should just call it a dignity booth, which is meaning you have no dignity. Now, everybody knows you’re on a phone call and you’re sitting in there in this weird booth, which again is a glass door, I think. It’s just horrible. I don’t know why opaque doors, they’re important. Sometimes you need to close a door.
John: Yes. Blow your nose, yes, whatever.
Craig: I don’t know. I’ve only been there a couple of times because normally, Zoom, phone calls. It’s a weird place.
John: Yes. I went in for a meeting with Range, the management company that’s out in Santa Monica. It reminded me of a super, super, super high-end airport lounge. This is cool. This is nice but it was like an airport lounge. Everyone was just on laptops around.
Craig: It’s horrible.
John: I’m like, okay.
Craig: It’s horrible.
John: I had a meeting in one conference room.
Craig: I hate it. If I had a business that required lots of employees and a big office space, I would do the normal thing. Just normal. What’s wrong with that? Just here in office, close the door. Yes, there would be some people do work in cubicles. I understand the need for that space. But yeah, it wouldn’t be like this horror show of like this forced, “Oh, yes, we don’t have walls here.” Yes, we do.
John: Yes. You wonder why people don’t want to go back to work.
Craig: Exactly. I don’t want to go back to work because it’s creepy. Because I’m never alone. Because I don’t have a moment to close my door and cry.
John: Sometimes you need to cry.
Craig: I see people crying in their cars all the time in LA. Have you noticed it?
John: I haven’t noticed that much. I can believe it, but I haven’t actually seen it.
Craig: The car has become the place people can cry because they can’t cry at work anymore.
John: Yes.
Craig: So sad.
John: It’s a very emotional episode.
Craig: Yes.
John: All right. Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Links:
- Scriptnotes LIVE! December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter
- AlphaBirds Game Night at Village Well
- The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck by Mia Gallupo for the Hollywood Reporter
- ‘Development is Wage Theft’: Pilot Season Death Morphs Into Year-Round Hell by Elaine Low for The Ankler
- Isle of Arrows
- Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
- Mr. McMahon on Netflix
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with special help this week from Chris Csont and Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
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