Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/television-economics-for-dummies).

**John August:** Hey, this John. So today’s episode has a little bit of swearing. Not a lot, but if you’re driving in the car with your kids, this is your warning. Thanks.

[Episode begins]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 253 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be doing another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take stories in the news and discuss how and if and whether they should become movies. But first, we’ve just come through upfronts where the networks announced their new TV shows. And as I read the coverage, I was perplexed and did not know what they were talking about, so we invited someone on to explain what’s actually happening.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** Yes. Jonathan Groff is our guest, and he is a writer and producer whose credits include Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Andy Barker, P.I., How I Met Your Mother and the late great, Happy Endings. He’s currently one of the executive producers of Black-ish.

Welcome, Jonathan Groff.

**Jonathan Groff:** Thank you so much, John. Thank you, Craig. It’s nice to be here.

**Craig:** And taking time off from Hamilton?

**Jonathan:** That’s what I was just going to say. I’m so glad you went to it.

**Craig:** Yes. Yeah.

**Jonathan:** The disambiguation that is necessary now with my name.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You are in fact both the television writer/producer and portrayer of King George.

**Jonathan:** Thank you for the disambiguation, Craig. Exactly.

**Craig:** I do something called re-ambiguation.

**Jonathan:** You re-ambiguated, that’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Well, the best thing was — do we keep this clean on this podcast?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We don’t have to.

**Jonathan:** Okay, good. The first —

**Craig:** Fuck it.

**Jonathan:** There you go. The first time I heard of him, my manager had my name on a Google alert which is, I think, how he knows how to manage me. [laughs] He finds out what I’m doing and that’s — I’m kidding. Tim Sarquis, lovely guy.

**Craig:** He’s been arrested.

**Jonathan:** Again. Better make a call.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**Jonathan:** So he had my name on a Google alert and also this name popped up and he was like, “Are you doing Gypsy at the South Shore Music Circus in Hyannis or in Cohasset, Massachusetts or whatever?”

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s so great.

**Jonathan:** And I was like, “No.” This guy was just out of like drama school. Really young.

**John:** Yeah, he started young. He’s still young.

**Jonathan:** He’s still young. He’s still really young. So I had no — so that was the first time I noticed him. Then he — you know, every once in a while, I’d hear something, and then he blows up in a show called Spring Awakening.

**Craig:** Oh, Spring Awakening prior to him being on Glee.

**Jonathan:** Prior to Glee, yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Right, Spring Awakening.

**Jonathan:** And he really blows up on Broadway and he’s a big deal. And, you know, I would have incidents where I would be — like I was casting a pilot and I’d been on the Sony lot every day for three weeks going to a certain casting office and all of a sudden, they’re like, “Oh,” — one day like, “You’re not supposed to be here until 4 o’clock and you’re not supposed to be even coming into this gate.” [laughs] And I was like, “Ohhhhh.”

And then he had the same problem. He — I got an inkling that he was a good dude because he left his email address and said, “This is funny. We should connect.” I don’t think — I think I misplaced it. Or I was like this isn’t — the time isn’t right yet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, you didn’t feel like it was — you weren’t ready.

**Jonathan:** I didn’t feel like the time was right. I want to chase this a little bit further —

**John:** Right.

**Jonathan:** And see where this went. And then Glee happened and he really blew up on people and he’s, you know. And so that’s sort of the high, whatever.

Finally, a couple of months ago I went to see Hamilton and he was King George III in it, and he — I got backstage because somebody from Black-ish knew Leslie Odom who plays Aaron Burr and he’s fantastic. And I just said, “You know what, this is going to happen.”

**Craig:** It’s time.

**Jonathan:** So we met, and he’s fantastic. He was wearing a bike helmet.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Because he’s a big biker.

**Jonathan:** A big biker. Gave me a huge hug. We had a great conversation. And we actually have emailed back and forth now. So it’s a nice story.

**Craig:** Ah, that is a nice story.

**Jonathan:** He said that he would occasionally get stuff that was meant for me like — not, you know, lots of them. But I think it was more —

**John:** He rewrites a few scripts just on the side.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Or he’s just like, “Yeah, I would occasionally get calls but nothing exciting like you would get that was meant for me.”

**Jonathan:** Exactly. [laughs]

**John:** He put out an inflammatory quote about Black-ish, about sort of like an upcoming plotline of Black-ish. That’s always a good thing.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. That’s the best you get.

So on the other night, I was in New York and I did a panel with some other comedy writers and there was a woman, an alum of my college who had seen the bio listed on the flier to come. And she was very sweet. And she like sheepishly —

**Craig:** Oh, God.

**Jonathan:** When she was introduced to me, like, put her Hamilton playbill that had been signed by every other cast member, tucked it into her purse like, “I’m sorry. I just maybe thought it was the same guy.” [laughs] Yeah, it’s still happening.

**Craig:** Oh no, I have no interest in hearing anything you have to say at all. Well, anyway.

**John:** You’re both very nice guys. And so Jonathan Groff was the — played Will in one of the readings of Big Fish along the way, with the Big Fish Musical.

**Jonathan:** Oh, wow.

**John:** So O known him from that. And so I know that he’s a bicyclist from that.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** So it was him and Michael C. Hall where we asked — that’s sort of how all the iterations you go through when you are trying to put a show together.

**Jonathan:** You know what’s frustrating is I’ve always been like the nice Jonathan Groff and now there’s a guy who’s nicer than me.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** And he’s younger, he’s better looking, and he’s nicer.

**Craig:** Better looking, nicer —

**Jonathan:** More successful.

**Craig:** More successful.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** I will say you know more about TV, and so therefore —

**Jonathan:** Okay. There you go. Good segue.

**John:** You are more useful for —

**Craig:** We actually don’t know that.

**Jonathan:** I’m not sure that’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah, but we will —

**John:** He has been a star of a TV show.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Two TV shows.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, so —

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to find out. He’s going to educate us.

**John:** So this is the education I need. So the point of entry for me was this Deadline article about network ownership. It’s all about upfronts and so they’re talking through all the new shows. And Les Moonves talking about sort of this new season and how ownership is important. And like there were all these terms I just didn’t fundamentally understand.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** So I hope you can explain some of this. And just — can you talk us through what the deal is with ownership because unlike features where it’s all sort of one company, there’s a studio producing a TV show, there’s a network airing a TV show.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** And those used to be different things and they don’t seem to be different things. What’s going on with ownership?

**Jonathan:** They still can be different things. It’s really complicated. I mean, basically, the very basic — and I’ll do my best, and I’m sure there’s some things I’m going to get wrong and you probably — you guys are both so smart —

**John:** No, explain like we’re five.

**Jonathan:** Okay.

**John:** Because we really don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, explain like he’s five. I’m an adult.

**Jonathan:** Craig, no. Exactly. Craig’s been in the business.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know what’s going on.

**Jonathan:** So basically, the studios are the entities that make the television shows. And they are the ones who take on the cost of producing them, the deficit. And most television shows, they get — and then they get paid a license fee by the networks which is a lot less than the deficit. So, you know, roughly, maybe for a single camera television comedy, it might cost $2.1 million to make an episode and they probably get a $1.1 million license fee from the network. So the studios are eating that million dollar deficit for shows until they can eventually sell those shows into syndication.

**John:** So —

**Jonathan:** In which case they then get all of that money back and a lot more.

**John:** So let’s say the 2.1 number that you are getting for that half-hour show —

**Jonathan:** Should we say $2 million? Let’s say $2 million. It’s going to be a lot easier.

**John:** $2 million and $1 million, yeah.

**Craig:** Thank God. The show just got shorter.

**John:** Explain it like I’m five. Indeed. We lost a commercial break.

All right. So let’s say it’s a $2 million show. For the $2 million show, that’s all in, like all the expenses/costs to make that show and an amortization of sort of the overall costs of the sets and things like that, because it’s a weird thing to make a TV show because sometimes, you know, you have things you write a check for once and those —

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** Could be things that are going to be used for the rest of the series.

**Jonathan:** Right. Amortization is a big part of it which is why, you know, they like to make as many episodes. And one of the big things that they’ll — the networks really want these six episode orders now and eight episode orders of things to fill in because they want to be doing more and more original programing, and they want to be in fewer reruns which is something I think you want to ask me about as well, probably, because that’s another part of what’s going on in the business. But today like a lot of times, these short orders and the studios don’t like them because it’s much harder to amortize the shows. Because, yeah, especially, you know — and by the way, the $2 million figure does not count the cost of a pilot, like even a half-hour comedy pilot, probably a single camera which is mostly what I’ve done are — maybe I did one that was over $5 million, I think. That got really expensive, but they’re often three, four, four or five, something like that. So you’re figuring that factor in.

And yeah, the cost of building a standing set, you know, the cost of your actor contracts, your buyouts. You’re hiring a staff and writing staff, guaranteeing them a certain number of episodes. You know, that is all of kind of built in. So the more episodes you can do, the faster you get to that magical — used to be a hundred, now they talk about 88 or — when I did Happy Endings, we almost got another 20. We had done 57 and we almost got another 20 episodes when we were going to be able to sell it to USA. And that supposedly would have been enough to maybe —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Make a real syndication sale.

**John:** So $2 million is what it costs to shoot that half-hour.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** The network is paying you $1 million. So let’s say — that $1 million is the right to air it on US broadcast television?

**Jonathan:** Yeah, and a limited number of reruns, I think —

**John:** Okay.

**Jonathan:** They get like three or four or something like that.

**John:** So for the studio to make its money back, it has to be able to sell that show either in reruns, syndication, or overseas.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** And so a lot of the money is coming from overseas now —

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** Because that first run could be worthwhile overseas. So they could be airing that in China or Australia or someplace else right now.

**Jonathan:** Well, apparently. And I’m told that that is a bigger and bigger part of the equation for the studios and that they are making their money back in foreign sales a lot sooner than they used to.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Because the market has expanded and there is such a demand for product. As many platforms as there are here, there’re platforms internationally and they want product. So the whole idea of what used to constitute, you know, the back end and what really you would, you know, recoup or when the thing was out of deficit and now in profit, supposedly it happens sooner than it used to.

The Writers Guild feels this way strongly that these studios sometimes are making that money back sooner with foreign sales than they used to.

**Craig:** That’s really interesting because, you know, the independent feature film model is essentially based entirely on foreign pre-sales so we have a budget, the budget is $10 million, we’re going to go sell the rights in various countries until we have at least $10 million.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** Then we’ll make the movie.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** So we actually have no risk when we make the independent movie like that. You know, the interesting case with television is the idea that they could also create a situation of foreign pre-sale where before they’re even getting to the fifth episode, they’re essentially saying if we have — now, there’s a danger involved, obviously, where foreign pre-sales is the infection that incurs is an infection of talent. They all say, well, certain actors —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sell shows overseas and certain do not. And now that starts to infect the kinds of shows that we get here because the studios need to sell them overseas. I can see trouble on the horizon.

**Jonathan:** Well, there was — speaking of that and related, there was a really kind of a rough article in Hollywood Reporter about, you know, Empire, not selling as well overseas. And that plays into like race and all that kind of stuff. Black-ish supposedly has done very well. I think maybe a family comedy aspect of it helps it. But Empire, you would think — you know, since so much of like black culture and hip hop and so on is one of our national — international exports.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** You would think it would sell but apparently it has been somewhat challenged so that gets into like —

**Craig:** I wonder if primetime —

**Jonathan:** The backlash against — is there’s going to be some kind of backlash against all the fantastic diversity, which is helping, I think, the networks get a little bit of a second wind. Especially ABC has done really well with it. FOX as well, obviously. And all of them realizing like, “Oh my God, the country is changing. This is who is watching television. We’re not reflecting America. Let’s be more diverse.” But that could factor in if it isn’t helping us.

**Craig:** It could be a problem. I mean — and the Hollywood Reporter is fairly reliable in getting things wrong. I do —

**Jonathan:** That’s true.

**Craig:** At least they are consistent. I mean, I remember reading that article and just thinking, there’s a thousand other possible explanations.

**Jonathan:** True.

**Craig:** For instance, I don’t know how primetime soap operas do overseas.

**Jonathan:** Yep, that’s a good point.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s something that people like.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** And the fact that a show Black-ish is doing well is sort of — I refute thus.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, right.

**Craig:** I mean, kind of argument over.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** I think it’s basically Malcolm Spellman’s fault. As a previous guest on the show.

**Craig:** Everything is —

**John:** He’s one of the Empire producers. It’s probably on his shoulders.

**Jonathan:** It should be.

**Craig:** He screwed it up. He really screwed it up.

**John:** So here is a question. This is again back to that same article.

**Jonathan:** Okay.

**John:** They’re talking about — Les Moonves talking about like, “Oh, in the shows we are picking up, we own a stake in all of them.”

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** And so I’m taking this to mean that even if it is a Sony show or a Warner Bros show or some other studio is behind it, a network gets to say, “Okay, we are an investor in this show up to a certain percentage.” Is that — am I reading that right? Is that what they’re — ?

**Jonathan:** That’s exactly what they’re saying. And it happens all the time. I mean, it feels rare unless — it feels like the exception now is for — it’s the exception for an outside studio that’s not owned by the network that they’re selling to, to be able to maintain a 100% ownership of it. I think some of the studios are a little bit stronger than others and hold the line better, but a lot of times it comes out of deal-making.

In that same article that we both read, it said that, you know, NBC was less aggressively pursuing ownership of a couple of single camera comedies that were coming on because they felt that the backend wasn’t as significant so they didn’t want to assume the cost. Because when you co-produce, co-own, you’re also putting up the money to buy in essentially.

But, you know, they all talk about like, you know, they’re all I think so nervous. And again, I’m a writer, so I don’t understand all this stuff, but I think they all are worried about the business of being in the distributors. They all want to be in the content business.

**John:** Yeah, they want to be the hype. They want to be the, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. And that’s where the future is. There’s always going to be room for content even if the pipe changes and the distribution platform has changed that content is king. You see Netflix go from obviously migrate from pipe, a brilliant pipe, to how many boxes of screeners did you get —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** From Netflix this year.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** They’re making so much stuff.

**Craig:** Well, you know, you’ve been around for awhile, so you remember the days where it was actually illegal —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For a network to own any part of a show that aired.

**Jonathan:** I wasn’t in the business then but —

**Craig:** Okay.

**Jonathan:** I remember that was the facts back in the day.

**John:** Was that called fin-syn?

**Craig:** The financial syndication laws abbreviated as fin-syn. And the purpose of those laws was essentially to prevent monopoly.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they did make sense when they were three networks and, you know, and so there was essentially a forced kind of competition where, essentially, the networks would pay a license fee and then make their money through the sale of ads. But they could not own. Similarly theaters, studios couldn’t own theaters.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** And I don’t know if it’s changed or not. I think that’s still maybe a thing. But it’s not a thing anymore for television.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** Well, they certainly don’t have monopoly power but it does feel like a network has a tremendous amount of leverage over the studio where it says like, “That’s a really lovely show. It could be a challenge if you couldn’t put that on the air.” Or they say like, “You have to let us buy in.”

**Jonathan:** It’s absolutely what’s happening.

The only thing that’s hilarious is that all these networks pretty much own studios that want to sell outside. Every studio is able to attract better talent, writers and actors, producers, you know, a producer on overall deals, pods, people, if they can say we can sell everywhere. Like I will sign up with Twentieth in a deal or with ABC Studios — I like ABC Network, I like Fox Network, but, oh boy, I would like to be able to take my project to the right place.

And so, they’re all doing it to each other a little bit. Like Sony is really fascinating to me because they don’t have that partnership and they’ve actually — in some ways, I like that studio a lot because they’ve really kept their independence. But they were the ones also more forced I think a lot of times to always co-produce.

**Craig:** Right. So —

**Jonathan:** Happy Endings was a Sony and that was partly because I was in an ABC Studios deal and I got involved in that show. They needed a showrunner. Happy Endings —

**Craig:** But they’ll find some way in or another.

**Jonathan:** I think they would have.

**John:** But it is interesting. When we think about the old Hollywood system where you had writers’ rooms and you had like, you know, MGM writers’ room and like you were bound to MGM and that all went away. But to some degree, that still happens in television where you make a deal with a studio. And so you are writing shows for that studio and you are prohibited from working for anybody else unless certain conditions come up. In order for them to get you on Happy Endings, didn’t they have to do something with the studio who you originally had your deal with? There was a negotiation involved.

**Jonathan:** Yes. Sony, to bring me in, had to —

**John:** Buy you out of —

**Jonathan:** Had to basically, yeah. I think that became a co-production partly because I became involved. But then again, Craig is probably right. Certainly now it feels like it would just become a co-production, whether they were —

**Craig:** Right, right.

**Jonathan:** Needing a piece of talent or a writer to make the show made.

**Craig:** Well, getting rid of that law essentially cleared the way for the most obvious request of all. We are interested in airing this. The fact that we’re interested in airing it means we think it’s good. The fact that we think it’s good means we would like to own some of it. Now, it may be a case where multiple networks want to air something, which probably doesn’t happen that frequently.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s a lot of leverage there on their part.

**John:** But some of these negotiations though would happen at the point where you’re selling the pitch. But some of these negotiations I’ve heard from other showrunners, they’re happening like at the last minute. Like you’re into upfronts and they’re still trying to hammer out this deal.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely. It happens really late and it’s the last piece of leverage that the networks have in negotiating with the studios. And the studios then have to decide whether they want to do it or not and whether it’s worth it to them to take on a co-producer. But, you know, all the studios are interacting with each other so well.

I’ve been in two Sony/ABC Studios co-productions, one on Happy Endings and one on a pilot I produced. And, you know, they’re smart people at both studios. Sony was kind of the lead studio on both of those, ABC Studios. I mean that’s why Black-ish is such a — you know, if you can get the owned show that works for you, that is the homerun. Like —

**John:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Like ABC loves Modern Family but Twentieth —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Twentieth owns all of that. They’ve never gotten into that one and that would be, you know, great.

I will give you a little bit of interesting context though, that there has always been a tendency, and I think it’s partly about executive dynamics and like how to reward them, to migrate the purview, the sort of responsibility from network president and give him or her also the title of studio president. And every time they do that, it doesn’t work for you if you work at the studio.

**Craig:** You mean when they leave the network presidency or you’re saying —

**John:** No, no, they basically —

**Jonathan:** Perfect example is like Paul Lee was the president of both — under his, whatever, job description was the head of the studio at ABC Studios and also the —

**Craig:** The network president.

**Jonathan:** President of ABC.

**Craig:** That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

**Jonathan:** I hated it. I always hated it. And it happened at NBC when I was there. Yeah, I think it’s the way it is at Twentieth Century Fox right now with Dana and Gary are also the head. They came from the studio and the studio was such a profit center and they did such a, you know, huge job in keeping that, I think, probably the strongest of the independent studios for a long time, that they wanted to keep that job. And it was part of the —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But the problem is that what I found happening is, and I remember talking to my agent about this, it never really worked for me as a producer because I would be like, “Well, why can’t so and so put on his studio head hat right now and keep my show on the network?” Happy Endings is a perfect example. Like, let’s keep that show on the network. Paul Lee could have kept that show on the network and probably gotten all of ABC Studios’ money out of it if he had programmed it better.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** But, you know, at the end of the day it’s like the big job still at that point, and this may be changing, was the network president. And they’re always going to choose the network president, “What’s better for me as the network president? Better for me to cancel Happy Endings. It’s not doing that great.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know what I mean? And I want to try something else. And so, it’s gone. So which is why I like the configuration they have now at ABC Studios. It kind of vacillates back and forth. It swings back and forth. And now, it seems like Patrick Moran is really growing ABC Studios and has a lot of independence, and makes deals with other places, and doesn’t just do it with ABC. But it’s so tricky when the networks own studios because they have that leverage and it’s an internal kind of thing, so.

**John:** Great. The next term I don’t understand, stacking.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** What is stacking?

**Jonathan:** I had never heard of that before a month ago.

**John:** Okay, all right.

**Jonathan:** But I get it.

**John:** Then tell me.

**Jonathan:** What it is, is the networks and the studios really realize that they are getting a lot of views of their shows, and the way people are watching television now is to binge watch. So, there’s obviously the DVR usage and that’s now counted for advertisers and it’s counted live plus three and live plus seven and live plus something else. And same-day viewing and it’s all, you know, added up and then sold to the advertisers. The other way that they can kind of binge, “Oh, I didn’t see The Last Man on Earth yet this season.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** “And hopefully it’s up on Fox.com,” or whatever their thing is. And the networks want to have those stay on longer and go past what they call I think the rolling five, which is usually what it has been. So even though they have to pay a little bit more to the writers for a residual, and I actually investigated this because I was curious about it and I talked to somebody at the Writers Guild today, they’re willing to pay that little bit of extra residual to maybe directors and certainly to the writers to have the shows hang around longer on the .com websites, the ad-supported video-on-demand segment.

**John:** So the theory being that it’s good for discovery, it’s good for helping people catch up on a show.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** And so especially a show in its first season, you want to make sure people who’ve missed it the first round can actually —

**Jonathan:** Yes. And it’s something the networks I think want more than the studios because I think the networks keep the lion’s share of that .com advertising. And it’s a way of building audience. The studios are nervous about it because it affects, potentially, their back end.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So the stacking rights are a negotiation between the network and the studio.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** Which in many cases are the same company. But aren’t always the same company.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and then, you know, you’re dealing with one pocket versus the other pocket. But it’s true. I mean the studio, theoretically, their interest is in making you pay to see this even if it’s a week after it was on air, right?

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And the network, their interest is in, no, see it forever.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See it a billion times. They want to expand the breadth of the license, right?

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That they’re paying for. And it’s interesting because we tend to look at it as writers as how are we going to get screwed on the residuals, because — and this will get us into our rerun thing. There was a time in the world when it was really simple and network paid a license fee, they were allowed to air a show once or twice. That was primary exhibition. But then there was something called the network rerun where they would rerun it again on the network, during primetime. And the writers would get paid a lot of money.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they don’t really do that anymore.

**John:** Very rare shows do. And a friend just got staffed on a show that actually does that. And so he’s like, “Score. I get a second run.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk about how writers get paid.

**Jonathan:** Well, the networks will do it on certain shows and like it’s another way of building audience. Essentially, it’s part of the license or the agreement that they have, so it’s not a great additional cost to them and the studios pay out the residual. And it’s fine. But yeah, like the comedies tend to do it more. I think ABC runs — we’re getting rerun a lot this summer on Black-ish. They’ll rerun their Wednesday night comedy block.

What I’m told is that the procedural dramas will do it. The place where it really is hurting is any kind of hour-long that is serialized —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** They don’t tend to rerun as much. And that’s where you’re seeing, you know, short order things to fill in. You’re seeing reality shows, game shows, all the stuff that NBC does every summer. And they seem to be the most kind of throwing anything out there.

**John:** It’s a whole different network in the summer.

**Jonathan:** Kind of.

**John:** So let’s say I’m a brand new staff writer on Black-ish. How would I get paid? So what would my deal be like for working there and would I be paid a certain amount per week? If I got an episode to write, would that count against what I had already been paid? How would it work from there?

**Jonathan:** My understanding of it is I have weirdly never been a staff writer on TV show. I had this weird way in because I was a Conan writer and then I started creating shows and so I always had this kind of creator-producer role kind of early on. But the way I think it is, the staff writers do get paid weekly. Their scripts actually they don’t get paid for, which is why the residual is very important if a staff writer writes a script and the episodes gets rerun. They do get a residual.

**Craig:** They have to be paid for it in terms of Guild minimum. But my guess is that it comes out of their — in other words, their salary is this much plus this much for the script and we’re going to pay you that on a weekly basis.

**Jonathan:** I think the deal is that maybe that money gets thrown back into their weekly pay or something —

**Craig:** It has to be. Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But they’re really not getting additional — like if you assign a staff writer a script, it’s not a big like —

**Craig:** It’s baked into their salary. But —

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But that baked in price still has to cover pension and health and stuff, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Sure, absolutely, yeah. And so they’re on a weekly thing. And I think they’re only ones who are, maybe story editors are, too, I don’t really know exactly. But then after a certain point and, you know, a number of episodes, you bump up in the job description and, well, the job title really, and you then get an episodic fee. Which is paid out weekly, I think. But it’s an episodic fee.

**John:** But that episodic fee is not as a writer. That episodic fee is as a producer, correct?

**Jonathan:** Technically. But everybody’s a writer-producer, essentially.

**John:** Yeah. The frustration, the challenge that always happens in Writers Guild is that like a lot of the money that TV writers get is actually producer money and therefore it’s not Guild money. And so that becomes a strange —

**Craig:** And like we get so screwed because we pay 1.5% guild dues on every dollar we make.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** You guys do not at all.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** Not even close.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** But this is not an East Side/West Side —

**Craig:** No, but in return —

**John:** We recognize.

**Craig:** In return for the larger share of money we kick in, can we get much less attention? [laughs]. So it’s a great system.

**John:** It’s really an awesome system.

**Jonathan:** Your name is much bigger though in screens and stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. When a movie gets made —

**Craig:** Really cool.

**John:** It’s really nice.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s awesome.

**John:** But it is fascinating how, like, the writers who didn’t actually write that episode, their names do show up on the show as like those other credits.

**Jonathan:** Producer, yeah.

**John:** That’s nice, too. I think it’s a good thing.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, we don’t mind that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**Jonathan:** Well, television, I don’t know about hour-longs. The only hour-long show I ever did was Ed. I was on that for a season. But I do know that every half-hour is super collaborative and super room-written to some degree, like you’re breaking the story as a group and then one writer goes off and does an outline and then gets feedback from the showrunners. Maybe another writer or two could get involved in looking at the outline and then the script comes in and the room works on it. So there’s a lot of people kind of throwing and it’s different.

**John:** So I’d forgotten to rave about your show but Black-ish is one of the few shows that we watch every night sort of when it airs. It doesn’t sit on the DVR long.

**Jonathan:** Fantastic.

**John:** And one of the episodes that you are credited with this last season is the flu episode where the whole Johnson family gets sick. So in an episode like that, how much more is that your episode than other episodes that ran in the season? Like percentage-wise, how much more invested are you in that episode than other episodes?

**Jonathan:** Well, I went off and wrote the draft by myself but I had a lot of help on that story. The story came together in the room and there might have been hours even when I wasn’t in the room when they were working on the story. And I came back in and people were like, “We think this is the direction for this.” There was lots of like group effort on the story. And then I went off and wrote the draft and lots of language and jokes are mine and sort of the structure of the scenes sort of. But then you come back in and it goes through another rewrite and you get jokes beaten and all scenes rewritten and you do a table read and it gets rewritten again.

So, you know, I would say the person with the highest percentage of stuff that he wrote in a draft being shot is Kenya Barris who created the show. It’s his show, it’s his voice. He’s a hilarious writer and he also takes on the toughest episodes that we do where we’re really talking about something. I had the advantage of — it was kind of a light episode. There was a sweetness to it, in which Dre was learning to take care of his sort of — like realizing he had missed out by avoiding taking care of his kids and had some regret. And then we learn at the end that Bow is pregnant. So he will have opportunities in the future to step up and be more involved in that way.

So it had an emotional wallop, I think. But it was in general not —

**John:** But it wasn’t the —

**Craig:** Police brutality episode.

**John:** Police brutality episode, yes.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Oh, why didn’t they give you that one? [laughs] That’s weird.

**Jonathan:** It’s so funny though. But even now, and like Kenya, we really broke that story as a group. I mean Kenya had so much of the way in because it was really his story of how do you tell your kids about something really hard, like he’d been watching the Ferguson riots with his little boys and they were like, “Why is everybody so mad?” Well, how do you explain this?

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** So the way in was totally his. But then a lot of the structure of that and a lot of the comedy stuff or ideas for that were, you know, kicked around in the room. But then he went off and wrote a script over Christmas and kind of came back and it just had that feel to it of like this, we don’t need to — we cut a couple of things and changed a couple of folks —

**Craig:** Shoot it.

**Jonathan:** And then it was pretty much shoot it, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just shoot it, yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It was a one set sort of, you know, a little play.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, that was his vision. And that’s in a lot of ways his vision for that show is he likes the sort of, like, let scenes play out. Let it be almost a multi-cam in some ways, believe in the characters and their abilities to be interesting. You know, I tend to be a little bit more single camera and it’s probably a good blend because I’m a little bit like, “Just keep it moving in the scene because the scene is three pages. It could be two — ”

**John:** That living room is almost proscenium. It’s almost —

**Jonathan:** It is.

**John:** You know, a three-camera setup and you’re in that space probably more than any other space.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** So the discussion of the police brutality episode, this is actually a pretty good segue into our other thing we want to do this time which is to talk about these ideas, these stories that are in the news and how they could be movies, which in the case of you, I’d also like to know like how could this be either a series or an episode, because some of these ideas feel like, okay, I can see a series about this but some of them feel like, okay, well that is the premise for an episode.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** So we’ll dig into these and see what we have. So first one up on the boards, this is Peter Thiel v. Gawker. So I’ll link to it —

**Craig:** Who do you root for here?

**John:** Yes.

**Jonathan:** That’s a tough one, right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll link to an article from —

**Jonathan:** This one kept me up a little bit, thinking about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** I’ll link to an article from Nicholas Lemann for The New Yorker sort of going into the back story behind it. But the short version for people who are like following this years after the fact, Peter Thiel is a billionaire. He’s made his money off of PayPal and other places. He’s a big investor in Facebook. He has a vendetta against Gawker. There was a lawsuit that Hulk Hogan filed against Gawker for discussing or releasing images from a sex tape and Hulk Hogan actually won this huge lawsuit against Gawker. But it turned out that Peter Thiel was actually funding the lawsuit against Gawker. And the whole notion of this billionaire versus this company, here’s a man who can spend his entire fortune to bring down a company if he chose to.

**Craig:** There are some free speech issues. The one fact you didn’t mention is the source of his vendetta.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is I think relevant. Gawker outed him.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So —

**John:** As gay. You can be outed as anything now, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. They even outed him as Jewish.

**John:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** That never happens. So I honestly don’t know who to root for here. I understand all the problems, you know, inherent to a very wealthy person possibly stifling a media outlet. On the other hand, ugh, Gawker.

**John:** Let’s talk about this as a movie because like the most simple, obvious thing is basically what if Bruce Wayne sued The Daily Planet out of existence. I mean —

**Craig:** Worst movie ever.

**John:** Yes. [laughs] But I mean there’s that quality of like, you know, what are the limits that you can put on an incredibly wealthy person who can just use the system to their advantage.

**Craig:** It feels like an episode of a TV show, doesn’t it? Like just an episode?

**Jonathan:** Well, first of all, it will be. Somebody will do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** They’ll find a way to sort of boil that down for Law & Order or something.

**Craig:** Yeah, so like torn from the headlines kind of thing.

**Jonathan:** Yeah. If Good Wife was still on or somebody would find a way to tear that from the headlines, I think. But it also does feel like it could be a really great movie because it could leave you with like just as kind of conflicted coming out as you are going in because it’s easy to see both sides of it in a way. Like Gawker is disgusting.

I had lunch with my friend Todd Barry who’s a very funny comedian and we were talking about like some of the stuff they’ve just done and some of the shots they take of people in New York, friends of his. And he’s like, it’s gross. And I’m like, “Yeah. Screw them. They’re the worst.” And then like it’s chilling because what we’re not talking about yet is the context a little bit of Thiel’s thing is what Donald Trump is talking about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know, and the way he went on the attack and played, I think, to a lot of receptive ears when he went on attack the other day against the press and what they were trying to do in just asking basic questions about where that money went through, his veterans things, where there were people going like, “The press is dishonest. The press is disgusting. The press needs to be shut down. There have to be better laws.” And that’s the legitimate press they’re talking about. So that’s the context of like it’s very much of a slippery slope kind of a thing.

**John:** In my head, I hear a lot of the Aaron Sorkin kind of dialogue about the arguments. And sort of like the way that both sides can make really impassioned cases for what they believe and sort of why what they’re doing is the noble thing. So the journalistic quality of like, you know, you may hate Gawker for what they do but recognize that any media publication could just as easily be in Gawker’s position where someone could go after them for anything they’ve ever written. And in this case, like the lawsuit for Hulk Hogan has nothing to do with Thiel other than the fact that he hates Gawker —

**Jonathan:** Exactly. The way to take them out. I would say this. I think that you’ve got to come down on the side of Gawker, ultimately, as much as I hate to say it because I — and I’ll say why.

**John:** For the movie version. Let’s just say like what it is the best movie.

**Jonathan:** But I think the aspirational thing that I would build into the movie, the ending, I don’t know how you get to this, is I thought about this as I watched the sketch that somebody posted today of Amy Schumer doing AMZ, a takedown of TMZ.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And it was devastatingly great, on point. And it’s like the aspirational, maybe Sorkinesque, maybe somebody else would write it better. But like the idea that like — do you remember QB VII, the ending of QB VII where the libel case where the author of the book about Adam Kelso who was the doctor who was accused of Nazi crimes that Anthony Hopkins played. It was a TV movie, Leon Uris novel. That he wins this libel suit but he wins a British ha’penny, the lowest coin in the English crown.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** The ending would be that Gawker wins but that they close for other reasons. So the market, the people would go, they’re discussing, we’re no longer going to read them, we’re no longer the market. It’s almost like a weird belief in the power of the common sense of people in the market to go like, you know, TMZ is disgusting and corrodes your soul so don’t watch it anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if I would believe that ending.

**Jonathan:** Of course not!

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**Jonathan:** But that’s the ending I would want to write, you know.

**Craig:** There is possibly another angle where you are on the side of this guy and he is taking on a group that, look, the one thing that gets left out of the discussion is you can’t successfully financially back someone’s winning lawsuit if they can’t win the lawsuit, right? That he did win the lawsuit —

**John:** Oh, no, no, no. But here’s the thing. It’s like he —

**Jonathan:** He drained them.

**John:** He drives them down. So basically like he can bankrupt them just through legal fees, essentially because he’s filing like —

**Craig:** But they got a judgment. I mean the point is they did —

**John:** Yeah, I think they got a judgment but here’s the thing. It’s like he could file 150 judgments and he doesn’t care if he ever makes any money back.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Right. But in this case, what muddies the water is — see, because Peter Thiel is not actually acting like a super villain. He’s acting like a guy that specifically hates one group of people and he has reason to hate them. And a lot of people hate them. And so he’s going after them. And they did do something wrong. They’ve done a lot of wrong things. But there is an interesting ending where in the movie version he wins, gets rid of Gawker, feels good, and then turns on the TV the next day and somebody that is bad is doing it to somebody that doesn’t deserve it and he’s essentially released a virus, you know, of behavior.

**Jonathan:** How about this?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Another version, probably not as interesting as your version but I’ll pitch it anyway, is that I do think like he takes down Gawker, he wins, Gawker goes out of business, but when he tries to take down something has journalistic standards, people say no. And that’s the rally. Maybe that’s the sort of like, so all of a sudden let’s just say he tries to take down the New York Times. We could debate whether the New York Times —

**Craig:** Right. He goes too far.

**Jonathan:** Is of quality or not, I’m not going to get into that argument. But like he goes too far —

**Craig:** They’re not Gawker.

**Jonathan:** They’re not Gawker. And people go, no, and they go we still want a free press.

**John:** Yeah. So essentially like he’s taking down Spotlight essentially. Like, you know, he’s taking down the noble journalistic crusaders.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And like that’s the thing. What I do kind of find fascinating are the characters involved. And so I think Thiel is a great character because whether you portray him as a villain or a hero, he definitely perceives himself as a hero. He sees himself as that person like all great villains should. Nick Denton is a fascinating character who’s like — I think he is actually clearly very smart but also to some degree self-delusional about sort of what his function is. And he’s willing to sort of say like, “Well, to make an omelet, we’re going to break, you know, people’s lives.”

**Jonathan:** Nick Denton is the head of Gawker.

**John:** Yeah, the head of Gawker, yeah. You have the Hulk Hogan or whoever the plaintiff is you sort of put in that place is really fascinating because that person kind of knows they’re being used as a tool and it’s not really about them. Like Thiel doesn’t honestly care about Hulk Hogan whatsoever.

**Jonathan:** That’s so great.

**Jonathan:** He’s just only a vessel.

**Craig:** We don’t know that. [laughs] He might love Hulk Hogan.

**John:** Oh, he might love —

**Craig:** He might have Hulkamania.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Probably not.

**John:** Probably not. I mean, to me the fascinating —

**Jonathan:** The realization by that guy that he’s been used —

**John:** Oh, yeah —

**Jonathan:** The conversations between him and the Thiel character where he’s —

**Craig:** Because I can see he’s like, “This is amazing. Somebody…”

**Jonathan:** Believes in me.

**Craig:** “…that cares that much about me, I still got it.”

**Jonathan:** That’s a heartbreaking scene.

**Craig:** That is a heartbreaking —

**John:** And so there’s a possibility for like, you know, you think that character thinks that they’re an Erin Brockovich, that they’re like little town Erin Brockovich. And like no, no, no, you were just a pawn being used by these plutocrats moving stuff around a board. That I think is a fascinating —

**Craig:** I still feel like to me, everything we discussed would be a great hour of television. I don’t know —

**John:** I think it’s a great HBO movie maybe.

**Jonathan:** I think it’s an HBO movie. I think two hours —

**Craig:** That counts as television.

**Jonathan:** Two hours of it. Yeah, television. It’s not going to put butts in the seats in —

**Craig:** No, because these kinds of movies ultimately, the issue involved needs to be like — The Insider was a wonderful movie and that’s about tobacco companies killing people and lying. This is in the end, I get that it is relevant to our lives but doesn’t quite feel like it deserves to be that — I always ask myself, “Am I going to drive somewhere and park to see this?” Probably not.

**John:** That was Amy Pascal’s thing which always, like, you know, if she’s going to green light a movie is, like, would I actually get a babysitter and go to the theater on a Friday night —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When I’m already tired and had a long day’s work? And like, that’s a high bar to put for yourself.

**Craig:** It actually is a very high bar.

**John:** All right, let’s go to a much simpler —

**Jonathan:** HBO movie — it’s an HBO movie.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go to a much simpler one here. This is about stoned sheep. So this is a Daily Mail article by Keiligh Baker for MailOnline. So essentially what happened is a bunch of cannabis was dumped at the side of the road. A bunch of sheep ate the cannabis. They went crazy and ballistic and destructive.

**Craig:** Well, okay, but they didn’t so first of all —

**John:** Yeah, it’s a sort of false headline and I —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s a classic Daily Mail.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Daily Mail headline is a Sheep Go on Psychotic Pot Rampage and then you read the article and what happened was they were wandering. They seemed confused. One of them got into a house and pooped. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** And one got hit by a car.

**Craig:** And one got hit by a car which is the most sheep thing of all time.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, exactly. With all the — pot is only going to have them act more sheep.

**Craig:** More sheep.

**John:** Yeah, like —

**Craig:** Like enhance their natural —

**Jonathan:** Like we used to say when we were getting high.

**Craig:** — harmlessness.

**Jonathan:** Like let’s get sheep.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like sheep are —

**Jonathan:** Sheep-faced.

**John:** Let’s use this is a springboard.

**Craig:** Sheep-faced. [laughs]

**John:** What is this? If someone came into the writer’s room with this idea, what might that spin into? Like what does that sort of get to?

**Jonathan:** You know, we would have to put it in a context of, you know, like a personal family story.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** I mean, a Black-ish, it’s much more of a — it’s not a Black-ish story maybe, you would try to — we have, you know, a —

**Craig:** Not really access to sheep.

**Jonathan:** No real access to sheep. Tracee Ellis Ross’s character, Bow, is a doctor so maybe there’s some way in which we could find an analog where a bunch of her patients got high or something off of an anesthesia — she’s an anesthesiologist or maybe something like —

**John:** You have grandparents — I also feel like they’re always potentially —

**Jonathan:** True.

**John:** You know, getting into things that they shouldn’t get into.

**Jonathan:** I can think it could be an interesting comedy movie, again, maybe, I don’t know.

**John:** Craig, can kids get high on pop syrup?

**Craig:** No, I mean, as somebody that has written a sheep movie —

**John:** Yeah, he has a sheep movie in development.

**Craig:** It’s a sheep movie about sheep that solve — they’re detective sheep, and they solve the murder of their own shepherd. This is not how we want to see sheep. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** Can I throw this in? What about — and I say this because I actually — every once in a while, I would perform on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and one of the things I did was we used to do the Clutch Cargo, which is the moving lips thing, where Conan would interview Bill Clinton or Bob Dole whatever.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, of course.

**Jonathan:** And I was Dolly the cloned sheep.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Jonathan:** So what if there’s like a — because this happened over in Britain, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Swansea or something?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Jonathan:** That was in Scotland. She was a Scotland sheep.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Jonathan:** And I remember trying to do a Scottish accent. “Baa, I don’t know. I recognize myself.” I was trying to like — she was basically freaking out because there were two of her.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** So maybe there’s a cloning — maybe there’s some kind of high concept? I don’t know.

**Craig:** No. No.

**Jonathan:** Animated?

**Craig:** No. It’s just — here’s the problem.

**Jonathan:** Animated for adults?

**Craig:** Here’s the problem, sheep getting high is as funny as people getting high. People getting high is occasionally funny like back — but it used to be way funnier. Like Cheech and Chong were hysterical because getting high was transgressive.

**John:** I think sheep getting high is funny for a scene in another movie so like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So like, oh, the sheep got high and then they like they ruin the house. That’s a moment, but it’s not a —

**Craig:** It’s a moment, yeah.

**Jonathan:** High sheep in like a DreamWorks movie, they would be like the penguins of Madagascar.

**Craig:** Right. But then you can’t put drugs in kid’s movies so you can’t do that, so.

**John:** Yeah, but they could eat like spoiled something or they eat the grass, yeah.

**Craig:** Or do like the fake high stuff? Like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, my God. He ate those weird flowers.

**Jonathan:** We did a show called Father of the Pride for DreamWorks.

**Craig:** I remember that one, yeah.

**Jonathan:** That made it for NBC. Was kind of a debacle. Like it the show about Siegfried and Roy and the white lions that worked for them.

**Craig:** And the Union debacle.

**Jonathan:** Oh, Union debacle, exactly. That was crazy and then it was physical debacle because Roy got eaten by a tiger which was terrible.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Jonathan:** It was a huge amount of money that was wasted all round. But there were some funny things and one of the things, it’s sort of a thing you would do but is that the daughter who’s a white lion — teenage daughter gets caught with catnip. So you can do catnip as a —

**Craig:** The fake drug, yeah.

**Jonathan:** The fake drug, yeah.

**John:** Cats on catnip. All right. Our next story is The Great Swiss Bank Heist. This is a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe. It tracks Hervé Falciani who is a worker for the Swiss Bank HSBC. He stole a bunch of data from HSBC and in the revelation of what was in the data revealed that there is a tremendous number of people hiding a tremendous amount of money. And it becomes much more complicated from that. Craig, you were the one who loved this more than anything.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. So, first of all, this will absolutely be optioned by somebody if it hasn’t been optioned already.

**John:** Yeah. So usually whenever we do this section, one of these things absolutely becomes a movie. This is Craig’s prediction.

**Craig:** Somebody will — I don’t know if it will eventually become a movie. Somebody is going to buy the rights to this and here’s why. Here’s what’s boring. A guy steals a bunch of data and it’s got a bunch of information about tax dodging, whoop-dee-doo, right? They couldn’t make an interesting movie out of Julian Assange, so how are they going to make an interesting movie of this guy?

Here’s why it’s interesting. This guy is nuts, okay? This guy is amazing. He is a total psychopath, you can tell, right? Even from him talking. He invents these crazy scenarios and nobody knows if it’s true or not. So he invents a scenario where he was kidnapped by the Mossad. He invents a scenario where he wanted to get arrested because people were trying to kill him. He tells the French that he is bringing them this information out of a sense of some kind of patriotism to let them know that French people are hiding their money.

But he may only have gone to them because he couldn’t find anybody to sell this to, right? Because he was trying to sell through a woman he seduced, right? Even though he was married. This guy is a nightmare. And the character that’s unmentioned in this but the one that I would love to write because this is one of my favorite kinds of characters is — like we’ll call it the Diogenes character. Somebody who sees everything for exactly what it is and no one else does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How frustrating that there’s this one guy who’s like, “No, this is not a hero. This is bad man who’s doing bad things.” And, you know, in a weird way, the one person that comes through like that in this article is the former mistress who’s — she’s the one saying, “Why are you all being suckered by the guy the suckered me?” [laughs]

“I’m telling you, you’re crazy.” Anyway, I love that character. I think there’s a really interesting story to tell here. It’s like I could see the trailer starting like, okay, we’re doing, it’s like we’re doing a movie about finances. It’s like we’re doing a Wall Street movie. But then, WAA-BAA. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy guy.

**John:** So it’s that sense of like, is he a hero? Is he a villain? It’s one charismatic guy you’re sticking at the very center of this thing and from the audience’s perspective, are we supposed to be deciding ourselves or do you think the movie has a clear take from the beginning of good guy/bad guy?

**Craig:** I think, ideally, we are left to decide.

**John:** So, it reminds me a bit of — I can’t remember the name of the movie but it’s Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh directed it where he claimed to be like this much more important CIA figure than he actually really was and he —

**Craig:** Is it the Good Shepherd?

**Jonathan:** The Good Shepherd?

**John:** No, not the black and white one. This was —

**Jonathan:** That wasn’t black and white.

**Craig:** It wasn’t black and white.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** The Good Shepherd was about the founding of the CIA so that can’t be it.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, those Yale guys in the —

**Craig:** Oh, The Informant?

**John:** The Informant.

**Jonathan:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** So The Informant had like a really interesting tone where, you know, you thought Matt Damon was the character he initially portrays himself to be and then you realize like, “No, no, no. You are actually a self-deluding fraud at the heart of this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that makes it really fascinating when you get into it. What I do like about what you’re describing, though, is it’s a way — sort of like The Big Short where you can tackle some real issues about sort of the way the wealthy hide money and sort of like how that cripples countries but actually have a story to it.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. Yeah.

**John:** A thread to follow on.

**Craig:** Yeah, because taxes are boring and Swiss bank accounts vaguely are boring. I mean, they’re — I mean, we’re all familiar with the phrase because of spy movies and so forth. But you’re right. I mean, this man’s insanity and his crimes, they’re not globally important. It turns out actually the boring stuff is globally important. This is a way to tell that story but at the same time show a scene where he is pulled off the street and a pillowcase put over his head, and he’s thrown into a room, and there’s two guys from the Mossad and they’re telling him that he needs to pretend to be arrested, and he needs to pretend this and triple lies and — oh, and he claims that there is a — what does he call it? The organization or the —

**John:** The Network.

**Craig:** The Network. He claims that his act of data theft was aided by a shadowy —

**John:** Yeah, a loose confederation of anti-tax evasion crusaders, consisting of law enforcement officers, lawyers, and spies.

**Craig:** Oh, bullshit, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, such bullshit and of course his former mistress says, “Yeah, that’s total bullshit. You knew the network was me and him. That was it. And, you know, why he’s doing it? Money, no big shock there.” But you see the things as like I would love to see the story that he’s telling be real and then from another perspective think, “Wait, did that happen or not?” That’s just you telling it. “Are you Keyser Soze or are you Verbal Kint? Which one are you? I can’t tell.” So I love this and somebody should be making this.

**John:** So Jonathan, is there any — if this comes into the room —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** Is there any pieces of this that you say, like, “Okay, well, that’s an interesting thing we can use for our show.” Like the idea of hiding money or where people hide money or the idea of what information you reveal like, you know, Dre finds stuff out at work and has to decide — has to make a moral choice as sort of whether to reveal it, like, there’s little bits and pieces you can you use in this probably.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely. I mean, I think that in general, I mean, these things are — I wouldn’t call it high concept but they’re the kind of idea that can support the weight of a two-hour movie where I think the thing about a half-hour television show is it’s smaller stories that you spend a little bit more time. And, you know, characters don’t really change that much so you can’t —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** You don’t quite have the giant crusade, like, the thing I always say about a half-hour show in a pilot, you do take your characters maybe from A to C or D in terms —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Of a growth but then you spend the rest of the series shuttling back and forth between A or B.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**Jonathan:** You know, and maybe at a special episode at the end of the season two, they get to C again and then they return —

**Craig:** But right back again.

**Jonathan:** Back a little bit. That’s kind of what people like in a way. So I think that it’s hard to find exactly what the father — but I will tell you a story like this will get us into — here’s what I think could absolutely happen with that story. If Kenya happened to read that and I happened to read that and a couple of other writers happened to read that. Or I said, “I want you all to read this.” It would get us into an interesting discussion that would potentially be — that I think we could do on our show which is the tendency to believe something like the Network exists or the conspiracy. Like, I was in San Diego last weekend and walked past the 9/11 truth squad —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Display on Embarcadero. I walked past a Trump merchandise table which was very happily unpopulated by customers. Flags make America great again. Right near it, though, was a pretty well-attended, lots of curiosity seekers — including I saw this young black family that was listening to this guy give this crazy conspiracy that ultimately was kind of anti-Semitic about, like, Larry Silverstein, the [crosstalk] of 9/11.

**Craig:** And there’s a shock. And there’s the shock.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, exactly. And this family kind of listening and going —

**Craig:** Was it a black guy giving the speech?

**Jonathan:** No.

**Craig:** Because I learned this term called hotep. Have you ever heard of hotep?

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** What is hotep?

**Craig:** Hotep is — I’m sidetracking here. Hotep is —

**Jonathan:** I just learned this this year.

**Craig:** Yeah, I literally just learned — yeah, exactly. Hotep is basically like the subculture of black men who over — they basically lecture all black people on black superiority and they’re kind of —

**Jonathan:** We did a hotep pop in an episode earlier this year when it was in, I forget. But it was a pop to Dre in college and he was a — he had a hotep face.

**John:** I didn’t know that you call those pop, so the quick cutaways where you’re in a different time period and it’s just for that one joke that’s a pop —

**Craig:** Hotep face.

**Jonathan:** Where he was talking about the, you know, the — the yeah. All this stuff.

**Craig:** Anyway, I learned and loved it but these people are spewing paranoid conspiracy cloning.

**Jonathan:** Yes, that gets me back to like where I would think we could do an episode where why a black family — a super educated black family could buy into some conspiracy stuff and I think a lot of the reason is because there has been a conspiracy against them a little bit.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know, in some ways and even if it isn’t necessarily as organized a conspiracy as what these 9/11 truthers would say happened on 9/11, you know, the belief in the black community maybe that there was — that AIDS was started as, you know, that there was —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Cooked up in a lab and, like, why would they think that? Because the Tuskegee experiments happened, you know what I mean? There have been conspiracies and so like — and we did sort of tap this when Dre had his fear of going to the doctor and then that was amplified and completely multiplied by Dre’s dad, Laurence Fishburne’s character, absolutely wouldn’t go to a doctor. Well, we talked a little bit about why there is a little bit of sometimes mistrust of doctors in the black community or certain members of the black community. And I hesitate always to say the black community because it’s not monolithic, another thing that I’ve kind of really learned a lot by being on the show. So I think that that kind of what would make people draw to something. So I don’t know whether that’s really what that — to be honest I did not do my homework.

**Craig:** No.

Jonathon: I did not read the long the New Yorker piece about the Swiss Bank Heist.

**Craig:** Clearly. But you see how important it is —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For those of you listening at home —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To be able to think and talk on your feet when you’re completely unprepared.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. [laughs] That’s what I do.

**Craig:** That’s how you get a career in this business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, but —

**Jonathan:** You have to love to hear yourself talk about nothing.

**Craig:** About nothing.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you are — you are demonstrating something else other than the fact that you’re not prepared, which is that for television, for episodic, I think a lot of times the real value is some kind of underlying psychological issue that you can carry through to any character, right? So how would we deal with this interesting thing?

Whereas in film, a lot of times what you’re looking for are characters like that man to me is a movie character. And you want to try and take it — it’s like the way I would pitch that movie to studios. I want to do The Insider, but what if you cannot trust? Like what if instead or Russell Crowe’s character, it was the Joker because basically that’s what’s going on. Like who do — how do you feel about this? How do you feel — and in a weird way, it is kind of similar to the Peter Thiel thing. It’s just that it’s a much cooler story.

Because it’s not about Gawker or whatever. It’s about the Swiss Banks and billions and trillions of dollars and countries fighting. It’s like in there — if you had read the article, you would’ve seen that they sent Greece a list of — so Greece, you know, few financial problems over there. Meanwhile, they get the data and they send Greece a list of all the very, very wealthy Greek people that have hidden their money in Swiss Banks and are not paying taxes on it. And the amount of taxes that these people were not paying was the equivalent of like 10% of all the taxes that should’ve been collected there. And you know what the Greece did about it? Nothing.

They couldn’t even — then like the new guy came in and found it in a drawer and the old guy had tampered with it to remove three family member’s names from it. It was a disaster — I mean that stuff you can’t make up.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, a final story. I think it’s going to fit more into the world of an episodic show. This is about the wrong grandson. So this is a story that comes from South Carolina. There will be a link in the show notes. It’s basically a 65-year-old Orangeburg County grandfather picked up the wrong son — the wrong kid at daycare. Actually the elementary school. And so, essentially, it wasn’t until he got the kid home and that someone looked at him and said like, “Wait you’re not our kid.”

And so basically the school released the wrong kid.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** The granddad —

**Jonathan:** Absolutely an episode of television.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely an episode I’m doing this fall.

**Craig:** And a broad comedy movie.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** I don’t think it’s enough of a movie premise. Unless the —

**Craig:** I know how to do it.

**John:** Unless it’s Home Alone — okay, tell me.

**Craig:** I know how to do it. You’ve got a kid. It has to be like, you know, think of like a Dennis the Menace age kid.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And his family sucks. And they don’t understand him or at least he thinks they don’t understand him and he doesn’t like them. And his grandfather, in particular, is the worst. [laughs]

And he wants to run away. So he’s made a plan — in fact, he doesn’t even have a grandfather, right? Just his parents. They’re the worst. So he’s made a plan, “After school today, I’m running away.” And he’s about to do it when this car pulls up and this guy goes, “Get in!” [laughs]

But it’s a nice car and he’s got like McDonald’s with him. And the kid’s like, “Oh my god, that’s Stewart’s grandfather but he thinks I’m Stewart. I’m getting in. And he goes and basically lives the high life for a weekend with this guy making this guy feel like he’s the grandfather except that he isn’t. And then, you could see all sorts of interesting —

**Jonathan:** I could see that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then, like, you know, family blah-blah-blah.

**John:** It writes itself. That was such a development executive pitch. Basically it’s like, yeah, do this thing and you can figure out the rest.

**Craig:** Family blah-blah-blah.

**Jonathan:** Have you seen the Mitchell and Webb thing about not that but that?

**Craig:** Yeah. A pebble, a penguin, a policeman —

**Jonathan:** No. It’s not that. It’s a guy talking about his novel.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what he’s saying. But he says, “It could be a pebble, a penguin, a policeman. All of the above, none of the above, and they are in love or they’re not in love.” That, write that. Or, don’t.

**Jonathan:** Or don’t. It’s hilarious. But, yes, so that could totally be a development executive’s thing — something like that. You’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But I do think that could be an episode of television. I think you could have — I love the story. I do this story over and over, I think most shows with a strong lead are this most episodes where you have a problem, you try to solve the problem, make the problem worse. And then you solve the problem but in the way you thought you were going to solve it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And it ends up kind of being a little bit of a moment of growth. So that would be the grandpa, we would have Dre or Laurence Fishburne, Anthony Anderson or Laurence Fishburne pick up the wrong kid. Try to fix it, make it worse, and then actually solve something else. Maybe not solve the real problem but solve something else getting not what he thought he wanted but what he actually needed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And you can do that in a half-hour television show.

**John:** For sure.

**Jonathan:** A lot, all the time.

**John:** And I bet what some of the challenges as you’re breaking the story in the room is figuring out like what it’s actually really about.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** The premise of it is like he does this thing. But like what is that actually really about? Is it about the fear of kidnapping? Is it about the —

**Jonathan:** I think it could be the fear of not having enough of a connection with your grandson that you notice the difference. You notice the difference until too late.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** So then Pops would try to fix that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Or Dre would try to fix that. I was so in my own head and distracted by work that I let this kid get in my car and drove him. And all of a sudden, the police think — people are thinking I’m kidnapping the kid. And I’m not and I try to fix that. And then you overcompensate and spend too much time with your kids. And realize that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

**Craig:** This guy — look at this guy. [laughs]

**John:** This guy looks great.

**Craig:** He looks so confused.

**Jonathan:** It’s such a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. So what Bart Simpson would always say is like, “The only thing worse than your crappy under-parenting is your scary over-parenting.”

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** And that would be sort of the thing —

**Jonathan:** That would be a story I could see us doing. And that might not exactly be it but that would be what caused this problem in the first place. And you go back at the end of the third act to kind of actually address the problem in a rational way as opposed to the irrational way that you —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Addressed it for all of act two.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this graphic novel series, a series of comic books from Image Comics but they’re gathered up together in nice little books you can go buy, called Sex Criminals. I’m the last person who’s read these things. Everyone has read them. But they’re really good.

**Craig:** You’re not the last person.

**John:** So in case you have not heard about it, it’s a series by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky from 2013. They are terrific. So the basic premise to this series is that you have this young woman who when she achieves orgasm, time stops. And so she can live in this sort of glowing moment for a period of time. A sort of refractory period in which she can wander around and everything else is frozen except for her. She meets a guy who has the same ability and together they rob banks. And it is brilliantly done. It is about sort of taking control of your sexuality. They’re funny, they’re weird, they’re naughty, so you shouldn’t live them sitting out on —

**Craig:** I have that thing by the way.

**John:** Yeah. It’s amazing.

**Craig:** I have that.

**John:** [laughs] That’s why everything seems a little bit misplaced every once in a while.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You snuck in and done things.

**Craig:** I have two weird things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have the ability to stop time when I have an orgasm and I have the ability to just spontaneously have orgasms. So, yeah, my days are strange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s how, you know, sometimes people remark on the podcast, “Oh, Craig tends to speak in complete sentences.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I just simply go back and stop time. I think, I write it out, I memorize it, I put it in my pocket. But, first, I have to jizz my pants. Yeah. So if it smells bleachy in here.

**John:** That’s what it’s for.

**Jonathan:** Oh.

**Craig:** What?

**Jonathan:** Oh.

**Craig:** It’s just — it’s biology.

**John:** It’s biology.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have dirty shows so we can do whatever we want.

**John:** Yeah. We can do whatever we want.

**Jonathan:** I took it to that. I got into it earlier on with the cream my jeans in the third row of the theater.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Boom. I was also made —

**John:** Craig Mazin, do have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** That’s not your orgasm?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know how to get cooler than that but I’ll try. Fallout 4, I believe, was one of my Cool Things when it came out. It’s very fun game. I don’t know if you’re a video game guy.

**Jonathan:** Not at all.

**Craig:** So big video game guy. Fallout 4 is a wonderful, huge, sandbox, open world exploration, quest-based game. And they have a new DLC for it, downloadable content, called Far Harbor. And so in Far Harbor, instead of wandering around Boston, irradiated post-apocalyptic Boston, you get to take a boat up to their version of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park and go kill different stuff up there but always, of course, with these interesting moral dilemma storylines. They’re very good at that. Excellent. And I think it’s like 15 bucks or something and it’s another, god knows, 20-hours of game play or something, so Far Harbor —

**John:** Cool. What’s your One Cool Thing for us, Jonathan?

**Jonathan:** My One Cool Thing, this is going to sound lame, but is foreign travel now. You have to do it. We were just in Mexico. My wife and I had our 20th wedding anniversary and we took a fantastic trip to the Yucatan where I’d never been. We stayed at a great resort and it was really fun. And we took this day trip and in talking to our guides — our driver and our guide — the sort of tentativeness with which they asked about how we felt about Donald Trump made me say it’s really important right now to go and let them know that we’re not all crazy. Especially in Mexico, but I think anywhere and honestly the sort of overjoyedness with which when we said, “Oh, god, no please understand that that is something that is — not everybody is that way,” was actually kind of heartbreaking and heartwarming. So I’d say like it’s an old standby, but if you have a chance to reassure anybody —

**John:** Before November?

**Jonathan:** Before November and even after November that even if something — if he wins that he’s going to have a rough road because that’s not who we are.

**Craig:** I don’t think he’s going to win. I think we — I don’t think so.

**Jonathan:** I know, but he’s the nominee of a major party —

John. Yeah.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**Jonathan:** That has seemed to have left its senses.

**Craig:** Kind of. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Well, I lost $500 on that with Kenya Barris, who’s a very good —

**Craig:** That’s the biggest problem with what happened. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** I lost the money.

**Craig:** You lost 500 bucks.

**Jonathan:** He took out in a thousand dollars from two writers who were both — Courtney Lily, who’s another writer on the show. We were both like, “Come on! He represents 30% of the Republican Party. Well —

**Craig:** Yeah, you failed to account for whom he was running against.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I could’ve been of assistance to you.

**Jonathan:** Yeah. I know. You should have stopped me.

**Craig:** I should’ve stopped —

**Jonathan:** Is that an okay One Cool Thing?

**John:** It’s a wonderful One Cool Thing.

**Jonathan:** It’s not a thing but it’s a thing that I think people — I’ve had a little hiatus and I’ve been — I took the opportunity to travel a little bit and it reminds me of a — it’s incumbent upon us now.

**John:** I’ve had the library as a One Cool Thing. So we go general sometimes.

**Jonathan:** Okay good.

**John:** Yeah, totally. That’s lovely.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** And that’s our show. Jonathan Groff, thank you so much for being on our show.

**Craig:** Thanks, Jonathan.

**Jonathan:** It was fantastic. Craig, John, thank you.

**Craig:** Our pleasure.

**John:** As always our show is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is from Adam Lastname, who does such great outros for us. We don’t know what your last name is but it’s Adam Lastname.

**Craig:** I’m so curious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Doesn’t he —

**John:** Weirdly, that’s a thing in podcast music where people use other bizarre names. You wouldn’t think there would be a podcast music thing but there is —

**Craig:** There is a thing for everything.

**John:** There’s a hotmoms.gov is another sort of podcast band.

**Craig:** Hotmoms.gov?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is the greatest title ever. That’s amazing. [laughs]

**John:** If you have questions for me or for Craig on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Jonathan Groff, are you on Twitter?

**Jonathan:** I’m @notthatgroff.

**John:** What a great handle for you.

**Jonathan:** Notthatgroff.

**Craig:** I’m going to consistent every day. I’m going to be like, “By the way, love you in Hamilton.”

**Jonathan:** Thank you. [laughs]

**Craig:** Love you so much.

**John:** Yeah. We haven’t even gotten into all the stuff you do on your gay HBO show, Looking. So that was really brave.

**Craig:** Very brave.

**Jonathan:** You know, it just, to me it was just a job.

**John:** Very good. It’s just a body. It’s the instrument that you’re given.

**Craig:** It’s just bodies.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** If you have a longer question, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcript for this show in a couple of days. The 250 episode USB drives just arrived as we were recording this episode. So they should be in the store if not this week, but the next week. And if you’re on iTunes for whatever reason, please leave us a review because it helps people find our show. Thank you all much.

Thank you, Jonathan.

**Jonathan:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Jonathan Groff on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0342917/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/NotThatGroff)
* [Network Ownership & In-Season Stacking Rights Rule 2016 Upfronts: In-Depth Look](http://deadline.com/2016/05/network-ownership-in-season-stacking-rights-series-pickups-2016-upfronts-1201752808/) on Deadline
* [America’s TV Exports Too Diverse for Overseas?](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/americas-tv-exports-diverse-overseas-879109) from THR
* [Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (aka fin-syn)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Interest_and_Syndication_Rules) on Wikipedia
* Black-ish, season 2 episode 16, [“Hope”](http://www.hulu.com/watch/909068) on Hulu
* The New Yorker on [Peter Thiel vs Gawker](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-peter-thiels-gawker-battle-could-open-a-war-against-the-press)
* Daily Mail’s [Stoned Sheep](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3609322/Stoned-sheep-went-psychotic-rampage-eating-cannabis.html) coverage
* The New Yorker on [The Great Swiss Bank Heist](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/herve-falcianis-great-swiss-bank-heist)
* [The Informant!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Informant!) on Wikipedia
* [Hotep, Explained](http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/03/hotep_explained/) from The Root
* [Grandfather “very sorry” after accidentally picking up wrong grandchild at school](http://www.kplctv.com/story/32102101/report-grandfather-accidentally-picks-up-wrong-grandchild-at-school?clienttype=generic&sf27594567=1)
* [Ok… Not this…](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LC0JjvAJt8) sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look
* [Sex Criminals](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1632152436/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, on Amazon
* [Fallout 4’s Far Harbor DLC](http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/435881/) on Steam
* [Travel abroad!](http://www.state.gov/travel/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/an-alliance-with-house-mazin).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 252 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, it’s another craft episode. In the past we’ve looked at heroes, we’ve looked at villains. This time we’re looking at allies and the discussion will be led by Sir Craig of House Mazin.

**Craig:** So excited. So excited to the return of House Mazin on Game of Thrones.

**John:** So this was the Hodor episode. And some people were very excited about Hodor’s backstory and Hodor’s disappearance from the show, but we were, of course, most excited by the return of House Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually call it the House Mazin show, in which also something happened with Hodor. Crucial moment. Crucial moment where Sir Davos, he’s looking at the map and figuring out how many people they can rally to Jon Snow’s side. And obviously House Mazin, the most important house in the north. Why there’s a Jewish house in North Westeros? I don’t know.

**John:** It’s a fantasy world.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the thing about my name. It actually is a weird… — You know, Rob McElhenney, who is the creator and star of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, he wanted to name the villain — he’s working on a Minecraft movie.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And he wanted to name the villain Mazin after me, because it’s a good villain name, too.

**John:** It is a good villain name, sure.

**Craig:** But they were like, uh, I guess the problem was that there are other Mazin’s out there. Apparently they couldn’t clear it. Yes.

**John:** Disappointing.

**Craig:** But like if my last name were Greenberg, there would be no House Greenberg.

**John:** I was watching the scene, this is midway through the episode, and I haven’t gone back to look at the episode to see whether they actually said the name on camera, of it it’s like a looping line that got slipped in there.

**Craig:** I think it was, well, I don’t know if it was a looped line, but they definitely played it over I think an insert of the map. But someone took a screen cap from the closed captioned version and there’s House Mazin spelled correctly.

**John:** Fantastic. I’m so excited. So, that was probably what prompted you to think of this episode about allies and alliances, because that’s what they’re discussing when your name was brought up.

**Craig:** Correct. And when we get into it, you’ll see that Game of Thrones is incredibly useful because there are so many relationships.

**John:** There are.

**Craig:** And every relationship is defined as either an allegiance or as some kind of hero/villain situation, or conflict. So, we have so many different kinds, so we can illustrate so many different kinds with Game of Thrones. But, I suppose first we have follow-up.

**John:** We do. So Emily from Sydney, Australia wrote in to say, “I just wanted to write in to say that the transcript of high quality audio with only two voices, no background noise, is fairly easy and very cheaply done by computers, so it probably isn’t done by child labor or exploitation.” Which is something that we brought up last time. I didn’t know how our transcripts were done. Emily seems to think that it’s probably done by computer transcription.

She continues with, “My mother is a lecturer at a university and likes to read transcripts of her lectures from previous sessions, so she can easily revise. So I’ve gone very deep into computer transcription world.” She says, “I’d also like to thank you for providing the transcripts and just all your other efforts to be inclusive as possible on the podcast.”

**Craig:** Well, thank you very much, Emily. But you have raised a matter of concern. [laughs]

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Because, again, I feel like, all right, you know, John, he’s collecting money from tee-shirts, USB drives. “Oh, well, you know, we have to pay for the transcripts.” Oh, apparently, according to Emily from Sydney — from Sydney.

**John:** Sydney.

**Craig:** It’s cheap.

**John:** Maybe Stuart needs to reevaluate how much we’re paying our transcript person. The transcript person who is typing up the words that I’m talking right now. See, that’s the whole thing. You know, if it’s a computer, who knows, maybe the computer is the person who is typing up these words.

**Craig:** Right. The computer wouldn’t find any irony in just repeating TRANSCRIPT, TRANSCRIPT, TRANSCRIPT.

**John:** So, I do know how much I pay Stuart, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that this podcast does not make enough money to pay for Stuart’s salary. So, there’s that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Bit of brightness.

**Craig:** Well, I suppose we’ll just have to eliminate some salary from Stuart. I mean, listen, [laughs]…

**John:** Craig is volunteering to do the hard work of transcripts.

**Craig:** Oh, no. No, no. No, no, no. I’m the talent.

**John:** Oh, that’s right. Talent doesn’t do that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I should say that some people don’t know we have transcripts. So, basically when an episode goes up on Tuesday, on johnaugust.com you’ll see the blog post that has the episode and has the audio for the episode. But usually by Wednesday, Thursday, definitely by Friday, that same post will have a new link added that says “This is the transcript.” And click through to that, and you’ll get the full transcript of everything we are saying.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Shall I read some more follow-up?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Bretton Zinger. That’s an — oh, god, I wish my name were Bretton Zinger.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** House Zinger.

**John:** House of Zinger. House Zinger. Come on.

**Craig:** House Zinger.

**John:** What would their little sigil be? Like what would their symbol be on their shields?

**Craig:** It would be a guy making like a pointing like Zing! Bretton Zinger, oh, so good, Bretton Zinger writes, “In Episode 250, The One with the Austin Winner, the script you read contained the following: INT. DC METRO STATION. NIGHT. The cavernous dome thoroughfare stands eerily still. It’s beyond late. The midnight train long emptied.”

Bretton continues, “The script is set in 1950. The DC Metro system did not open until 1976. Based on the description here and later, I believe that the writer, Amanda Morad, is actually referring to DC’s Union Station where Amtrak is located rather than a Metro station, which is the subway station, though both have domed thoroughfares.

“When describing real cities, landmarks, et cetera, how much fudging do you think is acceptable? I know writers can do whatever they want, and that good writing always trumps everything else. But how much do you worry about the audience or readers calling BS on something you include?”

**John:** Well, I think it’s a good point about Amanda’s script, and also a good question overall. So, in terms of Amanda’s script, I think that was actually probably a mistake. I think it would be better to actually make that correctly Union Station, if that’s what would actually be there in the 1950s. But it doesn’t really mess me up as a read. I don’t think of it as a different thing because of a Metro station versus Union Station.

So, for Amanda I would say it would be great if she swapped that out for Union Station, just for accuracy and authenticity. But in terms of overall, I think readers have to understand that we’re writing for the ability to create a picture in your head of what things are. And that’s why we’re not so necessarily accurate about geographic locations, about sort of how things fit. You’ll find in movies people can get across the city much more quickly than they really could. And that’s just the nature of moviemaking.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re always allowed to do anything in your screenplay that a director can do when they’re shooting the movie, right? You can elide time and elide distance. Chop up the shoe leather. I do agree though, I’m a stickler for getting things right if I’m putting them in. So, yeah, she wants to change this for sure. The one thing you definitely can’t do is put something in where there is not a substitute for it. So, for instance, if Amanda had — here she simply makes a mistake, and so she can switch the stations and she’s fine. But, let’s say there were no stations like that in 1950. That’s a problem.

And so you do want to get things as right as you can. I get a little crazy about it. I actually, I was writing a scene yesterday that takes place in the ’80s and on a certain day in the ’80s. And I wanted to know what the face of the moon was that night. And I was kind of hoping it would be full. And it was almost full.

Because, of course, you can go on the Internet and type in any day and they’ll tell you what the moon was doing that day. And in what time zone.

**John:** That’s lovely. I will say that what tends to be more important than being completely accurate is feeling accurate, feeling true. And sometimes one of the things you bump into as a writer is what is actually true doesn’t feel true. And, you know, if you’re basing something on historic event, things could happen a certain way and you won’t actually believe they can happen that way in the course of a narrative film. And so sometimes you have to find ways to either really hang a lantern on like this is how it actually happened, or you have to move things around in a way that makes the simplest believable version of what it is that you want to convey.

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually think it’s a gift sometimes when true life seems unbelievable, because it gives you as an opportunity for somebody to say, in the movie, “I don’t believe that.”

**John:** Yeah. One of the things I really liked about The Big Short is there’s moments where characters will turn to camera and say like, “Okay, this didn’t actually happen this way,” and sort of really explain it. But in their explanation you see like it’s actually even kind of crazier than what we’re doing right here. And that was a good shorthand they were able to do. Most people will not be able to do that in their movies.

**Craig:** Yeah. I moderated a discussion at the Guild with Adam McKay and his cowriter on Big Short and we talked about that a bit. And he said the one where Ryan Gosling turns to the camera and says, “I would never be caught dead in a club like this. This isn’t where we were when this happened,” happened because the person that that guy was who read the script and had to approve that his name be used and all that, he said, “I would never…”

His exact words. And so they were like, well, can we do what you just said in the movie? And he’s like, “Um, okay.”

**John:** Nice. Let’s skip ahead from some questions and get right to the meat of this, because I’m desperate to see what you want to say about allegiances and alliances.

**Craig:** Allegiances. Well, enemies are easy to do, I think, because, you know, we understand what’s going on there. Things are well defined. We have instant conflict. Friends are hard. And a lot of times I will read a screenplay where friends or alliances, partners, are bland. Because they are lacking conflict, and I think is something that people make a mistake about — the idea that an ally is an absence of conflict. Or an ally means a resolved relationship.

Quite the opposite is true.

**John:** Yeah. So often I will read these scripts where it feels like that character is just there to sort of set the balls so the other character can spike it. And they have no life independent of that main character. And there’s no friction between them and the main character at all, or they just have good-natured barbs to each other that doesn’t help us at all.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that, unfortunately, counters the whole point of what an allegiance is. So, let’s go to the fundamentals. Why do we even need allies in movies? And these seem like crazy questions to ask because, you know, why do we need allies in life and we like movies where people are doing stuff together. But it’s good to ask why, because it helps, I think, lead you to the path of writing good versions of these things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the point of allegiance in narrative. Some general notions of it. Individual characters are trying to advance their own selfish interests through relationships that help them do so. Similarly, characters will learn about themselves through their relationships that are not defined by conflict relationships, but allegiances.

One thing that allies help characters do is suffer pain for the wrong rewards, because friends will get you to do things sometimes and then you find out, oh, I shouldn’t have gone along with that. There are things friends can do in this regard that help characters see themselves much, much better. And, of course, an allegiance helps the screenwriter define what’s wrong about where a character is in the beginning of a movie. And then also helps them define what’s right at the end.

**John:** Great. So, let me try to go back through these four points you just made and see if I can restate them in ways that might anchor them in sort of experience of what you sort of see in a movie? So, characters advance their interests. So, it gives a character the ability to express what they’re after, and it gives another person that the hero can express what they’re actually going after, but more interestingly, the character who is the other part of the alliance, they have their own wants and needs. And so those conflicting wants and needs are the source of tension and also provide propulsion within a scene.

If you have one character who wants something, and another character is just there to listen to it, that’s not a good scene. But if we can see that two characters have different wants within a scene, there is some tension there and there is some — there’s a reason for that scene to be there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It also helps your character as they’re going for something that is maybe just for them, they have to do it through the prism of a relationship with another person, which is vastly more interesting to us. Even in movies where people are really alone on purpose, they’re not alone. This is why you had to have Wilson, you know. You need a relationship. We lose sight of what a person is going through if it’s not understood through that interpersonal connection.

**John:** Let’s get to your point about suffering pain for the wrong reasons, or for the wrong rewards. So, this is the case where it lets you put your hero, your protagonist, in a situation where they’re trying to do something which isn’t necessarily even something they believe, but they are doing it because of a relationship. They’re doing it because they promised their wife they would do this. Because they want to look better in the eyes of this other person.

There’s a reason why they’re doing it which is not a purely selfish reason. It is a bigger reason. And sometimes they’re willing to do things they wouldn’t do for themselves for other people. And that can be great for both comedy and for drama.

**Craig:** Exactly. That there’s something about your friend, your partner, your ally that gets you into trouble. We all have that experience. Every single one of us has had that friend that got us into trouble. And that’s the best kind of trouble. It’s so much more interesting when your friends get you into trouble, I think.

**John:** Absolutely. And so also your friends who can point out where you are starting. They’re the people who can put words to what your starting situation is, but hopefully if you’re trapped with this other character through the whole story, they’re the ones who can tell you, oh, you know what, you actually got there. And you sort of function as a proxy throughout it and say like, “Oh, I see what’s wrong with you here and you actually did this thing that is very good for you to do.”

Without that character there to clock that, you don’t have the sense of accomplishment, the sense of reward at the end of the movie.

**Craig:** That’s right. And sometimes the disruption or disillusion of one allegiance and the creation of another, in and of itself, is a signifier that you’ve done it. You know? So, the bad one leaves you and the good one returns.

**John:** Let’s talk about the experience of allegiances, because very few of us in our life have enemies, but we all have allegiances. So, do you want to dig into sort of what the realities of having allegiances in real life are?

**Craig:** Well, if you have an enemy, there’s a clear state. And there’s not a lot of ambiguity. I don’t like you. Here’s why.

So, Ted Cruz, very clean relationship for me. I do not like him, right? There’s no confusion. There’s no ambiguity. And I’m also not challenged internally in any way by that. It’s nice and easy.

Friends, much harder. Friendship cuts to the heart of all, I think, of our innate human flaws. Because friendship is asking us to do things that go against the selfish gene sometimes. Being friends, having an allegiance, implies honesty, loyalty, self-sacrifice, even love. And these are the things that people find hard to do. Even when they’re trying to make an allegiance with themselves.

**John:** What I also find in the real world is I am a different person to some different people. And my relationships from my high school friends, to my work friends, to my people in other parts of my life, I’m a different person with them. I’m not a completely different person, but what’s important to me about the relationship is so very different. So, my relationship with my housekeeper is very different than my relationship with you.

And so, you know, I’m talking about different things, but I’m also presenting myself in a very different way. And so in narratives, the allegiances you show onscreen let you see different sides of a person that you would not otherwise be able to see.

**Craig:** That’s right. They also let you see people struggle to be good. And we don’t really believe in characters that are just good. We have them, but when we have them, they are rarely the protagonist. They’re usually some kind of rainmaker that comes in to enlighten us all, you know, like K-PAX, or Starman, or Jesus Christ.

Or, Elwood Dowd in Harvey, right? But it’s the people that are struggling to the right thing that are interesting. And so they’re struggling to maintain these allegiance. The boyfriend is leaving and the girlfriend doesn’t want to lose him, but doesn’t know how to keep him. That’s an interesting allegiance that’s falling apart, and she’s trying. We like that sort of thing.

I mean, when you look at a movie like The Avengers, what’s more interesting, the relationships between the heroes and the villains, or the relationships between the heroes and the heroes?

**John:** Absolutely. If you look at the most recent Avengers: Captain America movie, that is based around entirely those relationships. Those people who are neither your friends, nor your enemies, because of the complicated situation you find yourself in. And so when you have Iron Man facing off against Captain America, you are fascinated because you can see from both sides. You know the depth of the relationship between those two, and yet they’re also kicking the crap out of each other. That is fascinating. And that’s a thing I think that they were able to do brilliantly in this most recent incarnation is really dig into what it’s like to be fighting someone who you have a relationship with who’s not purely a villain.

**Craig:** Exactly. Because, we actually spend most of our time fighting with our friends. Very rarely do we fight with enemies, and the reason why is they’re not near us. We avoid them. But we don’t avoid our friends. We don’t avoid our spouses. We don’t avoid our children. We don’t avoid our business partners. We are constantly with our allies. And so naturally that’s where the most interesting fights happen.

**John:** Yeah. Because you would not choose to be around those enemy figures. And you’re getting as far away as possible from them. So, all those tensions that come out, which should be there, can erupt. And that can be the source of drama.

**Craig:** You know that super hacky line, “After all, you and I, we are not so different.”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Right? The worst villain line ever that just shows up over and over. That is just a very clunky overdone way of trying to say, “Look, even though I’m your enemy, we could be friends in some other world. There’s some connection between us that is almost like an allegiance.”

Where it happens best is when you have enemies and heroes that you believe actually, if not for a slight flick of fate, could be allies. Batman and the Joker are a fascinating partnership. They do feel more in a weird way like allies, even while they’re fighting, because of that strange notion of similarity.

**John:** Absolutely. Without the other person, they would sort of cease to exist. And Batman without Gotham City and without the crime of Gotham City, what would Batman be? And if Joker succeeded in killing Batman, would he be happy? Hard to say.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so in a weird way there, and that’s why maybe the finest of these Batman stories, The Killing Joke, which they are animating, and it looks wonderful, and Joker voiced by Mark Hamill, the greatest Joker of all time, I will say. That’s what that is about. It’s entirely about we love each other, in the strangest way. We do. We love each other.

So, we can talk a little bit about different kinds of allegiances that exist.

**John:** Let’s go through it. I see you have a whole sort of hierarchy built around Game of Thrones, and the kinds of patterns that characters find themselves in. So, I think it’s important to note with Game of Thrones is that because it’s a big giant soap opera, you can’t say like this character is the hero and this character is a villain. Everybody has their own motivations. And so each character in this relationship is sort of equal parts.

And so let’s go through Game of Thrones. Let’s also save some time and talk about movies which tend to have a central character and a character who is not a central character and sort of what’s different.

**Craig:** Sure. So, these are all allegiances. Sometimes they will sound like they’re not, but they are. They function essentially as two people — I guess I would define as an alliance or an allegiance is when two characters are operating toward the same goal.

So, the most common kind of shaky allegiance you’ll see in anything, movies or television, is the marriage of convenience. Essentially, we don’t like each other, but we need each other. That is essentially every buddy film you’ve ever seen.

**John:** Every film in which two characters are handcuffed together for some strange reason.

**Craig:** Correct. Or, in the case of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow and Tormund. Tormund is the best. So, there you have Jon Snow. He’s a member of the Night’s Watch. And you have Tormund, who is a leader of the —

**John:** Wildlings.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Wildlings. And they are historical enemies. They hate each other. But the two of them need to work together because they’re facing a larger common enemy, which are the White Walkers. So, marriage of convenience.

**John:** I’m recognizing as we’re about to go through this whole Game of Thrones thing is that most people’s experience with Game of Thrones is probably my experience with Game of Thrones, where I kind of know some character’s names, but I mostly like point and say, “That guy.”

**Craig:** Oh, well Tormund is the big redheaded Wildling dude.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he’s the one who has the Brienne fetish with chicken.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s totally into Brienne.

**John:** Nice. Next up. What kind of pattern next?

**Craig:** Well, here’s a great one. Unrequited love. And this is a tragic one. Now, you may think, well, if someone is pining for somebody else, how is that an allegiance? Well, it is because the person who’s pining typically will do whatever they need to do to get the person to return the love. Which means they’ll help them.

And in the case of Game of Thrones, we have Jorah Mormont and his lovely Khaleesi.

**John:** Yeah. Daenerys Targaryen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, in the case of — we can clearly see what he’s in it for. On her side, she can use him to do anything, but she also has a responsibility to him, and that’s a thing we saw in the House of Mazin episode, where she felt the responsibility of having this person who was so drawn to her. It strikes me that actually all of these relationships we’re talking about, it’s sort of like gravity. Like you have two items that have their own gravity and they’re sort of circling each other. And that’s really what you see in allegiances.

It’s two characters caught in each other’s gravity. And having to decide what they’re going to do with each other and for each other as they’re sort of doing this dance around each other.

**Craig:** That’s a great analogy. And to dig even deeper into it, the gravity has to kind of be in a weird stasis, right? Like the way the moon is around the earth. Too close, boom. Too far, wee. Right? So, and that can happen. But, when it happens, that’s how you end relationships. That’s how you end alliances, by people disappearing from your life, walking away from you. Or, from a collision that’s so emotional or the circumstances are so significant that you hate each other.

**John:** Yeah. Those high school romances that burn far too hot, and then they just completely flare out.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** Oh, I remember those.

**Craig:** Ugh, me too.

Here’s one: misplaced faith.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** So this shows up a lot. People are devoted to somebody out of some sense of follow the leader. In this case in Game of Thrones, we have Cersei and the High Sparrow. She kind of puts her faith into him, although really she was hoping for something else. But maybe a better look of it is Sansa and Joffrey. She believes, she has faith, that Joffrey is going to be a good king who will love her and be a great guy and he’ll make her the queen. There’s faith involved in this. There’s an aspirational element to it. If I just stick with this person, and give them all of my belief, I know that blankety-blank-blank-blank.

**John:** Well, it’s also a sunk cost fallacy. And so you have Sansa, oh, actually I’m thinking Cersei. But there is that sense of like I’ve invested this much time in the relationship. And so therefore I’m going to see this relationship through or else.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you’re in for a penny, in for a pound. By the way, you see this in life all the time. It is very hard for people to say that they’re wrong. It’s incredibly hard for them to say that they’re wrong after they insisted they were right a lot. When other people were saying they were wrong. That’s the toughest one. Because there’s a certain humiliation to it.

And, of course, then that is an example of a kind of allegiance that almost always ends with some sort of Ka-boom, Wee, because it is not stable. It’s not stable.

What is a very stable one, though, is the parent-child allegiance. So, in Game of Thrones, you have the Three-Eyed Raven and Bran. You have Tywin Lannister and Tyrion, which is a bad version of it. And even though that one ends poorly, you can see that at least it lasted for a good chunk of Tyrion’s life.

Parent-child is sometimes a biological parent and child. Sometimes it’s Yoda and Luke. But it is a pretty strong allegiance. It’s an allegiance of either blood or a sense that you are going to replace me.

**John:** Yeah. Now, there are some — what’s fascinating about Game of Thrones, and I think a lot of good dramas, is sometimes it’s kind of unclear what type of relationship these characters are supposed to be in. So, you look at Arya and sort of her assassin training. What is her relationship with that dude? Like the faceless guys? Is it a parent-child relationship? Is it sort of a mentor relationship? It’s not really clear whether he cares for her at all. And it’s not clear whether she cares for him at all.

The same thing when she was traveling with the Mountain. [sic] You don’t know sort of what the boundaries of this relationship are. And this is partly what forms the conflict and the tension and the friction and all the delight within the scenes. These characters are trying to figure out who they are to each other.

**Craig:** Exactly. You can change the nature of the allegiance depending on the circumstances involved. For instance, take Arya Stark and the faceless man. When she meets him initially, he’s a guy trapped in a thing and she saves him. Then, he offers her something in exchange. He’ll kill three people for him.

Their friendship became almost like a buddy comedy there. And he was in her debt. And it was cute. It was actually kind of cute. And then it became something else. Now, you know, I would describe it more like disciple and prophet. There is somebody who can do things that are supernatural, and she now is training with him to do those supernatural things, to get the power that he has.

**John:** And certainly like Luke’s experience with Ben Kenobi in the first Star Wars tracks sort of that experience. Where like this is a person who is teaching you in these mystical ways, and yet is a very hard mentor. Then becomes a much more difficult mentor with Yoda in the second movie. There’s a track for that. What’s so unnerving and unsettling about Arya’s situation is we’re not sure he’s a good guy. And that’s a large part of the tension there.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. This is something that Game of Thrones generally does well. And I always tip my hat to Dan and Dave, but I also — after this last episode really just reminded myself to tip my hat to George Martin, because he is the one who thinks ahead on this Hodor thing. And he comes up with these remarkable characters that oftentimes you do both hate and love at the same time.

It’s pretty amazing, like the faceless man is a good guy, and definitely a bad guy. He’s a murderer. For money. So, bad guy.

And these allegiances don’t have to be fun. There’s codependency.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Codependency is an incredibly powerful kind of allegiance. Do you know — have you ever met couples, usually married, where it seems like they’re in their own cult?

**John:** Oh, for sure.

**Craig:** Yeah? And no one can get in. And it’s just like they whisper to each other a lot. And they’re just like only into each other. And it’s not like they just met. And if one doesn’t like somebody, the other one is not allowed to like that one either. Codependency.

**John:** It’s really crazy. And sometimes they are literally kind of in that cult where like they only listen to the same talk radio programs. They have one brain. And I’ve met some of those couples that have then later divorced, and both of those sides were just crazy afterwards.

**Craig:** Right. And in part because what you’re looking at there are two people that are missing something and the other person is giving it to them. And that’s a very powerful bond, but it’s also very disruptive to any kind of sense of being a better person.

So, in Game of Thrones, is there anything more codependent than Jamie and Cersei Lannister, the incestuous twins, who are just bad for each other.

**John:** Yeah. They are. And they’re bad for each other in a way that actually kick-starts the entire saga of Game of Thrones. Their lovemaking is what sends Bran flying off the tower. And so if they hadn’t been so messed up for each other, there wouldn’t be most of the drama we see.

**Craig:** That’s actually kind of an interesting idea of just what Game of Thrones would be like, how boring of a show it would be, if that were just — then it’s just mostly like meetings of the small council.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] I would watch it.

**John:** Bureaucracy of Thrones.

**Craig:** Exactly. Anyway, we have a bunch more of these. I have a bunch more. But rather than belabor them all, I’m just going to pick out a couple of my favorites. Animal loyalty. I like it in movies and shows when there’s a character who is — and they’re always a side character, they’re always fairly minor — but they are defined by their dog-like loyalty to another person. It is completely irrational and it is totally unquestionable. There is comfort in knowing that of all the twists and turns that narrative can throw at you, that one thing will never twist or turn.

So, in The Godfather, Luca Brasi, he’s — that’s pure loyalty. He will never turn on you. And he will do whatever you ask him to do. And similarly in Game of Thrones, Hodor.

**John:** Hodor. You separated out Hodor’s sort of dedication to Bran from Brienne’s dedication to Sansa, which I think is actually smart. Because Hodor, he’s that dog that will just keep following you around, and nothing will ever dissuade that dog from following you. Brienne, she’s really sort of bound to herself in a way. She’s bound to own oath. And that is what is making her stick with Sansa.

And while she would do anything for Sansa, she’s really kind of doing it for herself. It’s a strange thing that happens there.

**Craig:** There’s a sense — some characters have a strong sense of honor or a strong code. And when they find somebody that allows them to indulge their code, and allows them to fulfill their purpose, that is a very strong allegiance.

But, if the person they are serving fails to meet the ideals of their code, then they are no longer serving the purpose, and then the allegiance breaks.

**John:** Yeah. So, you single out a couple other ones. Let’s just highlight them here. You certainly have the Oedipal pull between Robb and Catelyn Stark, which was just strange. I loved seeing it, but I was never quite clear what was going on. You have the master and his slaves. You have Ramsey Bolton and Reek, which is just so messed up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you want to say it’s codependent, but it’s not even that. It’s the desire to destroy another person and sort of reforge them in a different light. And it’s just taken to such an extreme in the example of Ramsey.

**Craig:** And then you can also get into the mindset of the abused. So, when his sister comes to rescue him, we understand why he acts in accordance with his allegiance with his master, Ramsey. Because in his mind we have now come to understand — it’s the strangest thing, to identify with a slave, because of the suffering and torment they have endured.

**John:** You know, what’s fascinating about the Ramsey character is there’s no one — I guess there is the girl he kind of liked who got thrown off the wall. But like you don’t see him with anyone else who is sort of on his side. Everyone else is just a puppet that he’s using.

And you feel like if you could stick him in a room by himself for a week, he would go insane, and would not be able to function anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a reason why he — I mean, if you think about what he does to the character of Theon, it required an enormous amount of thought, planning, personnel, creativity. You know, like he actually had to sit and think like, “What would be the most screwed up thing I could do now?” And that implies a need.

There’s no reason for him to do all of that, unless there’s some need, which means he gets something from it. And I find that fascinating.

**John:** Yeah. So, this is Game of Thrones. So, Game of Thrones is a huge universe with a lot of characters, and each character theoretically can take the narrative off in their own direction. And so every character in Game of Thrones basically has storytelling power. There can be scenes just with them.

But when we’re going back to feature films, you tend to have — well, you have a hero, you have a protagonist. You have a central character. You have some sort of opposing force — an antagonist, a villain. And then you have allies. You have people who are there who function in ways like we’re describing here, but they don’t have their own storytelling power. They generally can’t drive scenes by themselves.

And it’s this weird thing in movies I find where you sort of want those characters to feel like, oh, they could take control of the movie by themselves, except they can’t. And so you’re deliberately sort of building the system in a way so the audience never feels like I want to see that character run off and take control of the narrative, because that’s not how it’s going to work. You still want your hero to be the person in charge.

So, what’d different about these allies in movies is they need to be able to illuminate aspects of the hero, the protagonist, without pulling focus. They can’t be so mesmerizing, attractive, fascinating that we stop focusing on our hero.

And that’s a thing you’ll often find where it feels like the minor characters run away with it. That’s what happens. A lot of times you’ll see in the animated films where they’ll go through the scratch reels and say like, “Oh, we’ve got a big problem. The sidekick is stealing the movie. Maybe we should make the movie about the sidekick?”

And that’s a thing you have to worry about in movies is making sure that your actual hero/protagonist is really at the center of the story. And is the reason why you’re wanting to watch this story.

**Craig:** Right. The people around your protagonist should express their allegiance to the protagonist in ways that hopefully add into the hero’s character by the end. You know, so you’ve got this woman and she’s a bit of a broken mirror. And she meets people along the way that are pieces of it, she just doesn’t realize. And each one of them, each one of their stories and their relationships with her should start to put her back together in a way that allows her finally at the end to say, “Oh, I know what I am. I am remade. And now let me do a thing.”

**John:** Yeah. I’m looking back at sort of the in-depth things we’ve done on movies in the past. So we’ve looked at Ghost, we looked at Raiders, we looked at Little Mermaid. In each of those cases, sometimes like Ghost is sort of a two-hander, like Demi Moore’s character almost has sort of full storytelling power there. But in each of those cases, those supporting characters have to be great, they have to be funny, they have to be wonderful, and they can’t pull us away from what we are actually focusing on which is what is the quest of our main character, and what is he or she trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. The function, it’s so true, the function of allegiances in movies is vastly different from television. Because, they aren’t designed to go on and on forever. They’re actually designed to resolve. So, it’s the difference between a very slow burning fuse and kind of a bomb, you know. So, movie relationships are more like grenades. They go off and then there’s a lot of noise and confusion, and then things settle down quickly and are resolved.

And so you have to think about your friendships in movies in a much different way than you do… — It’s one of the, you know, writing this miniseries, it’s been fun to extend the nature of some of these relationships, even though they too must end. They’re not designed to spool out forever. But it’s been fun.

**John:** Yeah. The last thing I’ll say is in movies these alliances, these supporting characters, they’re there often to serve as a proxy for the audience. They’re asking the questions that the audience would want to ask. They are helping you feel about the hero the way that these characters feel about the hero. They are the person who lets you into the world of the movie, so you could look at the hero the same way they are looking at the hero.

And it’s one of the reasons why some of the movies I have done have been incredibly difficult because they don’t have that single hero. So, I’m thinking about the Charlie’s Angels movies, which are actually weirdly the most difficult movies to write, because you have three heroes that have their own relationships with each other, and have their own relationships with Bosley, who have their own relationships with the villain. And all of the other supporting characters. It’s just a tremendous amount to try to manage and a tremendous amount to try to manage within scenes that actually have to have plot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Big Fish —

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, those team movies kind of feature the allegiance as the hero.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Right? So there’s no one Charlie’s Angel that is the hero hero. It’s the team. Right? And the idea that they come together and fight together. I mean, there’s always going to be one that’s got slightly more, you know, but yeah, that is tricky. Because that relationship — it’s hard to tell those stories without falling into a very well-worn rut in the road. We break up. We’re jealous of each other and blah, blah, blah, we get back together. You know.

**John:** Yeah. Big Fish was the other example of a very difficult sort of relationship movie, because the relationship between the father and the son is the center of the movie, and yet the father and the son are not onscreen together a lot. I mean, we’re seeing the younger version of the father. We’re seeing the Ewan McGregor version of the father and his life. But we’re also trying to see the story from the point of view of Will, the grown son.

And trying to set up that story in a way that you understand both character’s relationship, that you invest in both of the character’s relationship, and understand the conflict is really challenging. And that’s because they both have very legitimate points. They both have very legitimate needs. And they have this gravity that is sort of destructive to both of them.

**Craig:** Yeah, that kind of destructive gravity to me is fun. That’s where things get interesting. To me, the most fun of writing on the Hangover movies was writing bad allegiances. I mean, they were just — it was just bad friendships from start to finish. These guys were bad for each other. One of them seemed to know it. You know, like that was — Ed Helms’ character Stu, he understood that this was — particularly Alan, Zach’s character, was just a bad friendship that would lead to no good things.

And, yet, without that he doesn’t necessarily win the respect of the father of the woman he loves. And then in the last movie, it really was about the end of that. It was basically how do we take this character, who is obsessed with his friendship, his allegiance with these guys. How do we take him on a journey where they basically say to him at the beginning there’s something wrong with you, and he denies it. And then get to the end where he says, “I’m okay to leave you now.”

And so, again, it was all about managing allegiances. I think they’re the most interesting relationships that you can have. Weirdly more interesting to me than standard romances, where you’re just waiting for the people to kiss. And they’re more interesting to me than hero/enemy, where it’s like I hate you, I hate you, blah, blah, blah.

Friendships are tricky, in our lives, and in television shows and in movies. That’s where I think the fun is.

**John:** Very nice. Cool. All right. Let’s answer a few questions from our listeners and see how much time we have left here. Josh in New York writes, “This year a film by Asghar Farhadi played at Cannes named The Salesman. The film takes its title from Miller’s Death of a Salesman, published in 1949. The film directly references the play, showing the two lead characters, both actors, exchanging dialogue as Willy and Linda Loman. How much published material of that kind can you reference in a screenplay? I’m working on a story that involves the cast and production of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. And only attempting to reference material in a couple of scenes. Is this doable?

“I’m assuming there’s copyright laws at play.” So, Craig, what advice would you have for Josh?

**Craig:** You know, I wish that I could tell you that there was a clear line on these things. Partly it involves how much you use. If you’re going to use a very small amount, sometimes you can just kind of say it falls roughly into fair use.

If you’re doing any kind of parody of it, then there’s much more leeway. But the truth is, if they want to go after you, they go after you. And if they don’t, they don’t.

For you, Josh, I would say write whatever you want. And then the best problem in the world is that a studio loves your script, wants to give a lot of money. The only problem is that they’re having trouble clearing some of the dialogue that you put into that one scene.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** You’ll figure it out.

**John:** For a while, I was going to adapt this book Wonder, which is a great novel, great middle grade fiction novel. And one of my concerns about was in the course of the novel one of the characters is in a production of Our Town. And so the book talks through this production of Our Town.

And in a book form, that was fine, because it’s a book form. But I was nervous about, well, when it comes time to actually make this into a movie, we’re going to have to sort of show scenes from Our Town, and there’s a blurry line at which point like, well, you’re actually just doing Our Town. And that’s a real concern that people do have in the real world. Like, do you change out that play? Do you do something different? Do you deliberately not show it? Do you cut that whole section of the story?

That was something that another writer had to figure out. So, that movie I think is going to get made now. So, we’ll see what they end up doing with that.

**Craig:** That definitely is something that you have to… — It’s a red flag when there’s any sense that someone might be confused and think, wait, am I watching a Streetcar Named Desire, or am I watching something that involves a reference to Streetcar? So, if there’s confusion, that’s generally bad.

**John:** A bad thing. There’s an addendum for Josh. He says, “Last episode you got a question from someone in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia. As a fellow Aussie, I want to clear this up. John, you nailed the pronunciation. And then you, Craig, totally steamrolled him with something that sounded stiff upper lip British.”

**Craig:** Oh, well, here’s the thing, Josh. You’ve released the Kraken.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** I’m going to dedicate my life to making sure that the people of Launceston pronounce it the way I think it should be pronounced.

**John:** [laughs] Nice.

**Craig:** I will spare no expense.

**John:** Yeah. Launceston.

**Craig:** Launceston.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In Tasmania.

**John:** Tasmania.

**Craig:** Mania. Amanda writes, “I sent a query letter with a short description of my script to a production company. The emailed back to say, ‘Feel free to send along your material as well as a signed copy of the attached submission release form.’ Is this a normal thing? And is this safe to sign? I don’t want to naively sign over the rights to my script, or find myself in a sketchy situation. My script is copyrighted, but not registered with the WGA.”

And you and I have taken a look at this attached submission release form.

**John:** Indeed. And, in fact, we’ll actually include this PDF with the show notes, so people can take a look at this, too. Craig, what did you think of this?

**Craig:** I thought it was perfectly reasonable.

**John:** I thought it was reasonable, too. I’ve seen things like this a lot. So, basically, this company is called Cartel, but a lot of these forms are very similar. They’re basically just trying to cover their ass, so you won’t turn around and sue them six weeks later for an idea that’s the same kind of idea.

Some places, the only way they’ll read your stuff is to sign this. You got to kind of sign this.

Definitely read through it. And if there’s things that make it sound like they’re taking ownership of your property, well, that’s not good. But here it was very clear that they were trying to protect themselves because some ideas are just similar. And things will get out there.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me this is sort of a good model actually of what these things should look like. So, running it down, they’re saying here’s what you’re agreeing to when you sign this. You’re agreeing that you actually are the owner of what you’re submitting. You haven’t ripped somebody else off or copied it. You’re agreeing that just by giving it to them doesn’t mean that only that person can read it. They can share it with anybody else within their company.

This is the big one: you are agreeing that they might already be exploring similar ideas. They might already have something else like it, or somebody else talking to them about it. So, you can’t sue them, essentially for misappropriating your work.

That doesn’t mean, by the way, copying your work. It doesn’t mean you’re signing the rights away. It doesn’t mean they can take your script, change the cover page, and say you waived your rights. No. This is what it says. “Accordingly you hereby waive any claim that whatever the company is misappropriated any ideas or portions of your submission.” And really that comes down to, look, if you — it’s a little bit like the Gravity case.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, there’s a couple of things that are similar, like the title, and it’s a woman in space, and she briefly gets burned at some point, right, and then one movie is about getting home, and it’s a survival story. And the other one is like a scary aliens on a spaceship story. You can’t sue over that. And nor should you be able to. And the rest of it is nothing.

**John:** Basically saying we’re not going to send back your script. We’re not paying you. That this is a blanket release form. So, this seemed pretty reasonable to me. If people who are doing this for a living want to take a look at this form and give us any guidance about things you think are sort of unusual about this, let us know.

In my experience, I haven’t had to sign one of these for a very, very long time, so I don’t know what the current state of these is. But this seemed very reasonable to me.

**Craig:** Do we have people sign something like this when they send their stuff to us?

**John:** That’s a very good point. So, we do have them — if you’re sending in your script for the Three Page Challenge, you go out through a form, and you’re basically saying like we’re cool, you’re not going to sue us, I’m doing this just for funsies. That’s basically what you’re signing as you submit for us.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, hopefully that covers us. [laughs] You know, because somebody sends something in and it’s like, I feel like once I think I said I’m working on, or have worked on, something similar to this. Yeah, I just don’t want to get sued by somebody.

That’s why these people are doing it. Because unfortunately people do sue, because they’re stupid.

**John:** Yep. So, my One Cool Thing this week is a video by Estelle Caswell for Vox. And she’s looking at the rhyming scheme of great rappers, all the way back from the ’80s with Kurtis Blow, through the present day with MF Doom, and there’s Eminem along the way. There’s really great little snippets of these songs and that they chart out sort of like how the rhyme schemes work.

And it’s really just fantastic. It’s about 13 minutes long, so it’s an investment, but it’s a good thing for the end of the day when you’re just burned out.

And what was weird is I was helping my daughter with a poetry project this weekend when I was watching this video, so she was doing her haikus and her clerihews and these other sort of poetry forms. But I was watching this video and thinking like, you know what, actually rhyming still does matter because it is so fundamental to hip-hop. It’s so fundamental to sort of how modern music works. And to see these great writers working and sort of how they are finding their rhymes, and finding rhymes that not only work sort of mathematically, but also have such great content behind them. I was really inspired watching this video.

**Craig:** I will check that out. You know what it reminds me? This is not my One Cool Thing, but did you ever see that video that this guy did on YouTube of the Amen break?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Basically it was a little snippet of a song from a B-side of another song. And the song wasn’t popular at all. It was called Amen Brother. And the only thing interesting about the song was that in the middle of it all the instruments dropped out and there was just a little drum break. And the drum beat was basically [hums]. And that little bit got sampled and used for everything.

It literally became like the weird urtext of hip-hop, jungle, trap, everything. It’s a great video if you watch it. Anyway, it’s on YouTube. You can just look up Amen break. But my One Cool Thing is Star Wars: A New Hope in infographic form, which everyone has been talking about. This is on a website created by Martin Panchaud, who is a Swiss illustrator and graphic novelist.

And what he has essentially done is a vertical scrolling, two-dimensional graphically designed explication of Star Wars: A New Hope, the movie, in a timeline, with all the dialogue, and representing everybody and all action graphically. And it’s beautiful. And really ingenious.

**John:** I’m scrolling through as we speak. It really is quite clever. So I would definitely recommend people check this out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s nice. Well done. Cool. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Timothy Vajda. If you have an outro for us that you’d like us to play, you can send that through to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today.

We are both on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You probably are listening to this on a podcast player. It’s great that you subscribed, but it would be also really wonderful if you would leave us a review in iTunes, because that helps people find us.

Next week will be — oh, we have a special guest next week. I’m so excited. But I don’t want to spoil it.

**Craig:** Ooh, who is it? [laughs]

**John:** Next week we’re going to be talking television. And we’ll hopefully be talking television with Jonathan Groff, who is one of the executive producers of Blackish.

**Craig:** He plays King George in Hamilton.

**John:** A different Jonathan Groff.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** Yeah, he gets that all the time.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** Don’t bring it up with him.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** And then we have special guests the week after that, too. It’s going to be so exciting. We actually recorded this episode on Wednesday because, Craig, you are headed to Princeton for your college reunion. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yes. I am heading back to Princeton for my 24th reunion, which isn’t exactly a popular one, but I’m going really because it’s Melissa’s 25th.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** Which is a big one. Yeah. So, I’m joining her. Princeton reunions are insane. I don’t know if you’ve ever read about them or heard about them. I think they are the second or third largest beer-consuming event in the calendar. I’m not joking. Like behind the Indianapolis 500 or something.

It’s crazy. I mean, it’s insane. Like these old people can drink.

So, yeah, and it’s fun. It’s crazy.

**John:** Oh, it’ll be good. So Ted Cruz won’t be there, because it’s not his reunion. It’s really Melissa’s reunion.

**Craig:** I mean, listen, I hope he is there.

**John:** Yeah. That would be great.

**Craig:** Somebody sent me a picture. There’s a breakfast place in Princeton that has been there forever, PJ’s, and somebody had carved into the wooden table, “We didn’t like Ted Cruz here either.” I mean, now he’s part of the lore of it all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have your own weird sort of alliance with Ted Cruz. You’re caught in each other’s gravity.

**Craig:** No, he’s caught in my gravity. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] All right. Have fun, Craig. See you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Find Scriptnotes transcripts at johnaugust.com](http://johnaugust.com/transcript)
* Scriptnotes, 250: [The One with the Austin Winner](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-one-with-the-austin-winner)
* Scriptnotes Bonus: [Craig and Adam McKay](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-craig-and-adam-mckay)
* [Idea Submission Policy and Agreement](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SubmissionReleaseForm.pdf) release form
* Vox’s [Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWveXdj6oZU) on YouTube
* [Amen break](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break) on Wikipedia
* Martin Panchaud’s [Star Wars: A New Hope in infographic form](http://swanh.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/they-wont-even-read-you).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 251 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, it has been 12 weeks since our last Three Page Challenge. So, we will be doing one of those today, looking at three samples from listeners and offering our honest assessments. We will also be answering some provocative questions from our listeners.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see if — I mean, you’re not going to get into trouble, but I probably will.

**John:** Yeah. I’m looking forward to that conversation.

**Craig:** I’ll end up in jail.

**John:** We have seen way too much of each other this week. You and I had a great lunch with Larry Kasdan, which was fantastic.

**Craig:** We did. Yes.

**John:** We recorded a one-hour podcast for the Dungeons & Dragons podcast, the official Dungeons and Dragons podcast, so that will be coming out at some point. I had a hard time reverting to my role as a guest and not a Segue Man.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. It was amazing. You really just — your natural mien is to run a podcast, and you’re really good at running podcasts. So it makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. So, when things would go way off topic, I kept trying to bring us back to Dungeons & Dragons, for example, and not Sexy Craig. And I did not succeed.

**Craig:** Well, listen, they wanted Sexy Craig. You can’t —

**John:** They clearly wanted Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** You’ve got to give people what they want. Sexy Craig always gives people what they want. It’s a huge issue with him.

**John:** We also got a chance to give people what they want on the 250-episode USB drives. So, we recorded a special little introduction to that. We’ve been talking way too much. So, I barely even remembered that we had not recorded an episode this week until yesterday afternoon and said, oh you know what, we should actually find some topics.

**Craig:** It did seem like we had already covered about five podcasts worth of stuff, but here we are. And then I’m going to see you again like in a week or whatever when we have our Dungeons & Dragons game again.

**John:** Plus, we’re playing Pandemic on Monday. So, there’s too much.

**Craig:** That’s right. We’re playing Pandemic on Monday. Oh my god. Well.

**John:** Far too much.

**Craig:** Listen man, whatever. You know what? You’re an easy person to spend time with.

**John:** Aw. Thanks Craig. That’s sweet.

**Craig:** I didn’t say you were fun to spend time with.

**John:** Yeah. Just easy.

**Craig:** Just easy. [laughs] Aw, Craig.

**John:** Aw, Craig. Let’s do some follow-up. So, back in Episode 242 we discussed the Internet outrage over the death of a gay character in the show The 100. And what TV showrunners owe to fans and sort of that weird relationship between TV showrunners and fans.

So, this week a friend pointed us to a site called LGBT Fans Deserve Better. And it has a thing called the Lexa Pledge, which is basically TV writers pledging to take certain steps in relation to their LGBTQ characters. Craig, did you get a chance to take a look at this?

**Craig:** I did. Yeah. I read through all of it.

**John:** So, let’s talk through some of the points. We will ensure that any significant or recurring LGBT characters we introduce to a new or preexisting series will have significant storylines with meaningful arcs.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Other ones that are very similar to that, I would say. We refuse to kill a queer character solely to further the plot of a straight one.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** All right. We acknowledge that the Bury Your Gays trope is harmful to the greater LGBTQ community, especially queer youth. As such, we will avoid making story choices that perpetuate that toxic trope. We promise never to bait or mislead fans via social media or any other outlet.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That was the one which I thought like, really, that’s a broad general thing that they’re doing there.

**Craig:** Kind of tipped their hand there, didn’t they? What this is really about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t like these pledges. I mean, listen, I’m completely in favor of treating all characters, but especially characters that are portraying people that have been either underrepresented on television, or treating unfairly in society in general. Treating them with respect. Treating them with dignity. Not falling back on stereotypes. I’m entirely in favor of that.

I am not at all in favor of anybody taking any pledge about their characters. They’re our characters. We’re writers. I don’t want to say ever I’m going to ensure, for instance that any significant or recurring LGBTQ character will have significant storylines with meaningful arcs. What if I want to have the police captain be gay and just have him be gay and it’s not a thing. We just hear that he has a husband and that’s that. And that’s it. And he’s not an important character. I’m not allowed to do that? That’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s not the intention behind this. My bigger worry with this kind of pledge is that you’re addressing a situation that has happened, obviously there’s one sort of flashpoint for it, but it’s an overall problem and a real trope. And so to call out that trope is useful and meaningful. But it feels like, again, a very blunt force way to approach how we’re going to deal with it.

And especially like, you know, most of these things you’re pledging are really subjective considerations. Like we refuse to kill a queer character solely to further the plot of a straight one. Well, what does that mean? What does further the plot of a straight one, what does solely mean?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** How good of a death does a gay character have to have? It just feels well intentioned, but I can’t imagine this having a great impact overall.

**Craig:** No. No. I don’t want to live in a world where writers can’t kill gay characters. Writers should be able to kill any character they want. We love Game of Thrones because everybody’s head is on the chopping block. Gay, straight, or otherwise. And that’s fair. I mean, it’s what we do. What this kind of thing ignores is that we have eyes and ears and we can watch and listen to movies and television shows and then draw a reaction, or draw a conclusion from what they’ve done. And if the conclusion is these people are just mishandling gay characters, and they’re being kind of irresponsible about it and a bit dismissive, vote with your eyes and ears, and get rid of it. And just don’t watch it. And probably it goes away.

Or protest. Do whatever it is you want. But I can certainly — as an adult, I feel like I can watch a television show and if a gay character dies and like, for instance, Renly died on Game of Thrones. Not because he was gay.

**John:** No. Everyone dies on Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Everyone dies on Game of Thrones. I didn’t walk away from that episode going, “Argh, Dan and Dave, there you go burying the gays to advance the plot of the…”

We are far more capable of determining what is — and then when you get to “we promise never to bait or mislead fans via social media or any other outlet,” what do you think social media — what do you think these shows use social media for? That’s it.

**John:** Yeah. I think at we’re at a really weird time, especially with social media and misleading and sort of what the creator’s responsibilities are to the show and to the fans via social media, because part of your job now seems to be kind of misdirecting people about what’s going on. Is Jon Snow dead? Well, they maintained a ruse for two years about Jon Snow being dead because that’s kind of their job now. So, you know, by the time this episode comes out, the news will have leaked about a major character dying on this one series that my daughter watches, and so I’m debating like do I tell her in advance, because it seems to be out there in the world that it’s going to happen. And she’ll be kind of traumatized by it.

But, I don’t know. We’re in a weird place.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we get traumatized because we care. I mean, listen, everybody I think who is a reasonable good-intentioned, big-hearted person is concerned about the high rate of suicide and self-harm among LGBTQ kids. Okay? But when they say that the deaths of queer characters can have deep psycho/social ramifications, A, we are not responsible for people hurting themselves when we kill characters. B, they have deep psycho/social ramifications because we do our job. If they didn’t, that means you didn’t care.

We all go through that feeling, that terrible feeling of watching a character you love die. It stinks. It’s just no good. Nobody likes it. But that’s part of what drama is, right?

**John:** Yeah. So, if I were — I’m not going to sign this pledge — but if the pledge were just one of these points, I think I might sign the version that is just I acknowledge that the Bury Your Gays trope is harmful to the greater LGBT community, especially queer youth. As such I will avoid making story choices that perpetuate that toxic trope. That, to me, feels like something I could actually sign on to. Because that’s saying like, listen, I see what you’re calling out, and I agree. It’s a stupid trope that we need to avoid, not only because it’s lazy, but because it actually has a negative impact on a very vulnerable section of the population. I totally get that.

It’s the broader thing I thought just went too far.

**Craig:** Well, I’m in total agreement there. I would sign that. But, of course, here’s the irony of signing these pledges. The only people that sign the pledges are people that weren’t going to be doing that anyway.

**John:** I think you’re right. Yeah. So, to bring this back to me, which is part of my favorite subject, back in 2006 on the blog, I had the screenwriter’s vow of Air Vent Chastity. So, this is the trope that drives me crazy is that in movies and in TV, characters are always climbing through air vents and it’s always so unrealistic and it can never actually happen. So rarely in actual life do people go into air vents, do heists happen through air vents. It happens all the time in TV and in film.

So, the pledge that I asked people to sign was, “I, John August, hereby swear that I will never place a character inside an air duct, ventilation shaft, or other euphemism for a building system designed to move air around.” And people signed that pledge.

**Craig:** I’m with you. In fact, I thought of you because I never forgot that. And I thought of you yesterday, because I was playing Unchartered Four, which is very good.

**John:** I hear it’s great.

**Craig:** And there is a sequence where — no spoilers here — in a couple of sequences they flash back to the time when Nathan Drake was a kid. And in one of those sequences, he goes through the air ducts. And actually, and then no, come to think of it, there is also an adult section where he goes — not pornographic — but when he’s an adult character, he also goes through an air duct.

You know, air ducts, A, aren’t that big. If they were that big they wouldn’t work as air ducts because there would be too much flow and no pressure.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** This is the nerdiest reason — it’s so nerdy.

**John:** Here’s what I will say. I have enjoyed many pieces of quality entertainment that have involved characters climbing through air ducts. And so going back to Aliens, favorite movie of all time, and even like 10 Cloverfield Lane has an air duct moment. In both of those, it didn’t bother me because it felt like, well, given the situation that you’re in, that may be a reasonable choice.

I just get frustrated that I feel like it’s a lazy kind of hacky way that I see every one-hour adventure show doing a lot.

**Craig:** They love the air duct.

**John:** They love the air duct.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** False suspense. All right. Some questions that are also kind of follow-up. James from, we’re going to say Launceston, Australia.

**Craig:** It can be Launceston.

**John:** Launceston?

**Craig:** Launceston.

**John:** “In your last episode with the Austin winner, that was Episode 250, you mentioned that her lack of dialogue in the teaser might be improved with lyrics that have some connection to the action. My question to you is do you write that specific sample lyrics in your dialogue? Or do we just write the song title in the action and assume the reader knows the lyrics to the song?”

Craig, that was your suggestion, so tell us what you think.

**Craig:** In all cases when I do things like that, I do use the lyrics. The whole point is that the lyrics, not the song title or what people might remember of it — usually when people see a song title, they’re just thinking the music, you know. The whole point is that the lyrics are a commentary on what we’re seeing. Some kind of ironic commentary or interesting commentary.

So in circumstances like that, I always use the lyrics. What I do is I don’t print them as dialogue, I print them in the action paragraph area, but I just put them in italics. And it’s quite clear. And then I break it up, so a couple lines, some action. A couple lines, you know, that sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think the reason why I was asking for dialogue and why you suggested lyrics is because those first two pages were so dense and it was asking a lot of the reader. So, just breaking up that page a little bit more would help. In that circumstance, I probably would put them in dialogue, but I also would put them in italics. So I would like, you know, singer, and then those lyrics as being sung by a person in the space.

You don’t have to have all the lyrics to the song. I think just like two lines here, two lines there would be great. You can jump ahead in the song. Just anything that feels like it’s fitting the moment you’re describing would be great.

**Craig:** Yes. You definitely want in your mind to have a general sense, okay, this is roughly taking this long, and this song — here’s a section where the lyrics make sense. Yeah, you’re right, sometimes if things are very blocky on the page I might put it in dialogue. And sometimes the character’s name will by Lyric.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, yeah. But I wouldn’t not put lyrics in, if that’s the whole point.

**John:** Absolutely. All right. Do you want to take the next one here?

**Craig:** Sure, Anonymous writes, “I’m an aspiring writer in Los Angeles and I’ve been trying to land a TV writing assistant job. These are actual quotes I’ve been getting. ‘We love your resume and you’d be a great fit for this job, but the higher ups told us we have to hire a girl.’ Or, ‘It’s going to be extremely hard for you as a white male to get into a writer’s room.’ Additionally, there are competitions or fellowships that are not advertised as diversity programs, but every year the winners will be along the lines of female, African American, ex-Marine. Let’s say there were 20 winners, there might be one or two white people. I’m sure all the writers are greatly talented, however it is statistically impossible for so few white people to win in competitions where race supposedly doesn’t matter.

“This is not at all an angry email. I totally support equality across the board and I get what Hollywood is trying to do. I just find it interesting and a little frustrating at times. And I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.”

**John:** Great. So this is the kind of thing I’ve heard both from showrunners and from young staff writers, is that it is challenging in some cases to hire a young white writer, a young white male writer for certain positions. And it is challenging and frustrating to be a young white male TV writer trying to get one of those positions.

And frustrating is, you know, a good term for it, because it’s less than angry, but it’s annoying. And from a young TV writer I talked to recently, his manager said like they won’t even read you. Because basically when they’re looking at some of those positions, they really are going into it with the mindset of like this person we’re hiring needs to not be a white male.

And that is annoying for that writer, but it is sort of the reality that they’re facing. So, I thought we might start by talking about what these positions are and sort of why people are going after them.

Distinguishing between a writer’s assistant and a staff writer. A writer’s assistant is a person who is kind of like a PA. They are often in the writer’s room. They’re helping out the writers. They’re taking lunch orders. They are taking notes down. They’re helping the showrunner. They’re not hired as a writer, per se. They’re not hired based on their writing sample. They are hired because they seem like a competent person who can do a good job doing that sort of administrative stuff that they need to get done.

A staff writer is hired based on writing samples, and so that’s most of what we talk about on the show are people’s writing samples. So, this is Amanda who was on last week, the script she wrote, that would be a writing sample and she would be trying to use that to get staffed on a job. So, those are kind of two separate things, but they’re both considered very classic entry level ways to get into Hollywood.

You and I didn’t come through TV, but if we had come through TV, those would be our first jobs.

**Craig:** No question. And I don’t know what the legality is of saying to somebody, “We’re not hiring you because you’re white.” It doesn’t sound legal. I mean, I know that there’s a difference between I guess what you’d call sort of the sort efforts and then the hard — no white people.

But, yeah, here’s basically the deal. For a long time, the scale was weighted heavily in favor of white guys. And now the scale is being heavily weighted against them, at least in these early positions. And that is a function in part of how clumsy Hollywood is at diversity. They just — Hollywood, when it comes to diversity, Hollywood is like a surgeon with no fingers. Just fists. And they swing their fists around and inevitably in an attempt to help somebody, and inevitably somebody gets hurt along the way.

What do you advise for — because, look, I don’t like — I was working this out in my head. Part of the problem is you have a certain amount of jobs, right? And there are certain groups that underrepresented. You want to bring them in. If you maintain the same amount of jobs, and it becomes a zero sum game, then you are necessarily saying to maybe the best applicant, maybe the most qualified applicant is a white man and you’re saying, “No, sorry, because you’re a white man,” which in my bones feels gross. Any kind of discrimination based on gender or race, I don’t like it.

But, if they expanded the hiring pool so that it was more than a zero sum, it was a — but then I thought, yeah, but then, you know, what’s going to happen then? It’s the same thing. You could look at this pool as the expanded pool. You know what I mean?

**John:** Absolutely. So, we’ve talked about diversity a lot. And whenever we go through the WGA diversity numbers we’re like, well, these are terrible and we need to make improvements, and we have to sort of — some systemic needs to be made.

And so what I think you’re seeing here is this is the uncomfortable grinding of gears as you’re trying to make some systemic change. So, let’s take a look at the macro decisions that are going on here and what the studios are looking at when they’re saying — you know, whether they’re officially saying you need to hire a diverse candidate for this slot, what their intention is.

And so I think the industry genuinely wants more diverse writers. They want people of color. They want women. They want people from a wide variety of backgrounds. And not only do they want new writers, but they want experienced writers. So, in their fantasy world there would be a whole bunch of really talented, really experienced diverse writers they could hire for their shows.

There’s a supply and demand problem. There aren’t enough of those really talented experienced diverse writers, because we haven’t been hiring them at those beginning levels for so long. And so the kind of brute force way of trying to get more experienced writers is to hire a bunch of really inexperienced writers to start in those entry level positions and try to grow them up. And so I think Anonymous is frustrated and I think everyone who is encountering this right now is frustrated because they’re trying to grow this generation and they’re just planting as many seeds as they possibly can. And there’s not sort of real estate to grow Anonymous because they’re trying to grow some diverse writers.

That’s sort of the macro thing I think is happening here.

**Craig:** I think you’re absolutely right.

**John:** But on a micro level, let’s look at it from the showrunner’s point of view. If you were showrunner running a show, you want an incredibly — let’s say you have eight writers on your writing staff. You want the absolute best writers you can find. I completely agree with you. You’re looking for quality. But you also want writers who bring different experience to the table. Ideally you don’t want like three writers from Brown who just graduated three years ago. You want people who sort of represent a range of experiences and who look kind of like America, who look kind of like the world, who look kind of like the cast of your show.

And so with those things in mind, the most qualified candidate isn’t necessarily the candidate who had the best writing sample. It’s the candidate who’s going to bring something into that room that another candidate can’t bring. And that’s why I think you end up sort of going for the diverse writer sometimes, even if script to script you might say like, well, the other one is a little bit better writer, you might say this is the reason why I’m hiring that person.

Or, in the case of a writer’s assistant, you’re not even really looking at a script. You’re looking at this is a chance to bring this person into the room and hopefully get the benefit of some of their experience. And that’s why I think you’re going to go for — even if like there wasn’t an official mandate saying we want a diverse candidate for these entry level spots, I think you’re going to — you may steer yourself towards that because, look, if you want a diverse staff and you would love to have — you’re going to have a hard time finding a Pacific Islander Co-EP because there just aren’t that many.

But you might be able to find that kind of person in a writer’s assistant, or a staff writer. And comparing two people, you might pick that person because that’s a chance to bring that person and that voice into the room.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is all correct. And the point of this gear-grinding, I think that’s an apt analogy, is to hopefully avoid gear-grinding in the future. In the meantime, somebody like Anonymous is at an individual basis sitting there going how is this fair for me? And it’s not.

**John:** It’s not.

**Craig:** It’s not.

**John:** And it’s not fair for him. It’s not fair for him in the sense of I’m trying to get this entry level writer’s assistant job, and I’m not getting this. And so I think what Anonymous needs to do is also take a step back and look at like, okay, have I had any advantages going into this situation that I’m not fully recognizing or addressing?

And so he may have social connections that would have sort of gotten him that job naturally kind of anyway, so like a college connection, alumni, his roommate is friends with this roommate who is friends with this roommate. That kind of stuff. You’re at a bit of an advantage I think in Hollywood coming from those social connections as a white person.

He might have had economic advantages. And so one of the things I hear a lot from people who are going after these sort of entry level jobs is like, oh, well they had these great unpaid internships. Well, you can only sort of take an unpaid internship if you can afford to take an unpaid internship. And so that’s an advantage that Anonymous might have had that he doesn’t sort of realized he had.

And, finally, there’s just geographic advantages. If you live in LA or in New York, you had more chances to sort of go in after those things than a person who is coming in from Chicago or someplace else. And so there may be a reason why they’re going after that writer who — or writer’s assistant who is from someplace else because, well, that’s a chance. Or, an international writer, or somebody who came from a different country because that’s a chance to get that experience in there.

**Craig:** All of that is true. Now, it may also be that Anonymous is a bit like I was when I started out. Even though I went to a pretty fancy college, I didn’t have any social connections in Los Angeles. Alumni were of no help. [laughs] And there was no college anything, I mean, you know, we’ve told the story. I mean, I basically got a job because I went to a temp agency and typed.

And my family didn’t have money. And I was living on the opposite side of the country from the city I wanted to be in. So, it would have been really frustrating and upsetting to me personally if somebody said to me, “You are the best candidate for this job. However, I cannot hire you because you’re white.”

Now, with that said, the only real advice I can offer Anonymous on this is this, and it’s the same advice that I remember talking to a writer. He’s black and it was about four or five years ago. And he was just saying, “I’m so tired of these moments that I encounter.” That it’s not like overt white-sheet racism, but it’s racism. And it’s just exhausting. And the advice I gave him is the same advice I’m going to give you, Anonymous. It’s happening. You are not in control of what is happening. Stay focused on what you are in control of, which is you and your work.

So, the world around you will continue to revolve in a way that is not fair. And while other people attempt to make adjustments to make it fair, or not, or make it worse, I don’t know, you may go ahead and fight for your rights as you wish. But when it comes to work, stay focused on what you control. The better you get, the more persistent you are, the harder and harder it will be for people to deny you.

**John:** So as I talk to young white male writers who are facing this, the ones who have had success more recently had been basically creating their own stuff. And so if you write a show, write a pilot that people want to make, well, congratulations. You’re now a TV writer because you wrote something that’s going into production.

And so they’re basically skipping the step of being the young staff writer and trying to get that entry level job. The other thing I would say is that I think Craig is exactly right in both I think you can acknowledge your frustration and look at it, and then you just have to kind of set it aside because dwelling on it is not going to improve the situation. And so trying to label it, or I’ve heard this term thrown around, the “white guy tax,” basically it gets more expensive to hire a white guy for something, that’s not going to help you or anybody. So just don’t think that way.

Instead, think about sort of what you can do, how you can distinguish yourself. To what degree you are offering a diverse voice in one of those rooms can be useful. When I had Aline and Rachel on for the episode two episodes ago, they were talking about they had a diverse staff and talking about sort of different racial things. Like, “We have a guy from the Midwest.” And that got a laugh in the room, but Aline was serious when she said that. She needed people who were not just from the coasts. Who were not just this one thing.

And having from different backgrounds really helps. And so there may be something about your specific background, you specific experience, things you’ve done that are useful. And so Anonymous singles out like, oh, a soldier got it. It’s like, well yes, a soldier is an interesting different experience. And so if you have something like that in your tool belt, don’t be afraid to use that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll tell you, and I’ll say this to anybody. I don’t care what your identity is, or how you identify. In the end, no matter what a system attempts to do, in the end talent will win out. So, if you are at home, and you are Latina, and you are feeling ignored by a system that seems with a deck that is stacked against you, your talent I believe will win out. And if you are 22-year-old white kid who is headed out here and is getting doors slammed in his face because you’re not diverse, talent will win out.

Keep your eyes on your own paper, I guess, is the way I would put it.

**John:** Yeah. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to insert yourself into a system that is not ready to accept you. And I think ten years ago, feature screenwriters were in a similar situation where there was a whole generation of young feature screenwriters coming in, and there just were not jobs because we stopped making a lot of features.

And so those screenwriters could have complained, and some did complain. It’s like, well where are the jobs? There used to be like young screenwriters used to get these jobs. And the smart ones recognize like, you know what, that door has kind of closed. And they started finding other ways to get work. So, they started working in TV.

And now if you’re this guy here, and it’s hard to get started in TV, well look for the thing that’s not hard to get started in. And so that may be the next industry, the next wave, the next thing that is just looking for great writers and hasn’t even really kind of thought about sort of how to diversify it. Go after that, but don’t beat yourself up about someone not letting you have this one job you think you should have.

**Craig:** Holler.

**John:** Cool. All right. Next question comes from Ben. Ben writes, “I’ve had two low budget indie movies produced. Made the Nichols finals. And landed my first two studio jobs in quick succession.” Congratulations, Ben.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sounds like — is this a white guy, do you think? I mean, what’s going on here?

**John:** “With those two projects moving in the right direction, and two new ones on the horizon, I find myself faced with a different kind of challenge. I’m a pretty fast writer and comfortable juggling multiple projects at once, but my biggest question at this point in my career has to do with managing steps. If I submit my first draft and the studio starts hunting for a director, I want to take another job. But what happens if I’m in the middle of job two when job one calls and wants its first rewrite? The last thing I want to do is overcommit and piss people off. But I can’t let great opportunities pass me by just because I’m sitting around, waiting for the next step on a prior job.

“From two guys who juggle a lot of studio projects, how do you handle this?”

**Craig:** Well, carefully. This problem is a wonderful problem to have.

**John:** Yeah. High class problems.

**Craig:** High class problem indeed. But nonetheless, it is probably the thing that comes up the most when I’m talking with writers who are in similar situations. This is the big agita of our lives. When there is more demand for your work than your ability to supply to supply it, then these things happen. What I find in general is this: everybody understands that sooner or later the shoe will be on the other foot. If I’m taking a job and working on one thing while I’m supposed to be working on your thing, that’s no Bueno.

But, if I take your job and I do it, and I’m successful at it, and I leave and I start another one, and then you come back and say, “Guess what? Everything is going great. We need some more work.” And I say, all right, I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m finished with this. Give me a couple of weeks, or whatever time I need, they can’t really get angry at you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If they try, it’s all too easy to just say what I’ve said so many times over the last 20 years. It should be like a little thing I could press a button. You wouldn’t want me to do this to you. I’m on your thing. You wouldn’t want me to just drop it and walk away. And they always seem to get it when you put it that way.

**John:** Yeah. Everything is always a huge rush and priority when it’s their thing. And when you’re waiting for them to read something or do something, there’s no hurry on their side.

So, when you are making a contract to write a movie, you’re signing a deal, and there’s generally multiple steps. Back in the golden days when Craig and I were starting, those steps were guaranteed steps. And so you would have a first draft. You would have a rewrite. You might have a second rewrite. You might have a polish. And there were reading periods between those steps. And I remember very fondly and vividly off of one of my first writing jobs, this if for How to Eat Fried Worms, I had like three guaranteed steps. And so I figured out I could make my little spreadsheet of like I will turn this in then, and there will be a reading period on this. And I could count on that money coming in because those were guaranteed steps. And that was a golden time.

That doesn’t exist anymore. So, I will bet you that Ben is taking a one-step deal on these projects. And so he is writing his little pen to the nib, and turning it in, and hopefully they’re loving it and they’re going after a director. When that director signs on, that will be the next step. But Ben has no way of knowing whether that next step is ever going to happen. So Ben has to be looking for that next job.

So he gets that next job, he’s working on that, and they finally come back to him and say like, okay, now we need you to sit down with the director. But he’s busy doing other stuff. In reality, what you do is you kind of make it work. And you take the meetings, you start figuring out how to do that stuff, and then you try to finish up job number two so that the minute you hand that in, like later that afternoon you’re working on that next thing.

And that is the reality. And it’s because I think we work in a draft-based business rather than a time-based business that it gets so uncomfortable. If we were working just on a clock, like when I’m doing a weekly, it’s like, you know what, that was turned in. That’s done. And I can walk away clean. That never happens in normal draft set mode of business.

**Craig:** Yeah. Make it work is pretty much what you got to do here, Ben. You will have some late nights. You’re going to have some weeks. I mean, I’m too old to work to the extent where I go, oh my god, I am exhausted. But it happens all the time.

**John:** Larry Kasdan at lunch said like, “How do you guys juggle multiple things at once?” Which seemed like a bizarre question from him. Because like how could he not have been this his entire life? And so we will tell you, Ben, what we told Larry Kasdan is you just make it work.

**Craig:** You make it work.

The one thing you got to be aware of is that on these one steps they have an option almost always for a second one, and they have a certain amount of time in which to exercise that option. But, this question of who is in first position and who is in second position, at some point your agent is going to litigate all this for you.

Let your agent kind of handle this, right? She knows what you’ve got. She has all of your contracts. She has all of your deals. She also knows that if you’re this busy, it’s good news. Nobody gets angry at somebody they don’t want. They only get angry at you because they do want you. That’s the best kind of angry at you and it doesn’t last. Because they know that if they get too angry and they throw a real tantrum, A, they’re not going to get good work out of you. And, B, that’s the last they’re going to see of you. And this is what your agent can do. This is why — this is why agents exist. If we didn’t this kind of buffer, my god, we’d all save the 10%.

**John:** Yeah. My last final rant is that if studios would just stop making one-step deals, a lot of this would be a lot simpler. Because Ben would not have had to sort of go after that second job, or that third job right the minute he turns in the script.

**Craig:** We’ve said this — when we go and meet with the heads of the studios. Billy Ray, he always says, “These people are looking for their next job the day you hire them for your job.” Because they have to. Because they have to. And that’s a problem for everybody.

**John:** Craig, why don’t you take the next question?

**Craig:** Right. Andrew, the delivery guy, writes, “I’m about 30 podcasts out from your first live taping in Austin. In the event you haven’t done a follow-up episode regarding it, and now that many years have passed, have your opinions regarding the Black List evolved any? Is it still a positive, viable inlet for new writers? Or has it perhaps succumbed to the gravity of financial immorality?”

**John:** Oh, I like that. I like that terminology.

**Craig:** The gravity of financial immorality. There’s got to be something other than those two options, right John?

**John:** [laughs] I think we’ll find a middle ground here. So, Andrew is not referring to the NBC show starring James Spader, he’s referring to the Black List, which is a creation of Franklin Leonard who is a friend of both of ours.

And so Franklin came to the live show in Austin — I think our first live show — and talked about the launching of the Black List as a paid service, which is where writers pay money to submit their scripts. They get professional coverage. And then industry professionals can download those scripts and read them. And so that was a new thing that Franklin was doing. Confusingly, I still think it’s confusing, Franklin also runs the Black List which is the annual assessment of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood, which is gathered together from the hive mind groupthink of all the top executives in Hollywood.

I’m sure Andrew is talking about the paid service Black List.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And when we talked about in Austin, Franklin was very nervous that Craig would hate it. And I think your exact quote was, “I don’t hate this,” maybe.

**Craig:** Right. It was I won’t attack it.

**John:** Oh yeah, you won’t attack it. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I won’t attack it.

**John:** And since then we have not attacked it. And we’ve brought it up a couple times on the show saying like, you know, as people asked for like what should I do next, we will send people to that, or to the Austin Film Festival, you know, screenwriting competition saying that might be a check for whether you are a good writer or not. Because you just may not know.

But we’ve come short of like fully endorsing it, because we don’t have personal experience with success or failure or how it all feels and fits to our lives.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we don’t really endorse anything to be honest with you, because that’s not what we do. But the Black List is, there are a lot of services that are like this. It is the only one I think that has the proximity to actual legitimate decision makers that’s required for it to be viable.

That doesn’t mean that an enormous amount of people are coming out of the service with gigs. But then again, an enormous amount of people will never come out of any pool of people with gigs, because there are very few jobs and there’s an enormous amount of competition.

What I can say about the Black List is that I know a lot of the people that are on the reading side of it, and they’re real. It’s not like these ridiculous pitch fests where some C-level production entity is sending their third assistant’s intern to hear your pitch. And it’s baloney, right? I mean, so much of that is just nonsense.

It’s fairly affordable. It doesn’t seem like they’re gouging you price wise. And it seems also like you would be able to figure out within a month or two if it were something that kind of might help you or not. So, is it a positive, viable inlet for new writers? I’m going to say yeah, or at least it’s not a bad one. You know?

**John:** I think the “not a bad one” is where I would land, too. If I were envisioning a service that does what Black List does, it’s kind of the best version of it. I’ve seen so many terrible scammy versions of it. And it’s like Franklin is actually smart enough to create like the good version of it. The good version of it is not perfect. And one of the things I admire about Franklin is whenever there’s like criticism of it, he will go right to where the source of the criticism is and like fully engage, be it on Reddit or wherever. And he will explain sort of what they do, what’s been working well, what’s not been working well.

And he’s both smart and responsive. And so that leads me to believe that probably the organization is run in a smart and responsive way. So, again, I’m short of endorsing it, but I feel like it’s the best version of that kind of idea I’ve seen.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I think that Franklin is a legitimately decent man. And he is legitimately connected to our business. He is close with a lot of agents and a lot of producers and a lot of managers and a lot of studio executives.

And, I mean, you and I, we’re not hanging out with some random dude that runs a baloney Scriptapalooza three times a year in Tulsa. We don’t do that. So, he’s a legitimate guy, and also he’s a decent guy. Those two things often don’t overlap, so it’s nice that they do for Franklin. So, certainly I can say that, no, I don’t think anything Franklin Leonard will ever do is in danger of succumbing to the gravity of financial immorality. He’s a very moral person actually.

**John:** Here’s one thing I will say. Stuart is friends with a lot of development executives, and we were talking about the Black List and Stuart relays that his friends will say in theory, they could be going on the Black List and looking at the highest rated scripts, and reading them and finding great new writers. That in reality their reading lists are so packed anyway with the stuff that they’re being assigned to read by their bosses that other colleagues are telling them to read, that they’re not going on the site to find those scripts.

And so that fantasy of, you know, you will discover these great writers, or that these industry professionals are going there to look for the next great writers, from Stuart’s limited development experience and his friends, doesn’t seem to be happening as much.

**Craig:** I would not be surprised if the real notice only comes when you are in the very, very, very, very top of the distribution pool of however they rank things. You know, essentially there’s like a — you should read this script. Really? On Black List. What did it get? It’s a 9.7 after 14 reviews. Oh, yeah, okay. That one I will read. People only read things because they’re frightened somebody else is going to read it and turn it into a hit. None of those people read things for any positive reason. They’re just scared to death that they’re going to be hammered over the head with it when somebody else reads it.

**John:** I worked for a year as a reader at TriStar. And I covered a hundred scripts, so I wrote full coverage on stuff. And of those things, I recommended exactly one thing. I recommended two things. And both times I got called to the mat for wasting people’s time recommending these things that they wouldn’t want to make.

So, it’s — Franklin is doing the Lord’s work trying to write up coverage and get people to really engage on material.

**Craig:** Indeed. We have one last question here. Should we do it?

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** All right. JD writes, “I have a question.” Well, that’s convenient, JD. “I have a question about how you go about getting text transcriptions of the Scriptnotes podcast. Do you farm it out to a transcription company or do you use some super advanced speech to text software? I’m curious because I have a lot of interview footage to transcribe and yours are always pretty spot on.”

John, how do we do that? Because god knows I don’t know.

**John:** So, Stuart does it. And so Stuart farms it out to a guy. And for all we know that guy is farming it out to a guy. So it’s sort of a black box. What happens is we’re recording this on a Friday. Stuart will take the file and he will send it to the transcription guy, who often before the episode actually is out he’s already started transcribing that. And so that transcript comes back to Stuart. Then Stuart has to do a lot of work manually by hand just fixing things.

And so the transcription guys have been smart about, they’re starting to recognize names of things, like how we like stuff to appear. But Stuart still has to do a lot of work. And it’s hours of his week doing that. That’s the job of the producer.

**Craig:** I would have thought that it was just Stuart alone in some kind of spider hole, underneath your house, little bits of fish bones around him as he poses Gollum-like over his laptop, his big moon eyes staring at it as he types, types away.

**John:** There’s a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t know whether any of this is being done programmatically, or if it’s all people typing, or if it’s in India. I don’t know. I kind of don’t want to know. I hope it’s not child labor.

**Craig:** I guarantee you it’s an entire village of nothing but children.

**John:** Indeed. But maybe they’re learning a lot about screenwriting.

**Craig:** You know what they’re learning. They’re learning that if they get arthritis at the age of eight, they’re tossed down a well.

**John:** Before we get on to Three Page Challenges, I have one last note, and this is sort of a frustration that I have not singled out, but I’m going to single it out now. So, in JD’s email he writes Scriptnotes, but he capitalizes the N in Scriptnotes.

Let’s not do that. That’s not how the actual word should be. I think people do that because the feature in Final Draft for Scriptnotes is capitalized, has that camel case where they capitalize the N. I just hate it.

So, if you’re a fan of Scriptnotes and you’re writing in, or you’re seeing it anywhere, or you’re tweeting about it, it’s just capitalize the S and nothing else. Or don’t capitalize anything. That’s fine, too. The camel casing of the N just drives me crazy.

**Craig:** That’s called camel casing?

**John:** It’s camel casing. It’s from programming, which is where you join two words together. Hashtags do it a lot, too.

**Craig:** Because it’s like a camel’s hump in the middle of the word?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you people out there, I don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** Craig was the guy who thought up the title of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** I did. That’s true. I did. I did. As far as I’m concerned, camel case the hell out of it.

**John:** He did exactly one thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. [laughs] Exactly one thing.

**John:** All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenges. Our first Three Page Challenge is from Bryan Koo. It’s called Korea Town. It is a pilot. The pilot’s title is Ma Vlast. I don’t know what that means after three pages. But that’s what it is.

As always, if you would like to read along with us, you can find PDFs of these Three Page Challenges on the show notes, so just click through and you can see all of the PDFs for these writers that we are about to read. I will attempt to summarize this. So, in the teaser we hear the deafening noise of a helicopter flying over the streets of Los Angeles. It’s in flames. A spotlight sweeping. We see a middle-aged Asian guy with a fishing hat and rifle. This is Lee Chang-Soo, 55. He shoots the rifle. A black kid drops dead.

We hear radio saying that we are in the middle of the LA riots. This is 1992. We see Chang-Soo slide the bolt in his rifle, getting ready to shoot again. And then a Molotov Cocktail is thrown in a parabolic arc through a building. Not quite clear what connects to what.

We are inside a convenience store. We see Michael Lee, 30. He’s got a handgun. He is scanning the aisles. He’s looking for Benson. The window shatters. Red lights reflecting on the remaining windows and then bam, bam. Police open fire. And then we tilt up and reveal Family Mart, which is sort of the place that we’re at. That’s the end of the teaser. Start of Act 1. Establishing shots. Everything is beautiful in Los Angeles. We see the pier. Beverly Hills. The Hollywood Sign. And then we’re in Korea Town. So, some time spent setting up what Korea Town feels like. By the way, this is where I’m recording this podcast. I live at Korea Town, so it’s fun to see this stuff.

We see the same guy, Michael Lee, from the start. He is jogging past a homeless man. He meets up with Hannah, his I believe wife. And they’re having a little bit of dialogue before he goes into the Family Mart. And that is the end our page three.

**Craig:** I have a theory.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** My theory is that the harder it is for us to summarize these things, the worse they are. I could see you suffering and struggling trying to summarize here, because this is a very choppy three pages. I have multiple issues, Bryan, but I’m going to start with sort of the overarching one. And then we’ll get into some granular stuff.

I’ve seen every single in this before about 200 times. It is so generic. It’s even a generic portrayal of the LA Riot. We begin with what is kind of an iconic image from the LA Riots, Korean men standing on the roofs of their shops, defending their property. I’m immediately disoriented because I see this Asian man up there and, bang, a black kid drops dead.

Where is this black kid?

**John:** That was my first note, too. The geography in this first thing was really confusing. I also got confused, is the convenience store, is that a direct cut? Are we at the same place? I don’t know where I am.

**Craig:** Precisely. It doesn’t appear to be the same place or time, because it’s not a continuous or same time, it’s night. So, I usually think we’re in a different spot. You have a radio announcer coming in the middle of all this action. So, that seems weird. If you’re going to have a radio playing behind something, it’s got to be right up front, otherwise you’re going to hear somebody just suddenly out of nowhere a radio starts.

It seems like a rioter throws a Molotov Cocktail, which flies in a parabolic arc and crash, interior convenience store, broken glass showers the younger Asian man. We have a Molotov Cocktail. That’s not just a bottle. That’s a bottle of gasoline and a rag that’s on fire. So, is there now fire in the store? You don’t seem to say.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** We meet this character, Michael Lee, black suit and a handgun aimed with highly trained accuracy. At what?

**John:** I didn’t have a picture of sort of who this guy was, and I kept thinking suit. Is it like a Tarantino kind of black suit and gun, or is it military, is he special ops? I just didn’t know what I was seeing there.

**Craig:** I agree. And here he has the physical description of him is “fierce eyes with one eyebrow bisected by a deep scar.” Which, again, this stuff feels like kind of honestly a lot of these descriptions feel like video game kind of stuff from 15 years ago, not from now. So, he finds — he’s yelling for Benson. And he finds Benson. Benson is a skinny Asian boy, hugging his knees, shaking in fear and tears, which is a bit over the top unless, you know, he’s special needs or something.

He’s 18 years old. He finds him and then yells his name at him again. Benson! Which, I don’t understand, unless he didn’t find him and then we’re cutting to behind the counter and we’re hearing him off-screen saying, “Benson.”

Then he turns to the window. A window shatters. We see red lights. Bam. Bam. It shatters. To police open fire. Are the police shooting at him? What’s happening? Ugh. Very difficult.

**John:** I’m frustrated with you, too. So, a few little word things to sort of get to and sort of some formatting things. So, going back to his description of Michael Lee, “Scans the dark abandoned store with fierce eyes with one eyebrow bisected by a deep scar.” The two withs — with fierce eyes, with one — like you got to — don’t give me two with clauses there. That didn’t help you there.

“Chang-Soo calmly slides the bolt on his rifle despite the tremor in his hand.” Well, he’s calmly — is calm but has a tremor?

**Craig:** That means early onset Parkinson’s. That doesn’t mean emotion.

**John:** Yeah. It’s strange to me. Also, Bryan has the more and continueds turned on for — a Final Draft thing, so there’s like Continued at the bottom of the first page and at the top of the second page. Don’t do that. That feature is useful when you are turning in a production draft and there could be broken pages, and A/B pages. Don’t use this for now, because it’s just getting in the way of stuff. You don’t need any of those continueds.

**Craig:** And similarly, I think, you want to do page breaks when you end your teasers and begin your acts, right?

**John:** 100%. I think we can probably stop here. This didn’t work for me. And so here’s what I will say about the idea of this is that a 1992 set show from the perspective of a Korean family going through the riots, that could be great. I think that is actually a potentially really interesting pilot. In some ways, the same reason why I liked Amanda’s thing being period is that it is timeless because it’s always going to be 1992 in that pilot. So, I think this could be a good sample if the writing was good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. The only advice I’ll give you, Bryan, but it’s big advice is everything counts. Every word counts. Every detail counts. If you put it on the page, you got to mean it. You’ve got to know exactly what it is. And you got to make me want to know what it is. And you’ve got to make me understand it. This just — it was a bit of a muddle. Bit of a muddle.

All right. Well, I go ahead and summarize the next one here. Let’s go with Open 24 Hours. Screenplay by Jamie Napoli. Story by Jamie Napoli and Joshua Paul Johnson. Okay.

So, we open on — by the way, we got a couple of Stuart specials here. Did you notice, by the way?

**John:** I did notice this.

**Craig:** The old Stuart and medias res. He loves it.

**John:** So we should explain what a Stuart Special is for new people. When something opens and opens with a teaser, and then it flashes back in time, that’s a Stuart Special. And it’s not that Stuart picks them, it’s just that so many of the things that people send in are Stuart Specials.

**Craig:** He picks them. He does.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe so.

**Craig:** Stuart Special. Okay, so our Stuart Special, Open 24 Hours. It begins outside of a diner in Bloomfield, New Jersey. The year is 1989. There is a crowd of police with their cars and a reporter is saying that tragedy struck at the Two Greek Brothers Diner. There was a deadly shootout.

And a reporter interviews a man named Ed, who is the night manager, or former night manager. And the reporter says he witnessed tonight’s bloodshed. Ed, tell us what you saw. But before Ed can say anything, there is an explosion from within the diner. And that little Stuart Special ends with the neon sign of the diner, Two Greek Brothers Diner, Open 24 Hours.

Then we go to morning and this is six months earlier. And we’re hearing Paulie. And Paulie is talking about how basically the glory days of the diner, how when he was 10 the governor of New Jersey came by and he called Two Greek Brothers a Jersey treasure. No one is saying that anymore. And it appears that he’s rehearsing a little bit of a speech to somebody. We don’t know who.

And then a waiter, Nico, comes in. And says, “Did you tell Ed he could take over staff training?” Paulie goes out onto the floor of the restaurant and he sees that Ed is with some new hires, including Kourtney, the girl next door, and Timmy, a busboy in training. And Paulie has a little bit of an argument with Ed, takes over the training. Ed is upset and walks away.

**John:** Yep. I loved these pages. I just loved them. And so I’m going to mostly focus on the things that I thought were great and a few little things to cut or move around. But I dug them. And we talk about specificity all the time, but I like the specificity of this. I liked Paulie a lot. I got a little confused who he was talking to at the start, but I liked his voice a lot. I loved Ed. You know, from the very start like when we first meet Ed, is like, “Do you still want me to talk?” Like after the explosion. Or like right before the explosion. It’s just — all of the details felt really right. And I could totally see it. And that’s where it really comes down to.

I could hear the voices. I could see it. I felt like, oh, I get what I’m going to experience if I were to watch this on a screen. It felt sort of lived in and interesting and real. On page three, the very sort of passive-aggressive fight between Paulie and Ed here about who’s going to give the instruction is great.

There’s a moment on page three, just a parenthetical. So, Ed says, “Your uncle doesn’t mind — ”

Paulie, in parenthesis, touching Ed’s elbow, “It’s not your job.” The touching the elbow is such a great sort of like, it’s a passive mood where you’re not really putting your hands on somebody, but you’re just trying to steer them away. I really thought it was just a very strong batch of pages.

**Craig:** It was. They were very well-written. I enjoyed Ed. I could see Ed in my head. I liked the descriptions of people. “Ed, bone-thin and fidgety. Ed is the sort of guy co-workers smile at in case he’s planning a shooting spree. He stares unblinkingly into the camera lens.”

This is exactly the kind of thing that I think is legal, but creative, right?

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** That’s something an actor can do.

**John:** But look at his name. Ed Nissirios. It’s just so great. It’s well-picked.

**Craig:** Yeah. And similarly Kourtney, who is there for the waitress job. “The girl-next-door, if you happen to own property on the Jersey Shore. Big hair, blue eye shadow, an FU expression,” he says the whole thing. I’m just trying to keep it clean here. “An FU expression she wears like armor…And she’s just Paulie’s type.”

All playable. Like doable. And you know me, hair and makeup. That’s my big thing.

**John:** Totally playable. Yep.

**Craig:** So, here are the only things I — my only suggestions. One small and one big one. Small one. You have Paulie as a pre-lap. That’s not really a pre-lap. Pre-laps are — I mean, it kind of is.

**John:** I think it’s pre-lap. It’s a long pre-lap.

**Craig:** It’s a long pre-lap. Yeah.

**John:** I circled that, too. It is technically a pre-lap, because it is the dialogue he’s speaking in the next scene. But it’s a really long one.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s just easy to do off-screen and connect it up. I think it might be — if the idea here is that he is practicing a speech for somebody, help us just a little bit. I had to read it a couple times to make that inference.

For instance, on the line, “I got a dream. A dream… nah, that’s too much.” Even if there were parenthesis, you know, (reconsiders), or something just so I understood. Because at first I thought that’s what he was saying. I thought maybe you were going to reveal that he was talking to somebody. And then you didn’t. So, that’s the small thing.

Here’s the big thing. If this were a TV show, I would think ending with the diner going Ka-Boom would be a decent end to the Stuart Special. But it’s a movie. If you’re going to do this in a movie, Stuart Specials in movies are — they’re bigger than that.

**John:** I think they are bigger than that. Bigger not just in the sense of explosion, but more story beat has to happen there.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because right now it’s not really happening.

**Craig:** No, it’s got to be really — like John Wick begins with a Stuart Special. And a car just drives in, smashes into a wall. Keanu Reeves gets out. He’s bleeding. He’s dying. And he starts to die. That’s okay. You can start a movie that way. This could be a gas fire. It’s just not enough. It’s not enough to make me go, Whoa!

**John:** I would cut the first reporter voiceover. I feel like we can get that — it’s actually stronger without it. We get the information we need before that. So, get rid of the “Tragedy struck at Bloomfield’s own Two Greek Brothers Diner.” No, don’t tell us that there was a shoot-out. Let’s get into it.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** It’s more suspenseful. And then you get a little more moment with Ed and the reporter, or just like the reporter getting set up, or trying to get the angle. But it’s going to be great. So, well done, Jamie. And I should also single out that the story is by Jamie Napoli and Joshua Paul Johnson. So, to whatever degree Joshua Paul Johnson helped out there, well done.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** All right. Our final Three Page Challenge comes from Suzanna Christopher. And it is called iDo. And the I is lower case and the D is upper case.

**Craig:** Camel.

**John:** It’s camel case, in fact.

**Craig:** Camel case.

**John:** Just like the iPhone, and that is intentional because the subtitle for this is a Silicon Valley Rom.com.

As we get into it, Heather, who is beautifully unaware of her own beauty…oh.

**Craig:** There we go.

**John:** So, most of us is a voiceover. So, Heather is giving her voiceover and explaining “Why do I deserve the Pitkins Grant. Well, I’m so glad you asked.” And so we see Heather as she is getting up. She’s wearing two sweaters, a sweatshirt, and years of therapy. We see her boyfriend. Their cramped little apartment. And then she’s going out for this interview.

And so she lives in East Palo Alto, which is adjacent to Silicon Valley if people don’t know the geography there. Sort of a rundown neighborhood. She’s got a helmet. She’s on a bike with a safety flag. She bikes over the 101 Freeway. At the Stanford Quad she goes in for this interview and she’s describing what the app is that she’s trying to build, or what the system is she’s trying to build, which is basically a quick test to figure out whether two people should get married. Whether they’re going to be compatible for the long haul. “I promise nothing less than to eradicate divorce in our time,” a sort of bold thesis.

The trustees meeting, where she’s trying to get this grant. There’s one trustee who suddenly wakes up in the middle of it. She wants to go and give this speech that we’ve heard her practicing. They don’t care about that. They only care about sort of the paperwork. And we end on a vegan mushroom joke, that looks like a fecal sample.

**Craig:** John, do you think I’m beautifully unaware of my own beauty?

**John:** You are beautiful as James Blunt would want to point out in a special way.

**Craig:** I am beautifully unaware of my lack of beauty.

So, here’s the thing. My general feeling about these pages, Suzanne, is that there’s too much going on. So much going on, I didn’t know where to look, and I didn’t know what to think. You lost a sense of perspective for me. And I lost my sense of perspective as I read because she was saying a million things, and I was looking at a million things. And they were all different.

So, on page one, she is talking about, well, she won’t tell us what she’s talking about. So, part is we’re listening and trying to figure out where is this going. She wants a grant. Imagine a world where you could save $50 billion a year in legal fees? Uh, okay. I wonder how that’s going to happen.

$22 billion in psychiatry bills. Da-da-da end. Da-da-da. All this. Imagine all these things. Yeah, okay. What is it for? Tell me, tell me.

While that’s all going on in voiceover, I see an alarm clock powered by potatoes. I see a woman waking up with two sweaters and a sweatshirt on. I see a boyfriend with a macramé sleep mask. I see a cramped room that looks like a meth lab, including oscilloscopes and back issues of Vegan World. I see what might be a real Picasso on the wall. I see her walk out of her apartment and there’s an enormous image of Garfield the Cat with a 10-foot-long penis. I see her unlock her 10-speed bike with three locks. That’s all one page. All of what I just said.

What am I looking at? What am I thinking? I don’t know. [laughs]

**John:** So, if I had all of those visuals without the voiceover, I might be able to draw a thread about sort of who she is. And it’s hitting me pretty hard, but I might be able to follow that thread. But her voiceover, every time I’m reading the voiceover I’m like, well, that’s a very different thing you’re giving me there. So, I’m having a hard time balancing the two things together. And I didn’t understand that she was practicing the speech at the very start. I found it weird that the dialogue was in italics. And I see kind of what she was trying to go for, but the italics were not helping me there at all.

I felt like there’s a false analogy on page two. She says, “But instead of measuring sexually transmitted diseases… My test will predict with 100% accuracy if two people will suffer romantically-transmitted diseases. Like boredom. Isolation. Infidelity. Diseases that 52.3% of couples catch during their failed marriages. In short…” It didn’t feel — that logic didn’t feel like the logic I heard three sentences before. So, it was tough.

I think you either need to show me the character, or you need to establish the premise, but trying to do both at the same time didn’t work for me.

**Craig:** I agree. It was all over the place. I didn’t find her — first of all, when she’s doing this voiceover, we don’t know what she’s doing because we can’t see her. So, I don’t know if she’s talking to someone. I don’t know if she’s practicing. I don’t know.

On page two, I agree with you, that her pitch actually wasn’t particularly compelling. The fact is, it’s an interesting thing, if it’s true, and I feel like this is inspired a little bit like that chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, where a marital expert got to just say like, “Oh, after 20 years of this, two people walk in a room and I go, no chance, they’re done.”

So, it’s an interesting point, but I don’t feel this character has any actual passion for her point at all. She seems glib, and it’s not helped by the fact that now on page two, I honestly don’t know what’s going on, because what Suzanna gives us here is now a sort of pushed reality/quasi dream sequence where Heather is being joined on her bike with other — she’s riding a bike, then other people showing up. We don’t understand why.

She gets off her bike and then snaps her bike in half over her knee. The crowd goes wild. What?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s happening? I understand that that’s not real, but I don’t know why it’s there.

**John:** Yeah. When we had Tess Morris on the show, she loves romantic comedies. And so a thing I think she would like about this is on page two she’s stating the premise very boldly and directly. “I promise nothing less than to eradicate divorce in our time.” That’s a bold premise. And so I do like that she’s trying to get to that place. And you’re establishing a character who sets that as her objective at the start. And then you can see like, okay, well how is she going to beat and not meet that objective?

Unfortunately the details about the character I learned around her didn’t feel like the person who actually had that thesis, at least what I saw on those three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s something that you hear all the time when you’re writing comedy, any comedy, a rom-com or anything. And that’s grounded, grounded, grounded. Everybody wants it to be grounded, unless it’s supposed to be a spoof, or a parody, or something that’s ridiculous.

So, you want to ground this character somehow. The fact that she’s pitching this thing, and she also has poop appearing mushroom gum, she feels like someone’s friend to me. She feels like there’s this other unseen character named Anne and Heather is like the problem — Anne is doing this and Heather is like her wacky assistant. You know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who makes mushroom gum and drinks out of beakers and has crazy — I know she didn’t drink out of a beaker in this, I’m just imagining. Because now in my mind I’m like, oh, actually Heather is a cool crazy assistant character. There is a great idea for a rom-com where somebody actually comes up with something they believe works that predicts whether or not two people who have just met will make it. And she meets somebody and she does the test and it comes out no.

That is so rich for — because there’s a great theme there. Do you try, do you fall in love if you know? Because that echoes to me what life is. I mean, look, you and I are both married. We both know sooner or later, either we’re going to die first, or they’re going to die first. It doesn’t end well. Ever. And we still do it.

And so that’s part of the human condition. It’s a fascinating idea. And obviously that’s, I assume, that’s got to be what she’s going to be planning here. But these three pages need Ritalin. Or something. Guanfacine.

**John:** I agree. I think the character needs some focus, but the overall like how we’re presenting the idea, and is this even the right character to present this idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess the thing is, Suzanna, there’s so much potential for this premise to be meaningful and interesting, that I think you have — you’re not treating it with what it deserves.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. All right.

**John:** Cool. I want to thank all three of our writers for sending in their scripts and being so brave. And congratulations on making it through Stuart’s filter, because Stuart reads everything that people send in, and he deserves a round of applause for doing all that.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** If you have three pages you would like to send in for us to look at in a future episode, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, and there’s instructions there for how you send in stuff. You don’t email it. You actually attach it to a form and you sign the little form that says it’s okay for me to include this stuff.

And part of that is because we include these scripts not only with these episodes, so they’re attached to the show notes so you can read the PDFs, but we also stick them on the USB drives people buy, so when the nuclear bomb goes off, people will still have their copy of iDo to read.

**Craig:** And thank god for that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s important. It is time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is delightful. And so I’m going to ask Matthew to include this underneath my talking, because I will describe what this is and you will be moved back through time. So many of you probably were not even born when this aired, but these were fond memories from my childhood.

This is a YouTube clip from ABC’s promo for Still the One. So, each season as the networks debuted their new shows for television, they would do these promos that just talked about how great their network was. And they would use all their network stars in these promos. And ABC’s were fantastic, as were many of them. So, Ricardo Montalban shows up in this. This one that I’m going to include has a bunch of people in hot air balloons celebrating ABC’s great season to come.

So, having just witnessed another upfront season in television, I was brought back to nostalgia for the days when network TV was all the TV there was.

**Craig:** You know, this was my first job in Hollywood was working on these things.

**John:** Tell us about it.

**Craig:** In 1992, I was working at an ad agency that mostly did promos for CBS. And the big job that we had, and I was just, you know, this young kid who started as a clerk, and then worked my way up to copywriter, was the fall campaign for CBS. And so I went back and — this inspired me. I found it on YouTube. It’s called It’s All Right Here. CBS, It’s All Right Here.

And it’s horrendous in all ways. It’s just terrible from top to bottom. But, you know, a slice of its time. It’s bizarre. I mean, and I remember, by the way, I had the experience of going and shooting these people and meeting all of these television stars and shooting them just head-turning and laughing into camera. It’s the most ridiculous thing.

**John:** It’s great. So I want to thank Stylez White for singling out this video and a bunch of other ones, because it’s great because you see Hal Linden just like pops in all these different moments from Barney Miller. And I think what’s weird about them is you’re seeing these actors outside of the characters they’re supposed to be playing. And like those two people aren’t on the same show, and yet they’re interacting with each other. What’s going on?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And my young nine-year-old brain was just like mesmerized by it.

**Craig:** Well, that’s why, what was it, the Network Olympics? What did they call that thing?

**John:** Battle of the Network Stars. Was the best program that has ever been aired.

**Craig:** Because you’re like Gabe Kaplan is wrestling with David Hasselhoff? Okay, so my One Cool Thing is the most mundane thing of all time and I love it so much. Cast Iron Skillet.

So, I’ve become obsessed lately with my cast iron skillet.

**John:** That’s very good, Craig. So, you were the one who mocked me on the first live show for singling out a kitchen knife, but okay.

**Craig:** Listen, I don’t like it when you hold me accountable for the things I say and do. Okay?

**John:** [laughs] I totally understand. Yeah. We should live in a post-accountability age.

**Craig:** I am not accountable for anything other than what I’m doing right now. So, cast iron skillet. Do you have a cast iron skillet? Do you own one?

**John:** Do I not own a cast iron skillet. I have in the past. They’ve rusted.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course they have.

**John:** And I’ve moved on.

**Craig:** So this is the great — cast iron skillet is the most important piece of cookware you can have. It’s the best piece of cookware you can have. And the reason why is because, you know, they’re very heavy. I mean, they’re very dense. They maintain their heat completely. So, you have a regular pan, you throw a steak in there, the pan, its temperature probably drops in half right there that second. Cast iron, no. Stays the same because it’s so hot because it retains all the heat.

Problem with a cast iron pan that people think is, oh my god, it’s so hard to upkeep. It’s not. You just have to know what to do. You’ve got to season it. That means a little bit of oil. And then you get that oil really, really hot. You do that three or four times, the oil bonds with the metal and does something called polymerization. And it becomes essentially non-stick, but not because of Teflon coating, but because of just natural awesomeness.

If you have a cast iron skillet at home and it is rusty and nasty, quarter cup kosher salt, some paper towels, and a little elbow grease, you will scour it right off.

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** That’s great. So my experience with cast iron, and everything you said is absolutely true, and there’s a reason why chefs love them. I would have rust problems and I would always burn myself on them because I would think like, oh, that pan has been out of the oven for an hour, it should be cool. And, no, it’s still incredibly hot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Craig likes it hot.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig loves it hot. Cast iron hot.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. So, if you would like to write a question for me or for Craig, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. That’s the questions we answered today. Those long form questions. That’s where they go.

Short things are great on Twitter. Craig is really good at answering questions on Twitter. He’s done it a lot this week.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro comes from Paul Barlow. If you have an outro for us, you can write into that same address, ask@johnaugust.com, and send us a link. We have a bunch in the folder to use and they’re just great. So, you guys are so talented. Thank you very much for doing that.

You are probably listening to this in a podcast application on your iPhone or other Android device. But if you would go over to iTunes and leave us a review, that would be fantastic. Because iTunes, pretty much the only way people know to subscribe to stuff is when iTunes features us. And the more people who leave us a review or a rating or a wonderful comment, that helps iTunes notice that, oh that’s right, that’s a podcast we should feature. And it’s been about a year since they featured us. So, it would make me feel good.

**Craig:** It would make John feel good.

**John:** It would make me feel good. Craig, thank you very much for a fun time. And I look forward to playing Pandemic with you on Monday.

**Craig:** You got it. See you then. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [LGBT Fans Deserve Better](http://lgbtfansdeservebetter.com/)
* [The Screenwriter’s Vow of Air Vent Chastity](http://johnaugust.com/2006/air-vents-are-for-air)
* Scriptnotes, 60: [The Black List, and a stack of scenes](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), and [blcklst.com](https://blcklst.com/)
* Three Pages by [Bryan Koo](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BryanKoo.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Jamie Napoli](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JamieNapoli.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Suzanne Christopher](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SuzanneChristopher.pdf)
* [How to submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [ABC’s 1979 Still The One TV stars promo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHvW_8W1_m8) on YouTube
* [Lodge 12-inch cast iron skillet](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006JSUB/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon, and [thekitchn.com on cast iron care](http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-season-a-cast-iron-skillet-cleaning-lessons-from-the-kitchn-107614)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Paul B ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-one-with-the-austin-winner).

**Previously on Scriptnotes**

**Craig Mazin:** Zero.

**Amanda Morad:** Oh, that’s me.

**John August:** So, what this card says is John and Craig will read your script. If you would like to–

**Amanda:** Um, yes.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** And we’ll talk about it on the show and you will come on the show.

**Amanda:** Yes!

**Craig:** Great. Or, you could have a tee-shirt.

**Amanda:** I’m going to pick C.

**John:** All right. Well done.

**Craig:** C.

[Intro bloops]

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

**Craig:** My name is Craig Mazin?

**John:** And this is Episode 250 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program we will be talking with the winner from our live show in Austin. And looking at the script she sent in. We’ll also be answering a bunch of listener questions from the overflowing virtual mailbag.

But first we have some follow up. Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** Right. So I did another Escape Room LA. This was my last one of that company’s rooms. They have four rooms. The Alchemist. The Detective. The Cavern. And The Theater. And so I went and I did The Theater and we did escape. Felt good about that. And there were only six of us, so that was a big deal.

But, while I was with Melissa in the little waiting room area there was this big group of people all going to do The Alchemist. And they were just, you know, talking. And then one of them said, “Oh, you know what? There’s going to be something that involves smelling different scents in this one because I heard Craig talking about it on Scriptnotes.”

And then someone is like, “Oh yeah, I heard that.” And they start talking about me. But I’m just sitting right there. And Melissa turns to me and goes, “You have to say something.” And I said, “Nah, I don’t want to.” [laughs] She said, “No, you have to. It’s crazy.”

And then somebody said my name again and finally I just said, “That’s me.” And then they turned and looked and they’re like, “It is you.” And so we had a very nice conversation. It was very strange because, you know, that is fairly rare to happen, but exciting in the moment. And I did promise them that I would mention them on the show.

And they did in fact escape The Alchemist. So, good for them.

**John:** Congratulations to everybody who survived.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So back in Episode 248, we talked about the controversy over white actors being cast in Asian roles. And Kirk Shimano wrote in to say — Craig, would you read what Kirk wrote for us?

**Craig:** Sure. He said, “Thanks so much for your thoughtful discussion about the casting of Asian American actors. I also agree that star-washing should totally be thing and will use it in social media as frequently as possible.”

**John:** That’s Craig’s term. Craig made up that term.

**Craig:** I made up that term. And I want money. Kirk continues, “I wanted to add one other thought about the character of the Ancient One in Doctor Strange. I think another complicating factor in this is that original character fits into a common racist trope. That of a wise Asian master. I know for my part, whenever I see an actor of Asian descent in this kind of role, my first reaction is always, really, this kind of role? Again? So, from my part, I’m actually pleased to see this character go a different way.

“That all being said, I find the lack of Asian American actors in the Marvel universe hugely disappointing. I just wish the conversation was more about the lead characters rather than having yet another wise Asian master who helps the white people achieve their full potential.”

**John:** Yep. So thank you, Kirk, for writing in about that. And that was an aspect we didn’t really get into when we discussed it is that if you’re just casting a person of a certain race in a very stereotypical role, that’s not a great mark of progress.”

**Craig:** It’s true. I mean, I’m not sure you can claim it’s a great mark of progress to keep the racist trope role and also then deny employment to a poor Asian actor who now can’t even get the part of the racist trope.

I mean, I suppose you could say that we’ve come a long way. Because it used to be that we cast white men like Joel Grey to play the wise Asian master. No, I guess we’re still doing it. We’re still — although she’s not meant to be — at least she’s not meant to be Asian. So, that’s a minor improvement. But I think Kirk is absolutely right that that character is beyond shopworn and needs to be retired.

And the Marvel universe I think has done a very good job of being true to things that deeply meaningful and being a little more flexible with stuff that isn’t. I don’t think, for instance, Nick Fury was originally African American. So, they had no problem with that. So, I’m not really sure why this needed to be that way. But it’s a tough one.

It’s interesting. Marvel makes movies in 2016, but so many of the characters that they’re pulling up were created in the ’60s and ’70s.

**John:** Yeah. And so the way you reinvent those or sort of re-explore those can be challenging. And finding a good way through it.

It reminds me of our conversation with Alan Yang at the Christmas live show where he’s talking about Master of None, and the issues came up of like you have an actor who is going in for roles, and he’s refusing to go in for those very stereotypically South Asian roles. And like he doesn’t want to be the cab driver or the call center worker. He doesn’t want to put on the fake voice anymore. And that’s a real issue and that’s a decision every actor has to make about what kinds of things you’re willing to go in for, or not go in for.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whereas on the writing side of things, we get to do anything. I mean, acting is really hard. It’s always you out there. I feel for actors. Because I can sense how frightened they are of being embarrassed.

**John:** Yeah. It’s tough. All right, same episode we also talked about pitching open writing assignments. And Philip from Durham, North Carolina wrote in to ask, “What are your thoughts on using visuals of any kind to help convey the story you want to pitch during this open writing assignment process? Is it a good idea or bad idea to bring in visuals?”

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s either a good or bad idea. It really depends on what you’re doing. If you’re pitching something where one picture would be worth a thousand words, bring that picture. For sure. Generally speaking, I’m not pitching movies like that by the nature of the movies I do pitch. Although, on the sheep movie, I did make — I mean, this was after we already had set it up, but when I turned the script in I also included a book. I made a photo book.

So, I went on the Internet and found as many high res images of sheep that I could find that were evocative, I think, and would have made them feel something. And then I made a little Apple book out of it, and I sent it in.

**John:** Nice. Yeah, for the thing I’m writing right now, I did come in with some visuals. I had little small artboards. And it was really to sort of show what the world would look like, because it was hard to describe my specific take on what this world would be without some artboards. But, the thing that people were pitching to me, I had three different sets of writers who were pitching this project, and none of them brought in visuals and it was fine. We just focused on what they were saying. So, it can be useful. I think what can be especially useful about the visual boards is it gives you something to point at later on in the process.

So, like as you’re having the discussion, you can sort of like go back to the boards, or the producer can look through the boards and say like, “Oh, so back in this moment…” It helps anchor the thing you said to a visual, which can be useful post pitch.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, Ted Elliott used to say that he and Terry were so bad at talking, and so uncomfortable in those rooms, that they would bring visual stuff along just to distract people from them. Because they didn’t want their awkwardness to somehow make their odds worse.

Sometimes the visuals that they brought were literally just index cards, like here, look at our story points as we talk so you’re not concentrating on our stammering faces, which I thought was great.

**John:** But if you’re a highly charismatic writer, sort of performer. Like if you’re Mike Birbiglia, you probably would not bring in visuals like that because you want them focusing on your face, because that’s where the performance is.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Yep. All right, last bit of housekeeping here. A few months ago we asked you to do a quick survey about the show and what we should do with back episodes and the bonus shows. And we decided that we’re going to make more 250 drive episodes. And this is episode 250, so in about two weeks we’ll have all 250 episodes of Scriptnotes, along with the bonus episodes, on a little USB drive that you can purchase in the store. So, if that’s something you would like, they will be available soon.

Craig, I think these USB drives are going to be black.

**Craig:** Oh. Sleek.

**John:** Sleek and black. Shiny.

**Craig:** Like little dolphins? Little black dolphins?

**John:** Maybe like little black dolphins.

**Craig:** Or, no, orcas.

**John:** Yeah. I was worried you were going to go to a Sexy Craig, like Scriptnotes After Dark thing. But I think orcas is maybe a better, safer thing. Because everyone likes whales.

**Craig:** You know, John, Sexy Craig doesn’t care about that computer stuff.

**John:** Yeah, it’s going to be good. The other thing we are experimenting with is people had asked — so all of the premium episodes and all the back episodes are available through the premium feed at Scriptnotes.net. You can also use it through the Scriptnotes app.

Some people had problems with the app, or if you’re overseas it can be a challenge with your bank accounts. It didn’t PayPal. There were some real frustrations that some people had. And people asked can you buy individual tracks for like those bonus episodes. So, we’re experimenting with just two of those tracks. And so the Justin Marks Jungle Book episode and the Q&A from the session with Aline and Rachel Bloom where we talk about introducing a character in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Those two tracks are available for $0.99 each in the John August store. So, just store.johnaugust.com. And we’ll see if people like to download those individual tracks.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m like a year away from having to hire somebody to audit you.

**John:** Yeah. You would not believe the dollars and cents coming into this operation.

**Craig:** I mean, if you buy a couple of houses and a few cars, just know I’m coming for you.

**John:** Okay. I want to point out that Craig Mazin drives a Tesla, which he talks about nonstop. I drive a seven-year-old Prius and a Nissan Leaf. I don’t even get to drive the Leaf, because my husband drives the Leaf. So I get a really beat up Prius.

**Craig:** You know, you could get a new car with the massive amounts of cash coming in on this show.

**John:** I probably could.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A sensible car.

**Craig:** A sensible car. [laughs]

**John:** The tiny last bit of follow up here is I asked Matthew to record his screen while he edited episode 248, so it’s about 2.5 hours’ worth of video that I’ve shrunk down to nine minutes. So you can see sort of his process of what he goes through as he edits our show down.

Because we record basically in real time. So, one of our recordings of our show will take about an hour, but it takes about 2.5 hours for Matthew to go through and sort of get rid of all the uhs and ums and get everything synchronized right and get the music in.

So, if you’re curious what that process is like, it’s posted on YouTube and there will be a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** I might even watch that.

**John:** You might watch that. And my perception is that I mess up on the show a lot more than you do. And so that he has to do more work. But as you actually look through it, it’s about 50-50. You have a few ums and stuff there that go away through the magical process of editing.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t call that messing up, John. I think what you’ve done is you’ve tried to equate complete failure with innocuous pauses.

**John:** Perhaps I have. Perhaps I have.

**Craig:** This is already shaping up to be a great episode. I feel like this is an episode that we’re not drinking, but I feel a little bit like I might have had a glass of wine.

**John:** That sounds great. And our guest has been so patient, because she’s been like literally right across the table from me this entire time.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So I think we should probably introduce the winner of our sort of special Golden Tickets. We’ll set up this whole detail.

At the live show in Austin, we had put up these raffle tickets and Craig called out the number and she had the right number. She came up and we told her she could give us her script and we would read her script and talk about it on the air. She is here. We want to welcome Amanda Morad. Welcome to our show.

**Amanda:** Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** So, Amanda, you were at the live show in Austin, but you’re actually a Los Angeles person. Is that correct?

**Amanda:** Yes, that was my first time at Austin Film Festival. And it turned out pretty well for me.

**John:** Cool. So, what made you want to go to Austin?

**Amanda:** It’s a great event. And it’s a great competition. Matt D. and everybody there is just amazing. And I learned so much and got to meet a ton of people. In fact, I made friends that I will likely have for the rest of my life. And it’s definitely an event that I would do again.

**John:** Cool. So, you show up in Austin and did you know people before you go there, or was it all strangers?

**Amanda:** I had one connection from my alma mater. He was a former professor, now technically colleague, who met me there. Shawn Gaffney. And he introduced me to some people and from there things just went great.

**John:** Great. So tell us about yourself. What is your background? Did you study writing? What are you goals? Do you do anything else other than write?

**Amanda:** Uh, yes. [laughs] I’m originally from the East Coast and moved out to LA in 2014 to pursue television writing. I would love to get into scripted drama. And right now I am working in digital development with you know Murray Productions. And on the desk of two development executives there. And working on original short form content in that capacity.

I am also a big board gamer. So, I followed along with several of the episodes that you guys mentioned. Ticket to Ride and Pandemic and everything. So, that would be like the secondary hobby outside of the writing, because the writing is certainly central and the reason I came out here. So, that’s the main focus.

**John:** Let me ask. Have you applied to fellowships? Have you gone after other things?

**Amanda:** Yeah, I’ve definitely applied to a lot of contests and all the network fellowships in the past. In 2014, I got to the semifinal round with CBS, so I got to go in and meet with their diversity, Carole Kirschner and Jeanne Mayo and all of them there. And it was a wonderful meeting and they said they really enjoyed the material but I was just really green at the time. I think I’d been in LA three weeks. And so their advice to me was go get some industry experience and try again.

So, now that I’ve been working in the industry for a little while I applied again, and so we’ll see where it goes.

**John:** Cool. And when you say diversity hiring, so you’re Latina and was that your focus?

**Amanda:** Yes. Yes. For that one.

**John:** What were they reading when they brought you in that first time?

**Amanda:** The first time was an early draft of Betty Bureau, many, many drafts ago. And a spec of Homeland. Because they require both a pilot and a spec script.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** I got to tell you that I feel like we won the raffle. Because the odds of randomly picking somebody that was a good writer were very low. And I apologize to all of the people that come to Austin. I assure you I’m not talking about you, dear listener, you are great. But, of course, how many great people can there be? But I thought your script was terrific. And I’m going to I think bum your current employers out by saying that you should absolutely — you’re ready to be on a staff right now as far as I’m concerned.

**Amanda:** Craig, you’re making my day. And you’re making me blush. [laughs] Thank you.

**Craig:** Well, you’ve earned it. I mean, we read a lot here. I mean, I can’t speak for John, but I thought it was really well done. It was professional. And it showed an ability to craft a scene, to pull a story through, to surprise me. Characters were distinct. I can imagine that this is already better than the work that’s being churned out by quite a few veterans of TV staffs. And I think somebody should put you on their staff right away. I really do.

**Amanda:** Thank you, Craig. That might be the best compliment of my life.

**Craig:** You’re welcome. I mean, and you know, 250 episodes of legitimacy behind that, because nobody can question the fact that I have no problem saying to somebody’s face, “I don’t like that.” So, you can take this to the bank. I thought it was terrific.

**Amanda:** Thank you.

**John:** So I have staffed TV shows, and I’ve staffed one-hours, and so I have a little bit more experience being on the other side of the table, and I agree with Craig. I think why I’m so, so happy that it was you who got that number and showed up is that you delivered a script that is professional in the sense of like there’s no — there’s no mistakes. Nothing about it feels amateur whatsoever. You have a really good sense of being able to draw small details out. I like some of your descriptions of characters. I singled out like there’s a minor police officer who is like a well-fed husband.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that. And then the little boy in his father’s suit.

**John:** Daddy’s suit. Yeah. Those are great sort of like small little signifiers that show like, oh, she really does kind of know what she’s doing here. I thought you made a good choice about picking a distinctive subject for this script.

So, before we even get into some of the praise here, you wrote this script — this is a one-hour drama pilot. It’s a writing sample fundamentally. It’s written in a five-act structure. Was it teaser plus five, or just true five?

**Amanda:** Teaser plus five.

**John:** Teaser plus five, which is common in sort of like ABC land for this. Which I thought was very smart, because you could have easily done this as a cable pilot or something else that didn’t have breaks, but good to sort of show that you understand that there do have to be act breaks. All really good.

Also smart choice to make this be a period show. A friend is just staffing from one show to another show, and he had to write a new pilot, and his agency told him do the period one because it won’t get outdated so quickly.

**Amanda:** It’s true.

**John:** And so you could send it out season after season and it won’t become outdated, so these are all smart reasons. And I always like the — I’m a big fan of some of the period shows. You look at like Homefront. I don’t know if you ever saw that which was a great WWII drama.

**Amanda:** Yes.

**John:** Mad Men, of course. So, there’s a lot of stuff there that’s great. They’re not reading a ton of period things and they’ll remember yours, where they won’t remember like five other sort of Sopranos shows. So, those are great things.

I was less enthusiastic about sort of the overall experience of the script. I got a little bit bored, and so some of my notes for you are going to be about places where I kind of fell off the ride. But I want my underlying message is that I’m so happy it’s you, because everyone can download your script, read along with us, and see like, oh, she does know what she’s doing, and it’s so refreshing to see somebody who is not making just dumb mistakes, so we can focus on making it better, rather than bringing it up to a baseline quality.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice for once? I mean…

**Amanda:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, anyone reading anything will always have some places to say, “Well what about this, or what about this?”

**Amanda:** Of course.

**Craig:** And I have some of those for you that I hope are instructive and constructive. But we’re in a different kind of note-giving here. This is sort of the note-giving that I would give to a colleague of mine. You know, I’d say, okay, what were you going for there? Didn’t quite work.

So, I will talk to you like you’re already working on a TV show and I don’t know about you, John. I don’t feel quite qualified to ever say whether or not something like this is something they would actually produce and air. All I can really talk about is the writing itself, I guess.

**John:** And I would also say that I’m not sure that should even be your goal here.

**Amanda:** Right.

**John:** Talk to us — we’re talking too much. Talk to us about why you wrote this specific script? And actually tell us the name, tell us the premise, because people listening to this in the car won’t know what we’re even talking about. Tell us your script.

**Amanda:** The script is called Betty Bureau. And it is an FBI procedural drama that takes place in 1950 when the first Top Ten Most Wanted List is first published by J. Edgar Hoover. And it follows Caty Pelayo, a new secretary to the bureau, as she is covertly helping the agents solve crimes. Of course, this is not at all sanctioned by Hoover or anyone. There were no female agents in 1950. And so this is her kind of journey to independence, but also to helping catch all the crooks.

And this story actually originated at my grandmother’s funeral. My great aunt used to be a secretary for the FBI and she was regaling the family with all kinds of stories from that time period. And she told us the story about accidentally helping catch somebody on the Top Ten Most Wanted list at a department store one day. And from there, I thought, you know, this is an idea that I can run with and I can write passionately about because it is based on two very strong independent Mexican women in my life that I have loved and respected forever.

And so that’s where the script kind of originated. And it’s been through many, many, many drafts since then. And, yeah, I do hope that it is a good, solid writing sample. Hopefully for representation. Maybe for just getting my name and myself out there as a writer, because I am fairly new to town, and with the experience that I am getting at a production company now, I’m hoping that that will kind of start segueing into actual writing–

**Craig:** I mean, look, I think your days of not having an agent are over. Because I’ll send this to my agent. [laughs]

**Amanda:** Wow. Thank you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s stupid. Of course you should have an agent. This is a strong sample. And you should have an agent. It won’t be my agent, but it will be somebody. And I’m sure John has people that he knows as well, because that’s just crazy. Of course you should have an agent. This is good enough for that, in my opinion.

**John:** All right, and in my opinion I don’t know that you will get an agent right off the bat. And this is just me sort of talking reality is that having read a ton of these, I think it’s good and shows competence. I don’t think it was breathtaking to me. And I got kind of bored.

And I remember back to when we had Riki Lindhome on the show and she was like reading through for staffing. And if she stopped reading after page three, she stopped reading. And I worry that people are going to stop reading. And so what you described and what you pitched was more intriguing than the first sort of ten pages were for me. And as I was reading it, I felt like I was getting ahead of you at times. And some of that is the nature of what you’re trying to do. You’re doing a procedural, but it’s also a premise procedural. And those can be kind of like the two most boring kinds scripts to read.

Because in a premise show, you’re having to set up this whole world, and you’re having to introduce your character to this whole world, so the plot always ends up taking sort of a back burner. And in a procedure, well, people are just going through and doing their jobs. And so it was a lot of people walking through FBI kinds of stuff doing this.

I think you do a nice job setting up the world of things, but I — there were very few scenes where I’m like, oh holy cow, that’s amazing, like that’s going to be a really great moment. And I think as you look at doing more writing on this, and look at doing the next thing you want to write, focusing on the how do I keep it incredibly suspenseful, how do I make sure people are desperate to turn that page will be your challenge.

**Amanda:** That’s a good note.

**Craig:** I never got bored, but perhaps because the script was teaching me something different, you know. So it was teaching you one thing — and this can happen all the time. This is the great difference of opinion of the world, you know. People, they start reading something and they think, “I know what I want this to be.” And if it doesn’t become that, that’s disappointing.

Now, to be fair, John and I read scripts that are just objectively boring all the time. In this case, what this was telling me it wanted to be, and what I wanted it to be, was kind of more Mad Men-ish in a way than high capery, which is why actually in a weird way my biggest issue was the ending, which I thought was not congruent. It was sort of like the show suddenly remembered that it was supposed to have cops and robbers and Ka-boom-ies. And I didn’t want that in a way. I wanted an ending that was more about the character.

I was so much more into the soap opera of the characters than I was into the crime. I really was enjoying that. I loved the reveal that the newspaper man was this agent’s brother. And I liked their flirtation, and the fact that now she’s got two brothers kind of going after her. And I also liked the woman in a man’s world aspect which felt very Mad Men to me and really interesting.

So, that’s kind of where I — that’s where my eye was. So, I was never bored actually weirdly until the end, when it was just like, oh, now they’re just shooting. Shooting. Shooting. Shooting. Shooting. So, that was a different — it’s so funny how we have these different responses to things.

**John:** Yeah. I think, Craig, you read this as being like this is like a Mad Men. I read it like, oh, this is like an FBI procedural. And it’s trying to do both things at the same time. The issue is I would love the Mad Men show, but Mad Men is not fundamentally a procedure. It’s a character-driven show where characters are going through journeys and sort of coming at each other in strange moments.

And I didn’t feel the friction, the tension, the spark in those moments in this. And I don’t feel like there quite were the scenes there that could have had those sparks. And so as we look at — as we go through pages, we may find some moments that can actually break out a little bit more.

The last thing I want to say is sort of urgency. And in any of these things, you want a sense that there’s an urgency for like why this scene is happening right now. And there were a couple moments where I felt like that was just a random other scene to go to. And there wasn’t a pressing need for like that had to be the next scene. It could have sort of arbitrary. So, that’s sort of the one the page urgency.

There’s also sort of a “why am I reading this script right now, why is this script relevant in 2016?” So, when I previously said it’s great because you could write a period thing because it doesn’t have to have a timeliness, but there’s still an underlying quality of like what is this show saying about today. And has that resonated for you at all? Is there a reason why you think this is a show about today?

**Amanda:** Yeah. Absolutely. With Caty’s position as a secretary in a man’s world, and coming into — as a writer coming into Hollywood as a woman with very little Hollywood connection, I’ve encountered it on a few occasions where my strength and independence and ability has been mitigated by what people expect of me as a woman. And I know we don’t really like to talk about the overtness of it still happening, but I think it is still relevant. And I think a lot of what Caty feels about being relegated to certain tasks and relegated to certain roles, I’ve certainly felt that through the various jobs I’ve had.

Yes, I’m still early in my career, and it’s possible it will continue to happen. But I think her emotion and her response to it and the resistance that she’s feeling toward this relegation to memos and lunch orders is something that I identify with. And I think a lot of female professionals, particularly in this city that I know, definitely feel that.

**John:** Okay. But I mean, is that a new thing that’s happened in — is that a 2016 thing? Or would the same thing happen in 2006? I’m just wondering if there’s a special thing about why this is happening now, or why this conversation is happening now.

I think her Latina heritage might be an interesting thing to bring up a little bit more, because I missed it until her mother is speaking Spanish, sort of midway through. And that might be a thing that is extra interesting. Or the degree to which Hoover and sort of like that whole movement reflects sort of modern times could be a way in. I just — I want to be intrigued about what you’re trying to say about today in this period show.

**Amanda:** Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think her heritage and the politics of that era are certainly reflected in a lot of things going on in our world today. There’s lots of talk about — even what you guys were talking about in the follow up, with whitewashing of actors in roles that belong to ethnically diverse actors. And I think that that carries over into plenty of industries. And in 1950 at that time, it was very rare to have a Latina secretary in the nation’s capital in a professional job.

You know, at the time a lot of it was southern labor for Latinas. And so I think showing that Latina heritage, I think things like Jane the Virgin have exceptionally well because Latinas are seeing themselves on TV in ways that they haven’t before. And even though this takes place 65 years ago, I think that this would serve the same way.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that one. We never ask the period pieces with a majority white casts who sort of carry the burden of the difference between then and now, or if we do, it’s because that’s that what it’s about. I think that if this were a movie, I would be much more concerned, because a movie begins, middles, and ends. And it must have some immediate relevance for you when you walk out of the theater. That is beyond just whatever you saw.

For a show, I always feels like sooner or later, no matter how hard the show is trying to be relevant, the show becomes about the show. It ultimately becomes about its own soap opera. And in this case, I think you have an interesting opportunity to combine soap opera with procedural, which has been done before. And doing it in just a different background. I love the setting. I love the setting. I think the ’50s is terrific.

And certainly the imposition on her as a woman is — I think it’s always interesting. There were spots here and there where I thought either — she almost seemed like she had arrived in a time machine. This is an interesting thing. When you’re talking about characters who live in a world that is oppressive, sometimes when they arrive on the show they seem as aware as we that this is all off. But that’s the world in which they are. It’s a very tricky thing — do you know what I — I don’t know if I’m explaining myself quite right.

**Amanda:** No, that makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. So occasionally she seemed almost sardonic about it, like oh well, in 50 years you’ll realize how stupid that sounds. You know what I mean? Which is a little different than being in the moment I guess.

**Amanda:** I see.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to your actual script. And so if people want to read along with us, there will be a link in the show notes for this PDF, so you can download it and take a read through it with us. Let’s start with the teaser. It’s a two-page teaser. It’s a teaser without dialogue. It felt a little strange and forced that it had no dialogue. I felt like I was missing some little bits of dialogue, or something to help ground me in a place. I felt like some of these characters talking, basically people are not reading this. It feels kind of like a tracking shot where we’re following this young hostess/server through this club. And she’s ultimately going to end up dead at the end of this teaser.

It felt like I wanted some snippets of dialogue, or something to help anchor us in a place and a time. Because as it is, they are two well-written pages of action, but you’re making a very big ask of the reader to like, okay, read through these two pages of action and I’m not going to give you any sort of break there.

**Amanda:** Got it.

**Craig:** I have a suggestion for that, because I agree with John. Sometimes in things like this, what could work in lieu of dialogue, because I like the mystery of not knowing what people are saying, and whispers in ears and all that. Sometimes a good song does miracles. And especially when you’re in DC in 1950, you’re period, and you’re in a — you have a band right there. A really great period song. And then just pull the lyrics out. And let the lyrics — find some great lyrics that kind of feel ironic and creepy and cool. And just pepper them in. Just layer them in. And then, you know, back engineer it, reverse engineer it, so your last lyric lines are really evocative over the image of this dead woman.

**Amanda:** Yeah, that’s a great fix, because I think one of my concerns with adding dialogue was that you do lose some of that mystery of the conversation in the booth and what this guy is giving her the note for, and all of that. So, yeah, I think I’d prefer something like that over kind of, you know, peeling back and letting the audience in on some of those conversations that are happening.

**John:** That sounds great. So, our out is on the dead body. And so by starting on a dead body, you’ve announced yourself this is a procedural.

**Amanda:** Right.

**John:** [Makes Law & Order sound] We’re in a procedural land. And so that’s fine, but we’re in a procedural land now. And so if at any point you say like, you know what, maybe this really wants to be more of a character study/character-driven thing, then you’re going to have to start with her. And that’s sort of your balancing act. It can’t be sort of — you sort of can’t have both in a way.

**Amanda:** Right. Okay.

**John:** I’m going to focus on little things I noticed in the writing along the way. There’s some moments you choose not to uppercase that I think could be sort of useful uppercase and can help sort of break up some of the action lines. We follow the girl’s “skirt” — like that follow feels like it’s a movement and that helps draw our eye across that.

Another place where I felt like I wanted some capitalization, page four. You do: SUPER: MARCH, 1950 Agents, analysts and secretaries buzz. Capitalize those people so we know that they are groups of folks.

**Amanda:** Got it.

**John:** Caty’s first line of dialogue is in reference to a guy, “Why are you following me?” “Slack sent me.” “ID?” “Left pocket.” It announces her as a badass in a way that is — made me feel like I was watching Agent Carter in a way. And I know if that’s actually applicable to the character we’re about to meet down the road. It made me feel like — I kept waiting for a reveal that she actually was a — she was actually special forces, or she was already well ahead of where she actually was.

And so it put me sort of on my heels about who she really was, or sort of maybe not trust my own instincts about the world she was entering into. I thought she was like a double agent going into it. It put me in a really weird place. Craig, did you feel that?

**Craig:** I did. Mostly because it didn’t quite payoff the way I was hoping. The character I probably have the biggest issue with is Slack, so we’ll talk about him later. But, yes, it did put me in a position where I was a little confused, particularly confused when she showed up and she was a secretary. This may have been sort of the time machine theorem that, you know, a woman comes in from 2016, lands in 1950. Some guy is following here. I could see her totally Krav Maga-ing the dude, right.

But this is 1950. Men follow women and catcall them. That’s the world that this woman lives in. one suggestion, something to consider perhaps, is that she’s aware that this guy is following her, and she stops, and he comes up to her maybe and lights her cigarette, and starts asking her some questions. And she’s sort of flirtatious and kind of innocent and feminine in the way he expects, you know, a little dizzy.

And then when no one is looking, then she grabs him and she says, “Why are you following me?” Like, I can see that she knows how to play a game, because there’s a little bit of a logic problem. When you’re in a busy train station and you physically assault someone, you’re probably going to get arrested, you know. So, there’s — you just have to figure out the logic of that, and figure out maybe if there’s a slightly twistier way of telling me more about her in this. Because I love the fact that she did it to this guy. I thought that was really cool and shocking. I think that he would be shocked, right, because that just doesn’t happen, so I’m shocked, too.

And I guess I wanted a little bit more of a misdirect before the shock happened.

**John:** I would also like to ask aloud the question of what if we lost this beat here and started with her doing her training at the job as a secretary. Basically like your first day as a secretary. And that way we can sort of assume that she is this person that she’s presenting herself, and then save this beat where she’s going after the guy who is following her. That can be a surprise later on.

Because it’s a challenge when you show her starting so strong, and then you have to show her being weak. We’re not quite sure what to believe. And so it’s intriguing if we see her really act out. And I think we’re more scared for her, because we’ve seen her being a milder character before this moment, and then suddenly, boom.

**Amanda:** I see.

**John:** Worth thinking about flipping those.

**Amanda:** I think my concern with having her first line, having her come in and say, “Hi, I’m Caty Pelayo,” was that it was a very weak introduction. That there was no POW to her first entrance and our first introduction to her.

**Craig:** I can see that. I mean, you do want something exciting and something very revealing about her. The issue is the way that you have it now, the POW is diminished by the fact that it’s nothing but POW.

**Amanda:** Got it. Okay.

**Craig:** It’s just an immediate Kaboosh, and you’re like, oh, okay, I guess — you know, again, we’re teaching people how to read this, right? So John is right. The teaser teaches you it’s a procedural. And this teaches you that it’s kind of action. And turns out that it’s–

**John:** It’s really not.

**Craig:** It’s more than that.

**John:** On her side, it’s not an action story. And so it sets an expectation that she’s going to be kicking ass a lot in the show, and that’s not the focus, and so–

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, so much of the show is about how smart she is. The big POW for me is smart. I want to see her smart, and then physical. That’s fine. I like that she’s both. But I need the smart.

**John:** If we could see a moment where you can watch her reading a room and figuring out something that another person would not be able to figure out, even if like she’s waiting for someone to actually come over and talk with her, and she actually is able to figure out a lot of stuff before anyone has actually come to her and then she can introduce herself in a really smart way, that could be a great moment. Another thing I think overall through the script, I was missing the other women. And so the degree to which secretaries aren’t supposed to do this, I didn’t feel the threat or sort of the group of other secretaries who were doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and the degree to which she is a threat to them for stepping outside of these lines.

And I think they’re going to be an important force. And even if they didn’t have a big role in this pilot, I think establishing them here would make it clear like in the series they’re going to be a major–

**Amanda:** Obstacle.

**John:** Obstacle here, too.

**Amanda:** I see. Okay.

**John:** Craig, let’s do a few more minutes here and look through some other things that stood out to you.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, one thing is I liked George’s move on her, where he poses as Slack and she kind of goes along. I think it pays off really nice when Slack comes in and she’s looking at this guy. And there’s some really clever writing there. Some good back and forth.

You have to help us a little bit when he first walks up to her, because I got super confused. I thought you had actually made a mistake with last names. Because you did too good of a job. You faked me out, too. It’s like in football, sometimes the play action, the camera is following a guy who is running with the ball and he doesn’t have it.

So, something just to make clear that, you know, when he walks over to her, she volunteers “I didn’t mean to interrupt Agent Slack,” a coy smile and a glimmer in George’s eyes says he’s happy to play along. It wasn’t quite enough.

And I also was a little confused why she just presumed this was Agent Slack.

**Amanda:** Okay. My thought in that was that he was the first authority figure to come up to her and give her some kind of order, some kind of task.

**Craig:** But does he want — when he does that, what’s his plan?

**Amanda:** His plan is to get her to take notes for him and pretty much — I don’t think he’s taking the bet that his coworker put out to get her number. I think he really is utilizing her and trying to get an in with her to figure out who she is, and what role she’s going to play here. I think it’s more of a curiosity thing than a game-playing thing. But, when she presented the opportunity by saying Agent Slack, he took it.

**Craig:** Got it. It’s a little bit hard for me, and I think for any reader, to read all of that into what he’s doing, because she’s a secretary. She showed up. He’s seen secretaries before. I can’t imagine why he would have a natural instinct to get to know her better already if it’s not about physical attraction.

**Amanda:** Okay.

**Craig:** And I think, frankly, that physical attraction is a great thing to be undermined almost immediately. And if he went over there and was trying to win the bet, and he was doing it by presenting himself as her new boss, because he knows that’s who it is, then he’s, you know, a charming cad. And she’s going to give it to him, you know. And I think that’s just clearer to me. I got a little confused in that zone.

**Amanda:** Okay.

**John:** Cool. Last thing I want to talk about is act outs. So, you chose to have this be a sort of broadcast spec that has act outs. Basically before you go to commercial breaks, there’s the moment of rising tension. Then we stop, and then we start again with a new act.

And when I first started writing television, I hated act outs because they were just torture and they felt really forced and artificial. And then once you sort of accept them, they actually can be kind of freeing, because you can sort of hang your story on those act outs.

And so generally in a writer’s room, as they’re breaking an episode they’ll sort of lean towards those act outs as sort of structural points which they’re going to hang the episode. I didn’t love your act outs. And I think a showrunner reading through this would probably send this back to you with notes about like, hey, we need better, stronger act outs.

And so an example would be at the top of page 18, the end of Act One, it’s an insert on a phonebook entry. There’s a lot to read. Caty find the block on the map and circles it. Three circles overlap. Off her disbelief. End of Act One.

One character alone looking at something doesn’t tend to be a great act out, unless it’s a huge revelation that’s really going to make sense for us. And at this point, I felt like I was ahead of her. The minute I see her start making circles I’m like the circles are going to overlap, and then we’re out.

And if this were episode 17, great. But this is your pilot, and so this has to be the one that is sort of like a showstopper. And so finding that moment where I can’t wait to see what happens next, and there’s nothing about three circles on a map that’s going to make me feel like I can’t wait to see what happens next.

**Craig:** I agree. The one that I loved was the one on page 40 when George reveals about Jack, “He’s my brother.” She stops walking, he keeps going. That felt good. I liked that.

**Amanda:** Yes.

**John:** Which is great. And that kind of moment is about a character and is about a change for a character and you’ve changed the dynamic of the story and the plot. That’s why that works for Craig as an act out. This just plot circling isn’t going to be sort of as fulfilling of an act out.

So, my question for you, Amanda, is if we send this to some folks who do TV staffing, would it be okay for us to do a follow up episode where we actually talk with them about sort of what they thought. Because we’re just two guys. I’d be really curious to see what other people think about this script and whether — where you would fall on the piles with this script. Is that okay?

**Amanda:** Absolutely. I think that would be incredibly helpful and way more generous than I was expecting. Thank you.

**John:** We have time for a couple questions. So why don’t you stick around, because you may answer some of these questions better than we can. Our first one is Steve from London who writes, “If you write a spec ‘inspired by’ a play or film from the ’60s that isn’t a blatant rip-off, but has echoes of the original ‘inspired by’ then what do you put on the front page?”

**Craig:** You wouldn’t put anything on the front page. I mean, if it’s an homage to other movies, it’s an homage to other movies. But unless you are, in fact, taking some of their intellectual property, you know, copyrighted material, then no. I mean, Austin Powers was referring heavily to Our Man Flynn and he didn’t have to put that on the front page at all.

Okay, so second question from RJ. He writes, “I found a true story for which I want to write a screenplay. The events took place in 1888. The subject of the story has many living descendants. Question: Is the story of his life in the public domain, or do his descendants own the rights? He died in 1963 and the last time I can find any record of his family preserving and maintaining his name was a museum that went defunct in 2003 when his grandson died.”

John, do you have any thoughts about this one?

**John:** So RJ wants to know if he needs to get anybody’s rights. No, the people are dead. And so dead people don’t have rights generally. You can use people’s lives or dead people, you’re kind of in the clear. With Amanda here, she used stories from her grandmother and she didn’t have to — I’m sorry, is your grandmother still alive?

**Amanda:** No, that was my grandmother’s funeral that we were sharing these stories.

**John:** And so you’re pretty clear. Here’s where RJ might run into a problem is that if he’s basing this story off of one specific account that he read, that is sort of only in that account, then he needs the rights to that account. There could be a book written about that thing that he’s really basing this around. That, he’s going to need the rights to that thing.

But if it’s a well-known event or just something he’s researched himself, he’s fine.

**Craig:** Indeed. I agree.

**John:** All right. Mauro writes, “I’m planning on shooting a feature this year, uber low budget, and I want to show two main characters playing Monopoly. Do I have to clear this with Hasbro? Or is a board game so utilitarian/mundane that showing it onscreen doesn’t need a clearance?”

Amanda, question for you. Do you think he needs the clearance for them playing this board game? You love board games.

**Amanda:** I do love board games. And I’m going to go with yes.

**John:** You are absolutely correct.

**Craig:** Tell her what she wins, John. [laughs]

**John:** She wins another script… — I used to work in clearances at Universal. I spent a summer doing clearances. And so clearances are anything you see onscreen in a movie that someone owns copyright to, you have to get that legally cleared. Which basically means I was calling up a bunch of people, getting them to sign these forms, saying it’s okay to put this up in the movie.

Monopoly is the kind of thing you have to clear every time, because the people who own Monopoly, they own Monopoly. And if you want to portray it onscreen, you have to get their permission to do so.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only exceptions to this are if you’re parodying something. So, if characters are playing a Monopoly-like game and the point is that it’s a parody of Monopoly, you are somewhat broadly protected there. But otherwise, yeah, you’re clearing it.

**John:** I had an interesting experience this last week. I was flying back from London and on the flight I was watching The 5th Wave, which was a movie that came out this last year. And about halfway through the movie I look and there’s a Big Fish poster on the wall behind one of the main characters.

And so I paused it, I took a screenshot, and then I put it on Twitter saying like does anyone know why there’s a Big Fish poster in The 5th Wave? And through the wonder of Twitter I found out that the director was on Twitter. He tweeted back to say there were three reasons why Big Fish was in that shot.

First reason is they were shooting in Georgia, and a lot of the crew had actually worked on Big Fish, and so it was kind of a nice thing for them. Second and probably the biggest reason is Big Fish and 5th Wave are both Sony movies, and it’s really easy to get clearance for a movie at the same studio.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But the final reason is the director is a big fan of Scriptnotes. And so he wanted to do a shout-out. So that’s why we are in, the Big Fish poster is in The 5th Wave.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for that inclusion.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. So, I think both of our One Cool Things are actually Hollywood related, just like that last story. My One Cool Thing is a GIF. And it is a GIF of superheroes jumping. And it came out this last week. And it’s basically a bunch of the Marvel superheroes doing their jumping, where they’re jumping off of apple boxes that are later going to be visual effects things. And it’s just so absurd. And I love it because it just points out how ridiculous it is, this whole process is for making movies.

And so you see Chris Evans like just jumping down off a box. The best by far is Benedict Cumberbatch, as Doctor Strange, who has to like stand up and then jump like he’s about to fly. But it’s just like sort of this skip. And I love our actors, but just imagining being on the set where like all you have to do is jump up a foot a lot. And try to maintain your cool.

**Craig:** That is this running discussion on every set now a director saying to the visual effects supervisor, “How much do you need here exactly?” And he’ll say, “I just need the first second of his coming up off the box. Everything after that falls away. It falls apart after that. I just need that bit.”

And so you’re like, okay, don’t worry if you look stupid. It’s just for the first little thing. And there’s a whole negotiation of tell me how long this lasts so I know. And then, of course, what happens? The whole damn thing ends up on the Internet. Classic.

**Amanda:** Of course.

**Craig:** Classic.

**John:** The best.

**Craig:** The best. Well, my One Cool Thing, this one doesn’t reflect well on actors. This is a real theme here. It’s called The Empty Cup awards. And I just love this.

So, this is a compilation video that was put together on Slate. The piece is done by Myles McNutt and Daniel Hubbard. And the idea here is all too frequently on television or less the case in movies, but on television characters are walking around with coffee cups. And there’s clearly nothing in the cup. And there’s all sorts of reasons for that. The least of which is water in the cup, it might spill, it might fall, whatever. But the problem is the actors simply don’t convey any weight whatsoever in the cup. So, you end up with actors effortlessly hoisting full tall lattes around or carrying two of them in one hand at one time.

In one case, one character has some kind of hot chocolate that’s got the whip cream on it. And the whip cream is definitely not whip cream either. And she’s just like wiggling that thing around. And it’s really funny actually. I think that a lot of actors are going to think twice the next time they’re handed a coffee cup.

**John:** It’s, again, a great compilation of absurd moments of acting. And I was frustrated and delighted about how many of those moments I actually had remembered seeing and they had annoyed me. And Supergirl for whatever reason, when I watched the first couple of episodes of that with my daughter, there’s a lot of coffee cups in that and I had never believed them.

Greg Berlanti, if you’re listening to this show, please spend some of the money to fix the coffee cup situation.

**Craig:** I mean, it does seem like it wouldn’t be that hard. You don’t have to put hot coffee in the cup. It’s got a lid on it. Just put water in it.

**John:** Not even water. Just put clear polymer. Just make it as heavy as the actual liquid would be.

**Craig:** Well, water is as heavy as actual coffee.

**Amanda:** But that spills.

**John:** But water could spill. Water could spill.

**Craig:** Okay, sure. I guess. Well, you know, yeah, put a weight in it.

**John:** So, while we’re ruining things for people watching stuff, I will tell you that if you ever see a paper bag in a TV show or a movie, it’s not actually a paper bag. So, because those make noise, because paper bags make noise, they use this brown cloth that they starch the hell out of it, so it looks like paper. But it doesn’t actually crinkle that way.

And they look really good, but they don’t look perfect. So now that I’ve told you that paper bags aren’t actually paper bags, you will see like, oh, that’s right, that’s not a paper bag.

**Craig:** Oh god. You know what? This is like the time the first person told me about reel change marks. And then there was the time somebody said, “By the way, you know that when people are driving in a car and you’re looking through the windshield at them, the rear view mirror isn’t there.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m like, wait, what? Oh god. Yeah, ruined. Life ruined.

**John:** Amanda, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Amanda:** I do have a One Cool Thing. I know the show has been mentioned on a couple episodes before, but I just got my copy of Hamilton: The Revolution, the book.

**Craig:** Yep.

**Amanda:** And I am devouring it. I’m only like in the second chapter but I poured over every picture, every annotation, and it’s amazing.

**John:** Wow. So she came prepared with board games and Hamilton. She definitely knows her audience here.

**Amanda:** [laughs] But the great thing is this is not put on at all. Like I skipped board game night last night just to read my script again. And I got up this morning to read another chapter of Hamilton: The Revolution. Because I’m obsessed. So, it just works out. I love you guys.

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Craig:** We love you, too.

**John:** Thank you, again, for being so brave and for coming in and for showing up in Austin. We all lucked out having you be the person who got that ticket. So thank you very much.

**Amanda:** Thank you.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. So, our outro this week comes from Paul B. If you have an outro for the show, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to that. That’s also where you can write questions like the ones we answered on the show today.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you would like to talk to us on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Amanda, are you on Twitter?

**Amanda:** I am. @amandamorad.

**John:** That’s fantastic. You will find links to a lot of the things we talked about on the show today, including Amanda’s script, and these wonderful One Cool Things, and other stuff we find that is useful. We will append those to the podcast that you’re listening to right now. So, thank you so much. Thank you, Amanda.

**Amanda:** Thank you.

**John:** And, Craig, I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Got it. Bye-bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Escape Room LA](http://escaperoomla.com/)
* [Scriptnotes, 248: Pitching an Open Writing Assignment](http://johnaugust.com/2016/pitching-an-open-writing-assignment)
* [Scriptnotes, 228: Scriptnotes Holiday Show 2015](http://johnaugust.com/2015/scriptnotes-holiday-show-2015)
* [Master of None, S1 E4: “Indians on TV”](https://www.netflix.com/watch/80065730?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C3%2C32842c79-3788-4f76-b086-740e1e8feaa3-16878876) on Netflix
* Individual bonus tracks are now available in the [John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Watch Matthew edit an episode of Scriptnotes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp9MDdhZ2lY)
* The [Austin Film Festival](http://austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [Betty Bureau](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BETTYBUREAUPilot316.pdf) by Amanda Morad
* [@amandamorad on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amandamorad)
* screenwriting.io on [referencing proper nouns in your screenplay](http://screenwriting.io/can-you-reference-specific-proper-noun-productssongslocationsetc-in-your-screenplay/)
* [Director J Blakeson answers John’s question about the background Big Fish poster in The 5th Wave](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/730150770922774530)
* [Hollywood jumps without CGI](http://www.avclub.com/article/gif-pre-cgi-superhero-jumps-proves-actors-are-just-236529)
* [The Empty Cup Awards](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/05/10/the_empty_cup_awards_are_here_to_raise_awareness_for_an_important_tv_issue.html)
* [Hamilton: The Revolution](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455539740/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Paul B ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))