Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-one-with-the-kates).

**John August:** Hey, this is 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.

**Kate:** Previously on Scriptnotes:

**John:** My One Cool Thing is The Katering Show, with a K. It’s this Australian team, these two women, Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan. They are ostensibly doing a sort of YouTube cooking show where they’re talking about cooking gluten-free, or cooking with ethical ingredients, but it’s really sort of about their lives and everything falling apart around them.

**Craig Mazin:** They are awesome.

**John:** So, Craig, I’m watching this, and I’m really questioning why no one has figured a way to use them here. Because you see Rebel Wilson, you see other great Australian people who would be able to cross over. I just feel like there’s a thing you could do with these guys that could bring them to a bigger audience.

**Craig:** Well, all right. So, why don’t we see how powerful we are? Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, you don’t know us, and we don’t know you. We don’t know if you listen to the show. We don’t know if anybody you know listens to the show. But, if some magic should happen, give us an email, drop us a line, and then let’s — who knows — see what happens?

**John:** We will see what happens.

[Intro bloops]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 254 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, our dream has come true. We are so excited to welcome Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, the Kates, to Los Angeles and specifically to our little program. Kates, welcome.

**Kate:** Thank you.

**Kate:** Oh, no, thank you for having us.

**Craig:** God, I feel like I know you guys. I really do. It’s almost like we’ve spent time together already.

**John:** We’ve been chatting for a while, and I actually forgot to hit record. So we are rerecording this little bit, I will confess. But, I think it’s also important because now we know how to introduce you guys properly and to help — hopefully how to paint a word picture for people who are listening at home. Because you’re both named Kate. You’re both Australian. And it could be confusing. But we’re going to get through this. And so let’s start with Kate McLennan. You are blonde. You are the first person who is going to speak. Tell us something about yourself.

**Kate McLennan:** Yeah. Look, I also have very big teeth. I have fluid retentive ankles apparently, according to McCartney on the show. Although, now I do reference my ankles quite a lot.

**Kate McCartney:** Yeah.

**McLennan:** I’m just the bubbly, cheery — I’m the brains of the operation.

**John:** So you’re the John of the two of you. You’re the one who organizes things?

**McLennan:** Yeah. That’s it. That’s it. I’m the one that — people ask me like what’s really good about McCartney, like why do you work well together. And I’m like, well, McCartney is really talented, she’s a great writer, and I’m good at responding to emails.

**John:** [laughs] It’s a very key skill.

**McLennan:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, McCartney, tell us about yourself.

**McCartney:** Oh, well I’m Kate McCartney, and I’m sort of the teenager of the group. I don’t like going out. I don’t like people. I just like my cat.

**Craig:** You know, it is kind of like they are the female Australian us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I also — I don’t like people. I definitely try and shirk as much responsibility as I can in this partnership.

**McCartney:** Yeah. No kidding.

**Craig:** You’re like, it works out great.

**McCartney:** It sure does.

**Craig:** We don’t have to do anything. People love us.

**McCartney:** We’re lazy.

**Craig:** Because we feel like — they’re free. They’re not constrained by anything. And they have to keep things going.

**John:** Yeah.

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**John:** So, while our program is a podcast, you guys have an actual program-program. It is a series called The Katering Show that I feel in love with. Craig also knew it.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the best.

**John:** And we’re so excited to have you guys talking to us about that. Let’s start with a clip from the show, so people who don’t know what The Katering program is, what kind of setup would you give about what The Katering Show is?

**McLennan:** It’s an online cooking show, hosted by us. And so we play these heightened versions of ourselves where I am an intolerable foodie.

**McCartney:** And I am intolerant to all food.

**John:** Great. Let’s listen to a clip.

[Clip begins]

**McLennan:** These days, food isn’t about how it tastes. It’s about impressing people on social media with how it looks. Fuck how it tastes.

**McCartney:** Fuck how it tastes.

**McLennan:** Seriously. Fuck how it tastes. It’s about decanting some soft drink into a mustard jar wrapped in weeds and shoelaces.

**McCartney:** It’s about set dressing your food so it looks like you work for Gourmet Traveler. But you don’t, do you? You just have an iPhone and a Nashville filter like every other asshole in the world. And so you take your photo of your dukkah eggs. And then you just sit there, tracking your ASOS order and waiting for eleven likes that never fucking come.

[Clip ends]

**John:** So, how did the show come to be? What is the genesis story of The Katering Show?

**McCartney:** So we were working on a — this is Kate McCartney again. We were working on a — it’s just good.

**McLennan:** We’re not doing an interview like that. A taped interview.

**McCartney:** That’s right. It’s important to qualify. I don’t want things kind of credited to you that I’ve said.

**McLennan:** Yeah. Fair enough.

**Craig:** Good point. Good point.

**McCartney:** So, we were working on this other web series. And we shot a video in order to crowd fund the web series. Basically just pleading with people to give us money for our idea. Subsequently, I think just friends and family gave us money and strangers did not.

But, the video itself was just us talking to camera as ourselves.

**McLennan:** And this other project was — you were directing. We were both writing. And I was acting in it. So we weren’t on camera together.

**McCartney:** No. And then weirdly we ended up getting more positive response from this video that we shot, the crowd-funding video, than we ever did for the web series.

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**McCartney:** So, we thought, well, there’s probably something here. We should explore this. And at the same time, I was being diagnosed with a ton of food intolerances. And you were getting annoyed at me pretty much.

**McLennan:** Yeah. I was becoming like more and more of a foodie asshole essentially.

**Craig:** Right. Whereas she was becoming a fake disease asshole.

**McLennan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it was like a real problem.

**McLennan:** There was a natural point of tension between the two of us. So, we thought that could be fun to explore. And, you know, food culture was just bursting right out of the gate at that point in Australia, which I’m sure, you know, the same here. And kind of worldwide, like everywhere. So, we kind of just hit a nerve with it and we made the show.

It was funded in part by Screen Australia, which is like a government funding body back home. And we thought maybe, you know, we’d get maybe 10,000 views when we released it on YouTube.

**McCartney:** Yeah. I remember us sitting in the car and going how many views did we get.

**John:** So there was no network behind it. There was no push behind it?

**McCartney:** No sir.

**John:** So you actually just produced it. Because it has really high production values. And so it looks fantastic, but how many days of shooting was it to make those six episodes?

**McLennan:** It was probably about 12 days, I think.

**McCartney:** Was it? Yeah. Maybe shorter. I don’t think it was 12 days. It was more like, I don’t know —

**Craig:** It seemed shorter to you because you did less.

**McCartney:** That’s right. I was barely there, guys.

**McLennan:** Yeah.

**John:** And what was the process? So, you wrote out all the episodes. You cross-boarded, or did you shoot episode by episode? Or how did it all work?

**McLennan:** We did pretty much episode by episode.

**McCartney:** Unless it was location, and then we’d pinch those days in.

**McLennan:** And that’s the same kind of with the second series as well, which was a little bit longer. We rented a house off Airbnb with a lovely big kitchen.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**McLennan:** We didn’t tell the people from Airbnb what we were doing. Because we just never thought that she’d ever see it. And then —

**McCartney:** She saw it.

**Craig:** She saw it. Was she cool?

**McLennan:** Yeah, she saw it. Well, she —

**McCartney:** I don’t know if she was ever cool.

**McLennan:** Put it this way: I don’t think we’re allowed to go back.

**Craig:** I see.

**McLennan:** You know when people, they kind of think that — we did film there for the second season and —

**Craig:** Yeah. I was going to say, it’s the same kitchen. But she’s at this point lost —

**John:** She knows.

**McLennan:** Yeah. I think she came home one day and saw what it looks like to have a film crew in your house. And that can be quite confronting.

**McCartney:** Yeah. So people expect it to be glamorous, but actually it’s a ton of equipment very respectfully laid down over the top of someone’s life. But it’s still a lot of equipment.

**Craig:** Exactly. And men who aren’t glamorous, lugging cables around with their pants sort of on, kind of half-off in the back.

**McCartney:** Yeah. And if that’s not your thing, then, you know, you’ve got an issue.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m good with it. One thing that’s wonderful about your show is that it does actually fit in that mold of parodies that are so close to real at times, because there are a ton of — I mean, there’s too many cooking shows. My daughter is 11 now and she’s obsessed with cooking shows. So she watches all of them, and I’ve grown disgusted with all of them, in part because there’s this crazy fetishization of weird things.

And also because they fake everything. It’s infuriating. And cooking shows have always done that. They always like, I’m going to assemble it — anyway, here’s what it will look like in the end. And you guys get that perfectly, but then there’s this thing where you’re constantly dropping out and the relationship and the timing between the two of you is amazing.

The things in between. In season two, there’s just these little interstitials where there’s like a hand that comes in and caresses a piece of — like a plastic container. And then slides one and then keeps sliding it. It’s bizarre and it’s perfect. And then little facts, like for instance, parsnips are the ghosts of carrots. That’s amazing. You guys are amazing.

And, by the way, you’ve answered a question that I had. I’m sorry, this is what my questions sound like: endless, ridiculous monologues.

**John:** Yeah. He’s so critical of people that ask questions by their statements —

**Craig:** But it’s half my show, so I get to. I wasn’t sure if either of the things that you say you are on the show are things you actually are. But they are. You really are an intolerable foodie. And you really are food intolerant. And that list that you run, is that — like on the first episode?

**McCartney:** That’s legitimate. That’s legitimate. I can’t eat anything.

**Craig:** Oh my god. And you’re like — and how many of those things do you believe she actually can’t eat?

**McLennan:** Well, I think a lot of it is attention-seeking.

**McCartney:** Whereas I don’t have that made within me, to have a lot of attention on me. That’s actually you projecting onto me.

**McLennan:** But I also think that maybe, you know, you should just eat something and just suck it up.

**McCartney:** Okay. She did offer me some — what were they — a couple of biscuits the other day. It was like, they’re made of gluten, but they’ve very flat. [laughs] I’m like that’s not how food intolerances work much.

**Craig:** Right. She doesn’t have shape intolerance.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about the characters you play though. Because you say they’re heightened versions of who you really are. So how do you, as you’re writing these things and as you’re sort of coming up with the characters, how do you recognize those things that are annoying about you and bring them up? And are there any moments as you’re playing them that it’s like, no, no, no, you’re not going to say that about me?

I remember hearing Sharon Horgan talking about writing Catastrophe and she asked like, “I need to describe something terrible about you. You tell me what it is that it’s okay for me to say.” What is your process?

**McLennan:** We tend to come up with things about ourselves and then put that in there.

**McCartney:** Put in that there. Firstly, I don’t think anyone is more critical of us than we are ourselves, so I think that kind of helps.

**McLennan:** Although we will pick up on stuff in our personal just day to day outside of the writing process lives. And then inevitably that will start to filter in. So there will be a quality about McCartney or something about me that will invariably work its way into the script. Nothing seems to be sacred.

**McCartney:** No.

**McLennan:** From our private lives. Like all of the stuff that’s to do with medical conditions is usually pretty spot on.

**McCartney:** You think so?

**Craig:** But it wasn’t your actual placenta?

**McLennan:** Yes it was.

**Craig:** That was your actual placenta?

**McLennan:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay. So, there’s an episode, was it one?

**McLennan:** Number two.

**Craig:** Season two, episode two, you both had children by this point.

**McLennan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you’re both lactating, which you’re very excited about.

**McLennan:** Yeah. Thank you.

**Craig:** And you’ve decided to make a lasagna out of your placenta. [laughs] A Plasagna. And then out comes — and I know what placenta is. That’s placenta. But I couldn’t imagine it was actually yours. Did you like freeze it? And you were like — as you were having gravy you’re like, episode, freeze it.

**McLennan:** Yeah. We wrote the episode before I had the baby.

**McCartney:** When she was like dangerously close to popping. It was kind of making me feel a little unsafe. Because she was in my front room, just sort of hovering over a football, in a perfect pose, to literally give birth on my carpet. And I was like you need to just — we just need to get these scripts out, mate. And then you’re welcome to become two people. For the moment, stay as one. Stay as one —

**Craig:** And you were pregnant at that time?

**McCartney:** No, I wasn’t. I had had my kids. And my kid was like five or six months at that time.

**McLennan:** And I had said all along that I was going to keep my placenta. And you were like, mate, I don’t — when the time comes I think you’ll have other things on your mind.

**McCartney:** Like the birth of your first born.

**Craig:** Right. No, she didn’t.

**McCartney:** No.

**McLennan:** Well, I actually remember it really, really clearly. Because I had gone through this really intense labor. And then eventually, you know, I just was like I’m taking the drugs.

**Craig:** Well done, by the way. Smart move.

**McLennan:** And I was lying there. And I started thinking about the show.

**McCartney:** What?

**McLennan:** I did. Because we were —

**Craig:** Because you were high.

**McLennan:** Yeah. And at that stage you had had your baby, but you’d had a Cesarean. And I was preparing for — I was going to be having a Cesarean and I was talking about having a Cesarean. And we had written a bit into the show that I had had a natural birth.

**McCartney:** We had very optimistically written that.

**McLennan:** And so, okay, we’re going to need to change that. And so the show was like in my mind as I’m lying there.

**McCartney:** Yeah. Because you’d only stopped writing it like two days beforehand.

**McLennan:** Yeah. It was very, very weird. And then I had the baby and the midwife came in and said did you want to keep your placenta, because I had written that I didn’t want to in my birth plan. And I was like, yes. And then she gave it to me in a little bucket. And I gave it to my partner. He took it home, put it in the freezer. And then when it came to shooting —

**McCartney:** Just sat in there with a little label on it.

**McLennan:** Yeah. I gave it to Jo, who is the head of our art department.

**Craig:** Oh, lucky Jo.

**McLennan:** And she had to plate it up. And it didn’t occur to me until we’d finished shooting and we’d wrapped and I was like, oh, I made another human being who is not related to me or my child handle — and who is not a medical professional — handle this placenta. And we shot in the middle of summer and —

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**McCartney:** That placenta was out for the whole day.

**Craig:** Oh man. You’re like let me remove the membrane.

**McCartney:** That thing reeked.

**Craig:** And it’s so funny — well, because, all right, this does remind me very much of you and me. That McLennan’s heightened version of herself is this need to — she wants to be Martha Stewart. She wants to be perfect. She just can’t. And then she breaks. So we get to watch you basically have a nervous breakdown about 12 times an episode, which is about nine minutes long. And McCartney is just seconds away from saying, “Fuck it,” always. Always.

And then like the levels of her Fuck-it-ness become so — I mean, the booze reviews are getting super fuck-it now.

**McCartney:** Yeah. Yeah. No, I’ve really checked out.

**Craig:** [laughs] Absolutely checked out. It’s amazing. It’s such a great combo. And when I was a kid, I don’t know about you guys, but I was obsessed with Laverne & Shirley. I just loved watching Laverne & Shirley. And I just — like I want to see the two of you living together. I want to see the two of you in an apartment. I want to see the two of you doing — it’s weird. Like I want more “what else do they do together?” How much fun would that be? But maybe I’ll never get it.

**McCartney:** We do everything together. I don’t think we see anyone else.

**McLennan:** No.

**McCartney:** So, you know, there is material there.

**McLennan:** Yeah. But, you know, I think our characters that we write that are in that show kind of do seem to pop up in some way in everything else we do.

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**McLennan:** And when we’re thinking about ideas for other projects, we keep — I’d really love to do a film when we are 13 — and we didn’t know each other when we were that age — but I’d love to write something if we did know each other and how that would work out.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean like a young you guys?

**McCartney:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about this. Let’s finish up with Katering Show. So Katering Show, everyone can see season one on your site, The Katering Show.

**Craig:** On YouTube as well.

**McCartney:** And on YouTube, yeah.

**John:** But this new season, where should they find your new show, if they’re listening in the US?

**McLennan:** It’s actually on an SVOD service at the moment called Fullscreen. Which you can download the app. I think it’s free for the first month. So, you know, you can download it and watch our show. And then what you do beyond that is up to you.

**McCartney:** Do what you will. We’re not your mum.

**Craig:** Just what the Fullscreen people were hoping you would say.

**John:** We’ll have links in the show notes for that. But the reason why we’re excited to have you here, and the reason why we sort of said, you know, does somebody know the Kates so that we can talk with them is because we kind of think you guys should be doing a lot of other stuff.

**Craig:** We want to make you famous.

**John:** So we’d like to talk to you about —

**Craig:** Famouser.

**McCartney:** We want to let you do that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Well, famouser is really an interesting question, because how famous do you want to be? And what is like coming from Australia to here? Is that even a goal? Is it patronizing to sort of assume that anybody who is doing great work in Australia wants to come to LA?

**McCartney:** Well, firstly, we want a god-like kind of level of fame. So, you know.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Check.

**Craig:** All right. At least we know the rough —

**McLennan:** Because that really suits our —

**McCartney:** It certainly suits my introverted personality. But, no, of course. Yeah, the industry is small in Australia. If you’re a comedy writer and — well, you started off as a standup. I started off in the animation industry, but then I moved into comedy writing. There aren’t that may narrative things that you can do within Australia. There’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of light entertainment. You can write comedy for talk shows. You can write comedy for game shows. You can write comedy for sort of like late night shows sort of.

**McLennan:** But there’s no guarantee you’d even get a year’s worth of work out of that. It’s very hard to have a fulltime career.

**McCartney:** No, you’d be very lucky to sort to get sort of two jobs a year. And they’d be contract. And they’d be sort of —

**Craig:** So like Summer Heights High, there’s not a lot of those?

**McCartney:** No, there’s Summer Heights High.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** What’s interesting is here we only see the ones that really broke out. So we see Priscilla and Summer Heights High, like Josh Thomas’s show plays here and that’s great. Please Like Me.

**Craig:** My daughter watches the dancing academy soap opera.

**McCartney:** Oh yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s that called?

**McLennan:** Dance Academy.

**McCartney:** Dance Academy.

**Craig:** I thought it was called Australian Kids are Dancing, or something.

**McLennan:** Oh, maybe they’ve changed the name over here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe over here it’s called —

**McLennan:** That’s a catchy title: Australia Kids are Dancing.

**McCartney:** Are dancing.

**Craig:** Are dancing.

**McLennan:** It sounds like we’re a bit special, doesn’t it? [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s called Look at the Australian Kids; They’re Dancing Again.

**McCartney:** Yes. Full Stop. They’re Dancing Again. Full Stop.

**John:** But you guys are here in Los Angeles. And part of your trip to here in Los Angeles is not just to be on Scriptnotes, but also to take meetings and set up other things. So what happens on one of these trips? What have you done so far and what could we help you do?

**McCartney:** Yeah, well we did get an agent last year. So we —

**John:** You’re at one of the big agencies? Where are you at?

**McLennan:** We’re WMA.

**Craig:** That’s one of the big ones.

**McLennan:** Yeah, which we had no idea about. So, like I had to ring my friend who is an actor and say who are these guys.

**McCartney:** Are they any good. And silence on the other end.

**John:** So what was it like when they came to you?

**McCartney:** It was just after the first season. So I was six weeks off having a kid. So the countdown had begun. But I don’t even know if we properly connected till after I had the baby. But I think actually what happened — no, I think what happened is that a few people contacted them saying we need to speak to these people. Do you know who these people are? That kind of thing.

**Craig:** They came looking for you?

**McLennan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, and I get it. I understand why. And now I assume part of what they do is they say what do you want.

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what do you guys want?

**John:** Yeah, pretend we’re agents.

**Craig:** Because by the way, we will be more effective than your agents. I guarantee you. Right now we’re being more effective than your agents.

**McLennan:** Well, we — yeah, we knew that we were coming over for this trip. And we’ve been building this trip up in our heads for months and months. And we only just sort of really finished The Katering Show in February/March, around that time.

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**McLennan:** And since then we’ve been working on a new idea, because we feel like there’s momentum behind The Katering Show, so we’re looking at this like a fully sort of fleshed out half-hour like lifestyle kind of version of The Katering Show.

**McCartney:** Yeah. An expanded world pretty much.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Got it.

**McLennan:** So that’s kind of what we’re talking to a lot of people over here. But then we’ve got our little other projects that don’t so much feature us in front of camera. So, we haven’t been pushing those as much.

**John:** Well, it’s really interesting, because you’re both actors and great performers, but you’re also really good writers. And so it’s a question of do you step behind the camera and write something for somebody else, or should you be out in front being the star of something. You know, Rachel Bloom who has been on our show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she was a writer for a long time. She was a writer on Adult Swim shows. And she’s a really writer, but she’s also a performer. And she had to make the decision at some point like, you know, she created the show with Aline and she’s the star of that show now.

But she could have also been a really great writer behind the scenes. Megan is another example of a — she’s really a great writer, but she performs.

**Craig:** I think these guys kind of have it figured out, actually. I mean, you guys write it, you direct it, you star in it. You produce it. Right? And it shows. It’s great. I mean, the one thing that I’m sure people have mentioned to you is if you come here it’s harder to do — well, not even anymore. I was going to say it’s harder to do just like eight or nine episodes for a season, but now it actually isn’t that hard.

**McLennan:** It’s getting shorter, which is, yeah.

**Craig:** We’re kind of transitioning here over to the European model, which is to go shorter. So you can actually do it yourselves. Stay in front of the camera, by the way. You get more money.

**McLennan:** Okay. Okay.

**John:** You get more money and you also get more control, because they can’t replace you because you’re the person on —

**McCartney:** On camera.

**Craig:** Right.

**McLennan:** That’s very true. Someone mentioned to us a couple of days ago if a studio bought an idea, you know, do they buy an idea? Is that how it works? Or they option an idea. And then, you know, someone said, yeah, and then if it doesn’t work out they can fire you. And the thought of coming up with an idea that you put all of your heart and soul into and that someone could then turn around and say, “No, no — ”

**McCartney:** No, no.

**McLennan:** “You guys can’t work on this anymore.” Like that would be devastating.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t that be devastating John? Can you imagine that happening?

**McCartney:** That would crush us.

**John:** [laughs] I can’t imagine that it didn’t happen like three times last week. Yes, it does happen a lot.

**Craig:** They can stab me in the same hole. They’ve stabbed me so many times in the heart, they can just put it right in that same hole again. It’s very easy.

**John:** So, in television we have a thing called upfronts, which is where they announce all the new shows. And so sometimes they will announce at upfronts like, “We’re so excited to be picking up this show. We love it so much.” And at the same time they’ll be saying, “Oh, by the way, we’re firing you. And you’re going away. And we’re bringing in a whole new showrunner.” And it’s like that’s accepted. That’s a thing that happens.

**McLennan:** That’s just the way it works.

**Craig:** It’s not going to happen to you guys.

**John:** It’s not going to happen to you, because you guys are going to be on camera, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** But don’t let them take any of your hair, because then they can clone you. Very, very important.

**McCartney:** Ah, thanks. Very good point.

**Craig:** Maintain all hair.

**John:** And no facial scans.

**Craig:** No facial scans, guys.

**John:** So they can replace you with CG characters. That would be awesome though. Wouldn’t that be amazing? So, they’re probably talking to you both about TV and about features. And so what do they want you to write? When you talk to your agents, what are they pushing you towards? Come up with a pitch for this, come up with a script for this?

**McLennan:** Yeah, I guess it is that. Something that can sit alongside The Katering Show.

**McCartney:** Yeah, at the moment, just because there is so much momentum around that. The trip has been by and large focused on that. And we’ve kind of had the opportunity to sort of have more general meetings with people and just say this is us. Look how funny we are. Don’t touch my hair.

**Craig:** Right. Don’t touch my hair. Exactly. We get that all the time as well.

So, you do these, you go and you sort of say look at me. And are people — have they been watching? Because sometimes I know people go on these meetings and they’re like, “We didn’t know who we were.”

**McCartney:** Yeah, yeah. And I think mostly people have seen — if not both series, then certainly the first series they’ve seen. So that’s good. Because it’s not a cold room.

**McLennan:** There’s usually someone somewhere within the organization who has championed us in some way. And it’s usually quite an indirect sort of little filtration system that has landed us on someone’s desk. But it’s very strange for us to be in a situation where people are saying, you know, we love the show. And then for us to take that compliment and not immediately say something self-deprecating.

**McCartney:** Yeah. It’s just not the Australian way.

**Craig:** Tall poppy syndrome.

**McCartney:** Yeah. It’s really hard. We’re learning how to go, “Thank you. And we love your shoes.”

**McLennan:** Yeah, because normally I’d be like, “Yeah, we’ve really lucked out.”

**McCartney:** A couple of failures.

**Craig:** Maybe the first episode of the second season, when you were describing something as over-hyped and not really all that good. And you’re like, “We can relate.” I mean, I actually think that’s great. I mean, I do think that people like that sort of thing. Don’t change that. That’s actually terrific.

**McCartney:** We’re unlikely to change it. It’s just that we’re trying to couch it in more positive terms like, “We are really good at being self-deprecating.”

**Craig:** Right. As opposed to, “No, please do not give us money.”

**McCartney:** Never hire us.

**Craig:** You don’t want to do that.

**McCartney:** Although that being said, every job I’ve ever had, people have gone, “Do you want to do this job?” And I’ve gone, no. And they’ve gone, “You’re hired.” So.

**John:** Yeah, always very useful.

**Craig:** And she’s like that never worked for me. I had to beg and beg and beg.

**McCartney:** Yeah, it’s so true.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. So, if you’re meeting with these American companies, is there any implicit sense that you will be writing for American characters? You will be writing yourselves as American characters. Has that come up at all, about sort of — can you take the Australian off of it?

**McLennan:** Yeah, people — it came up yesterday. Someone asked us would be interested on writing on other shows. And we would.

**McCartney:** Straight up. Yeah.

**McLennan:** The idea of just sitting in our rooms — we don’t have offices. We’d just be in your front room.

**McCartney:** My front room. The dead fish.

**McLennan:** Knocking out a script for a half-hour, for a show over here. That sounds like heaven.

**McCartney:** That does sound like heaven. Doesn’t it?

**McLennan:** Like we’d totally be into that.

**Craig:** You’d get more than that room. There’d be probably a live fish if you request it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**McCartney:** Which I would then kill, because I’m not good at it.

**Craig:** But here’s the deal. You would kill it, and then you’d come in the next day and it would be alive again, because somebody’s job is just too —

**McLennan:** Alive again.

**McCartney:** Assistants. We’ll get an intern on that. It will be great.

**Craig:** There’s like a room with a thousand of those fish and they’re just like —

**John:** Next one. [laughs]

**Craig:** Next one. Okay. And the other fish are like —

**McCartney:** I think she’s a serial killer. Right.

**Craig:** Exactly. I don’t know what happened.

**John:** Does having young kids change any of the equation for you guys about sort of what you want to do next, and moving here, or doing stuff different places?

**McCartney:** Well, in terms of what we want to do next, I think it just means that we’re more discerning about what we want to do. Like we don’t want to unnecessarily take time away from our kids with something that we don’t truly enjoy or love. But they’re not in school yet, obviously, because they’re not crazy geniuses. Little Man Tate style geniuses.

**John:** They’re 15 months old.

**Craig:** They’re aggressively normal?

**McCartney:** Yeah, they are. [laughs] Yeah. They’re properly normal. And so we could always come over here for sort of short stints or what have you.

**McLennan:** Yeah.

**McCartney:** So, I hope my partner is listening to this.

**McLennan:** Yeah, see, I hope my partner is not listening.

**McCartney:** Okay, great.

**McLennan:** I’m just going to come home day and just go, “So, we’ve got a deal. And it’s paying this amount of money.” And then he might go, “Oh yeah, cool.” Because at the moment it’s kind of hard to say to someone, “So what you do, you have to give up your career and come over here and just wheel the kid around the Grove all day. How do you feel about that?”

**Craig:** I think he might be okay with it, actually. Because I’m thinking about applying for that job if he doesn’t take it, because that sounds pretty awesome.

**McCartney:** Pretty nice.

**Craig:** I can’t guarantee. I’m sort of with kids —

**John:** Craig, you’re married.

**Craig:** Well, okay, there is that. Okay. Hear me out though. I’m married and I do have two kids. And I kept both of them alive.

**John:** True.

**McCartney:** Oh, well congratulations.

**Craig:** Or, maybe one of them was like the fish and then they just put another baby in.

**McCartney:** Just an intern.

**Craig:** Or multiple babies. I don’t know. I got what I got.

**John:** Yeah. His children are very tall. So, that’s useful. You have that.

**Craig:** They are. Yeah, they’re very, very tall.

**McCartney:** Well, that’s the mark of a successful parent.

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

**McLennan:** How old are they?

**Craig:** My son is almost 15. And my daughter is almost 11.

**McCartney:** Well, you’re due for looking after another baby.

**McLennan:** They could maybe come over to my house.

**Craig:** Great idea.

**John:** Babysitter.

**Craig:** You don’t want the boy doing it. The girl would be better.

**McCartney:** Okay.

**McLennan:** Okay.

**John:** The girl would be good at that. She would love that. I’m also thinking that there may be a scenario in which you think about Catastrophe which is, you know, very much feels like a British show, but is a big hit here on Amazon. So, there may be some version where you get to shoot a show that is Australian but is really designed for a worldwide audiences. Because so much of what we see here is just like those rare Australian shows that sort of break out. But maybe you could write something that is designed for, you know, set in Australia but is designed for a bigger worldwide audience.

**McLennan:** That’s what we’re hoping for. And I feel like with The Katering Show, because we have watched so much stuff online anyway, it was always in our minds that we wanted to write something that wasn’t necessarily Australian.

**McCartney:** You said that in a really Australian way.

**McLennan:** So, you know, I think that —

**Craig:** So Australian.

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**McLennan:** I think that whatever we write would naturally be informed by the world around us anyway.

**McCartney:** Certainly in this next incarnation of The Katering Show, and then also beyond that as well.

**Craig:** I think you guys are inexorably Australian. I think you’re both incredibly Australian and I think that that’s awesome. And no matter what you do, I actually feel like it’s cool. There’s something fun about it. It’s not like being Australian is fun. It’s just it’s not the same old thing. I think like the weird way some words just don’t match up, you know, from there and here, I’m all for it.

Like I’d go and look it up. Like what was that word? Duqqa?

**McCartney:** Oh, Duqqa.

**John:** I asked what this word meant, because even as I watch the show, I get like 90% of it, 95%, but like that 5% I don’t get is sort of fascinating. It’s like I’m hearing — it’s like science fiction. Like I’m watching Star Trek and they’re talking about some invented thing. Like what is that? And it draws you in.

And we always talk about specificity on the show. And it does very much feel like a specific Australian subculture that is great to see from the outside.

**McLennan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Plus, too, your Australian-ness makes you great observers I think of what I think of as like mainstream American culture. For instance, if you expand your show and it’s like you said a lifestyle show and you’re looking at gadgets and whatever it is. That it’s like you’re visiting from, you know, the opposite of the world. And you’re like, “We’re going to tell the truth about this.” And you’re trying to be like the perfect person there. And you’re like, “Fuck it.”

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or what do I do with this? And when can I drink? Wonderful. It’s just great. Don’t change. That’s what I’m saying. Don’t change.

**McCartney:** No problem.

**Craig:** Don’t change. [laughs] You’re like, wasn’t going to anyway.

**John:** So it’s like Laverne & Shirley meets Crocodile Dundee. That’s the pitch they want to set you up.

**Craig:** No, they’re just great on their own. You guys are the best. Honestly. I can’t wait to see what you do. I really can’t. You’re so smart. The two of you are so smart.

**McLennan:** We know.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** See, that’s good. You’re taking the compliment.

**McLennan:** I did it. I did it guys. That was very unnatural for me.

**Craig:** It was actually terrible. I might take everything back. And also, god, the timing. Timing. You know, there’s something that you just cannot teach. I mean, guys, their timing is impeccable.

**McLennan:** We do a lot of takes. And there is a lot of editing.

**McCartney:** Yeah. Honestly, we really do only speak to each other by and large. I mean, I speak to my cat, but she’s not much of a conversationalist.

**McLennan:** No.

**McCartney:** So, yeah, the back and forth is really just as we are.

**Craig:** But even if you edit it, or you do multiple takes, you can’t get it unless you know what it is. You have to know that you didn’t have it, you know. Like I never see anything mistimed. Ever.

There’s a shot where one of the interstitials is just a shot of somebody, one of you, turning the hood on the vent hood. And then it just holds there. And it holds for exactly the right amount of time. It’s exactly too long, but exactly not too, too long.

**McLennan:** And we agonize over that.

**McCartney:** We do agonize over frames.

**McLennan:** Frame by frame.

**Craig:** Like where will this be the most uncomfortable and wrong? There. That you can’t teach anybody. That’s music. I love that.

**McCartney:** It is music. I was about to say it’s like music. Yeah.

**Craig:** It really is. You guys have a great ear. I love your work. Big fan.

**John:** Cool. We should have warned you about this before you came on the show, but we have a tradition where we do One Cool Thing, which is we recommend one thing that listeners should check out. Sometimes it’s a song, sometimes it’s a videogame — it’s often a videogame — or something you’ve seen in Los Angeles that might be interesting for people who are visiting Los Angeles for the first time. So be thinking of that while we give our One Cool Things.

**McLennan:** Okay.

**McCartney:** In Los Angeles?

**John:** Or Los Angeles. Or anything. Anything you want to recommend.

**Craig:** It could be an Australian thing, too.

**John:** Totally.

**McCartney:** I know what I’m going to recommend.

**John:** So I have two One Cool Things. They’re both little games. First is this game called Mini Metro, where you are building essentially these subway stations. You’re building these subway lines to connect these little dots on your screen. And it manages to be both incredibly tranquil and incredibly stressful at the same time. Because they keep adding new subways stations and you have to connect lines to them. And you’re trying to get these passengers — it appeals to your need for order, and yet the realization that you cannot possibly make everyone happy.

And so it feels like a very true expression of the perils of modern life. The second one is a thing that Craig will make fun of me for. It’s called Human Resources Machine. It’s an iPad game.

**Craig:** Oh, we get to make fun of you again for it? Fantastic.

**John:** So, this is a game where you are this little mail worker and you have to carry packages from one side to the other side and set up these rules for doing it. You’re essentially sort of programming yourself to do these things, so you are basically a little robot.

**McLennan:** Like a robot mailman?

**John:** You’re a little robot mailman. And you have to figure out little systems for doing it.

**Craig:** This is so great, because he is a robot. And he’s a robot playing on a robot machine, pretending to be a robot.

**John:** And this is the nature of our characters. Because I really am not a robot, and Craig is not really quite the character he plays on the show.

**Craig:** I am exactly this. This is who I am. And I’m telling you, if you cut him open, it’s gears.

**John:** It’s gears.

**Craig:** Gears and blinkies. Well, that’s a great segue into my One Cool Thing. This — a lot of people tweeted this to me, and it’s actually kind of incredible. It’s a short film called Sunspring and it is directed by, well, I can’t see — it doesn’t matter who directed it because — Oscar Sharp. What matters is who wrote it.

It was written by Benjamin. Benjamin is a program. Benjamin is an artificial intelligence writing program. And so Benjamin was given the task of writing a movie, and then they actually did it. They shot Benjamin’s script with real actors, Thomas Middleditch from Silicon Valley, and Elizabeth Gray, and Humphrey Ker. And you can watch this movie. And it’s awesome, because it is the most nonsensical thing imaginable, and the actors do an incredible job of attempting to imbue proper emotions to these words.

But it’s things like someone is sitting there and he goes, “I don’t even understand.” And the other person goes, “What are you?” And then a third person walks in and says, “Huh, I’m sorry, I had to go to the skull.” And then he picks up a thing and looks at it and goes, “Yep.”

And then another person says, “What are you talking about?” And then the person answers them, “What are you talking about?”

And you can see the software occasionally going, “I’m bored. Let’s try something new that makes absolutely no sense at all.”

**McLennan:** It sounds like The Room.

**John:** I was going to say, it sounds really great.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**McCartney:** Wow.

**Craig:** Have you ever heard of The Shaggs?

**John:** Yeah.

**McLennan:** I feel like I have.

**Craig:** There’s a trio of girls from the ’60s and their dad made them, he wanted them to be a band. And so he made them learn instruments. And then he had them record an album. And they are perfectly incompetent. All three of them. And they wrote their own songs. And Frank Zappa said, “If you did that on purpose you would be the greatest musical genius of all time.” Like you could never write this. It’s amazing.

**John:** They had no sense of how music actually worked.

**Craig:** None.

**John:** They didn’t know how to play their instruments.

**Craig:** None.

**McLennan:** And they’re called The Shaggs?

**Craig:** Well, over here, we didn’t —

**McLennan:** Different.

**Craig:** Shag over here was like a kind of carpet. And over there. It’s like our whole thing with fanny pack, which drives people crazy in other countries.

**McCartney:** It’s also a bird.

**Craig:** And we’re like, but you guys taught me a new word I didn’t know. Cunt stump.

**McCartney:** Thank you. We did. You’re welcome.

**Craig:** Appreciate it.

**McCartney:** That’s actually a word — we didn’t make it up. One of my friends made it up. And I thought, well, this deserves to be in it.

**Craig:** Who is the director anyway? I don’t know, some cunt stump.

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**McCartney:** It’s so good.

**McLennan:** We replaced ourselves with our director.

**McCartney:** Who had been our onset director. We decided not to try and direct it as well this time around. Although we were very in control. But still, you know.

**Craig:** Some cunt stump.

**John:** McCartney, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**McCartney:** I do. Well, recently we went and saw a film, a New Zealand film, called Hunt for the Wilderpeople. And it’s directed by Taika Waititi. Written and directed by Taika Waititi, who wrote Boy, and directed Boy. Directed Boy as well? Yes. And starred in Boy as well. And I think he’s about to direct the new Thor.

And it’s about a little kid, a foster kid, who gets taken into the New Zealand wilderness. And one of his new foster parents is Sam Neill, who plays this kind of quiet, I don’t know, how do you describe him?

**McLennan:** He’s an ex-criminal.

**McCartney:** He’s an ex-criminal. That’s right. And they get lost in the wilderness together.

**McLennan:** An illiterate ex-criminal, which is always fun.

**McCartney:** I mean, I’m not selling it terribly well, because obviously I’m not very good at pitching, which is great for our careers. But it’s honestly one of the best family films I’ve ever seen. And one of the best films I’ve ever seen. I absolutely loved it.

**Craig:** Say the title again.

**McCartney:** Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Like Wilder beast.

**Craig:** Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

**McCartney:** Yeah. Go and see it. I don’t know if it’s here. Good luck.

**McLennan:** It will come here.

**Craig:** Maybe we can get it on Spin Stream or whatever that —

**John:** Fullscreen.

**McCartney:** It’s so good.

**McLennan:** Yeah, I have a One Cool Thing. It’s a video that I keep sharing in Australia.

**McCartney:** Oh my god. It’s so good. I know what you’re talking about.

**McLennan:** It’s by these guys called Cope St. So Cope and then Street. And these indigenous comedians who work out of Sydney. And they do a beautiful makeup tutorial. And it’s this guy called Bjorn does this tutorial on how to do blackface.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s awesome.

**McCartney:** It’s so good.

**McLennan:** It has a delightful ending, which I will not reveal. And unfortunately we’ve had the need to share it a couple of times because —

**McCartney:** Because people in Australia keep doing blackface.

**McLennan:** People in Australia just don’t —

**Craig:** You mean not ironically?

**McLennan:** No, they just don’t understand.

**Craig:** They don’t get that it’s probably not a good idea.

**McCartney:** No. No.

**McLennan:** It’s like we’re in 1963 in Australia sometimes.

**McCartney:** Yeah, so every time that happens, and it has been happening with alarming regularity, McLennan just goes, Post.

**McLennan:** Yeah, share this post. And it’s very funny.

**Craig:** Here you go. Watch this video.

**McLennan:** But even, you know, aside from the message in the video, it’s just quite delightful.

**McCartney:** Oh, it’s so funny.

**McLennan:** It’s a piece of Internet silliness.

**McCartney:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, it’s fascinating because Australia does exist — your decades were different than our decades. We had certainly things that overlapped, but we had situations come up in the US that you just didn’t have the equivalent thing there. And so issues are going to come up at different times. I wonder if that’s going to go away now that we’re all so connected by sort of a shared culture of TV, of Internet, of everything happening so quickly.

**McCartney:** Possibly. But, I mean, every country has its different history, and that sort of informs everything. So, I think, there will be pigs in troughs at different times according to what hits home with everyone’s kind of particular set of issues.

**McLennan:** Yeah, I don’t think we’re as far ahead as you guys are. So people don’t have as much of a voice I think.

**Craig:** I don’t think you quite get how —

**McLennan:** I know what I’m saying.

**McCartney:** Yeah. Yeah. We know what you say. Yeah, we get a lot of your news. We know.

**Craig:** No, actually, I think this is a great opportunity — we never talk about politics on the show, but I do think we have international guests. That our country has a rare opportunity to look pretty good to the rest of the world. Just give us a few months.

**John:** Give us a few months.

**Craig:** But I think you’ll be happy. Just give us a few months.

**McLennan:** Okay, good. We’re a little worried at the moment. I must admit.

**McCartney:** I’m not going to lie. We’re a little concerned for you guys. Are you guys okay?

**Craig:** In a few months, we’ll either be happy or we’ll all be dead.

**John:** You’ll be holding back our hair as we’re going over the toilet bowl, you know.

**McLennan:** We’ll have a podcast in Australia. And you guys can come over. Like what can we do for you?

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. Now that your country is a wasteland.

**McLennan:** We can get you four weeks a year writing on a morning show. What do you say?

**Craig:** Yes. We’ll take that.

**John:** Guys, thank you so much for joining us.

**McCartney:** Oh my gosh. Thanks for having us.

**Craig:** Kate and Kate, woo.

**John:** Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. Our editing is done by the brilliant Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. Thank you, Rajesh. If you have an outro for us that you’d like us to play at the end of our show, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the email for questions and such things.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. What are you guys at on Twitter?

**McCartney:** I’m @tigervsshark.

**McLennan:** Ah, see now I just sound boring. I’m @kateMcLennan1.

**John:** That’s amazing. How does @kateMcLennan not 1 feel about your existence?

**McLennan:** I think she’s a Mormon ukulele singer somewhere in the Midwest. And she’s doing fine.

**Craig:** She’s doing great. I kind of like the idea that there was no other one. You just like really like the idea of sticking a 1 on there.

**McLennan:** I’m number 1. Number 1. It could potentially have been. I could have just presumed that my name was gone and just, “I’ll go for 1.” I got it.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s the ultimate tall poppy syndrome.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. You’re typing it in like, “I’m only going to try to type one thing into the little box. Oh, I got it.”

**Craig:** I got it. Yay. @Tigervsshark and @KateMcLennan1.

**John:** It’s such a pleasure. Thank you guys so much for coming in.

**McCartney:** Oh, thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

Links:

* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/)
* [Kate McLennan](https://twitter.com/katemclennan1) and [Kate McCartney](https://twitter.com/tigervsshark) on Twitter
* Watch season 2 of The Katering Show on [Fullscreen](https://www.fullscreen.com/)
* [Dance Academy](http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/danceacademy/), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Academy)
* [Tall poppy syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome) on Wikipedia
* [Catastrophe](https://www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-Season-1/dp/B00X8UKEEQ) on Amazon Prime
* [Duqqa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duqqa) on Wikipedia
* [Mini Metro](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mini-metro/id1047760200?mt=12) and [Human Resource Machine](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/human-resource-machine/id1005098334?mt=8)
* [Sunspring](http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link), a short film written by Benjamin
* [The Shaggs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs) on Wikipedia
* [Hunt for the Wilderpeople](http://wilderpeople.film/) is playing at [Arclight Hollywood starting June 23](https://www.arclightcinemas.com/movie/hunt-for-the-wilderpeople?lid=1001)
* Cope St Collective’s Bjorn on [how to do blackface](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALudjI-8q-g)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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))