Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-power-of-the-cold-open).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 644 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we will sing the praises of the cold open. Those scenes that occur at the beginning of an episode, often before the opening titles. We’ll discuss how they work and how to make them work for you. We will also check out new requirements for loan-out corporations and answer listener questions on exposition, motivation, and agents. Finally, Craig and I have both discussed our love for the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. Love that movie. It’s so good.

**Craig:** Love that movie.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, let’s talk about how OpenAI’s new chat capabilities might have us talking to human-like AIs and how we feel about that.

**Craig:** Okay. I don’t want to fall in love is all I’m saying.

**John:** It’s gonna be up to you whether you fall in love. First rule is never fall in love.

**Craig:** Oh, I see what’s coming next, and boy do I like what I’m looking at.

**John:** I’ll let you do the honors here. Tell us what we now have for our listeners.

**Craig:** We now have official Scriptnotes hats. These are baseball style hats. They’ve got the name Scriptnotes written across the front. But why I love it so is because the S that begins and the S that ends the name Scriptnotes is the legendary cool S.

**John:** The cool S. It’s the very cool PT folder kind of Scriptnotes S. We’ve had T-shirts of this logo for a while, but Dustin Box, our designer, said, “Hey, how about hats?” And I said, “Absolutely.”

**Craig:** I gotta get a hat.

**John:** You gotta get a hat. You and I are both gentlemen with not a lot of hair on top of our heads. Hats are very important for us. Gotta protect our bald pates.

**Craig:** Hats are not fashion for us. Hats are self-care. I gotta get one of these. I’m ordering one of these. Can I order one now? How do I do it?

**John:** You can order one now.

**Craig:** How do I get a hat?

**John:** The same place you get our shirts. They are available on Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Just let them know they are embroidered rather than being printed. I think they should be great.

**Craig:** John, you could also get glassware.

**John:** Yeah, we have drinkware there.

**Craig:** Scriptnotes themed glassware. I gotta tell you, I love this, because what is my cocktail of choice?

**John:** An old-fashioned.

**Craig:** And where does an old-fashioned belong?

**John:** In an old-fashioned tumbler, so a short, squat, cylindrical glass.

**Craig:** It is a rocks glass. I’m gonna get one. I love it. I’m gonna do some shopping today. I’m losing money.

**John:** Absolutely. Always been a money-losing podcast, and now Craig is personally losing some funds to the Scriptnotes branding.

**Craig:** It’s like you’re watching Scarface snorting his own coke right now.

**John:** I’m excited for these hats. I’ve not gotten my first Scriptnotes hat, but I’m excited to wear one, although I do recognize that sometimes I’ll be out in the wild, I’ll be wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt, and people will come up to me like, “Hey, John.” It’s like, “How did you recognize me?” Oh, because you think that’s probably John August and he’s actually wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. But you know what? Let’s face it. We’re not that famous. Every now and again, somebody goes… I could hardly say, “Oh god, I can’t even walk outside.” I can totally walk outside.

**John:** We can totally walk outside. We are not at the level of an actual actor. We’re not at Glen Powell level of celebrity.

**Craig:** I like that. Good choice.

**John:** Good choice. I will say I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt this past week when I jumped out of an airplane for the first time.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you did what?

**John:** I went skydiving with my daughter. We went to a place in Oceanside. It’s a jump by the ocean kind of place. I was wearing my Scriptnotes shirt. I realized, oh, this is being filmed on the GoPro. Can I write this off? Basically, this is promotion for the Scriptnotes podcast. I decided no, I don’t think that’s ethically correct for me to do. But I did, I jumped out of a plane. It was actually fine and good. For me, it wasn’t personally terrifying. Aline was terrified on my behalf, but I was not terrified.

**Craig:** I am terrified. I will share with you Melissa Mazin’s philosophy, if I have not already on the program. It goes like this. If you do something like jump out of an airplane, go deep-sea diving, and you die, you deserve it. You deserve it. Now, I’m sure a lot of people listening who are avid skydivers are gonna feel very upset by that. I just want to remind them that’s what my wife says. That’s not me.

**John:** Blame it on Melissa there. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the video of me jumping out of a plane if people are curious to see me jumping out of a plane and want to see a Scriptnotes T-shirt in action.

I’ve done things like this. I’ve bungee jumped, which was much more terrifying, because – we can talk about agency here – bungee jumping, you actually have a lot of agency, because you are responsible for stepping off all by yourself. That is a hard thing to convince your body, which does not want to fall and die, that no, you have to go do this. That’s a tough thing to do. In the case of skydiving, I am strapped to the instructor, so I really have no agency. I’m gonna be out of this plane no matter what. I was like, “Might as well just go for it.”

**Craig:** That’s a huge distinction, because I did go rappelling once. Once. The moment where you sit back over air is basically like you just have to tell yourself to commit suicide. It’s the same feeling. It’s insane.

**John:** Craig, my palms are literally sweating just picturing that.

**Craig:** It’s horrible. Once you’ve done that, now you’re just going down the hill and it’s fine. But the moment where you just have to trust that this rope is going to hold you as you let yourself die… I could do that or I could do what I did yesterday, which is to solve the latest issue of Panda Magazine Puzzle Hunt with my friend Dave Shukan, in my seat, without falling off a hill.

**John:** They’re both thrilling. Only one will kill you potentially.

**Craig:** One is thrilling, and the other one is just sweaty and scary.

**John:** There’s a thing I’ve done which is similar to the skydiving. When we were living in France, we were in Chamonix, and we went paragliding, which is where you’re at the top of the mountain, and again, you are strapped to a person. The parachute is laid out on the snow behind you. You just start running forward and the parachute goes up. I guess it’s really a sail goes up. Then you jump off a cliff. But then you are literally just flying in the air. It’s 30 minutes. It’s incredibly relaxing and peaceful. You don’t have that sense of falling at any point.

I would say skydiving, the moments where you’re free-falling is incredibly loud in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and unpleasant. But then once the chute opens, it was just like paragliding again. I got to control the going to the left, going to the right. I was pulling on the ropes. I got to go through a hole in the clouds. That felt really cool.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The answer is no from Craig.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t think I’ll do it again. Just the hassle of getting down there and setting up… If I lived by an airstrip where I could just go on a random afternoon and just do it, I might. But it wasn’t that life-changing.

**Craig:** You didn’t get the bug for this?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** I’m not an adrenaline junkie, for sure. I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt. I could’ve potentially taken a tax write-off, but that would’ve been a not necessarily kosher thing to do, because corporations are under a lot of scrutiny these days. This is our bit of news here.

You and I both have loan-out corporations – and we’ve talked about this before on the show – which is when somebody wants to hire us to do some writing work, they are not hiring us directly. They are hiring a corporation that we control, and that corporation then hires us to do the work. It’s an abstraction that is very, very common in the film and television industry.

**Craig:** I don’t know if this is referring to… John, have you done the annual report to the Secretary of State of California? Is that what this is referring to?

**John:** Yeah. It’s a new requirement. Traditionally, when you set up a loan-out corporation, your attorney fills out this paperwork and creates this corporation. Then once per year, you have to cement this on-paper annual meeting that describes what happened to the corporation. It’s just very perfunctory. What has changed is that starting in January 2024, most entities like corporations or LLCs, partnerships, have these new US federal disclosures-

**Craig:** Federal.

**John:** … because of the Corporate Transparency Act. It’s actually a big deal, because if you do not file these reports properly, there’s civil and even criminal penalties. It’s all in an effort to combat money laundering.

You and I and our individual corporations but also the Scriptnotes LLC now have to file this new paperwork. Our law firms who generally set up these things have said, “We’re not doing that anymore. This is beyond the scope of things that we are able to do for you.” Most folks listening to this podcast who have loan-out corporations are going to have to do something different this year, which probably means bringing on an outside firm and paying them 100 bucks, 200 bucks to file this new paperwork that has to be filed every year.

**Craig:** I will not be filing the paperwork personally. Here’s the order of business. Buy Scriptnotes old-fashioned rocks glass. Buy Scriptnotes hat. Talk to business managers and lawyers about who is gonna fill out my new report. Then I’ll have lunch.

**John:** That’s what it is. For most of us, it is an email. It’s a little annoying thing. But if you are a listener who ignores this, I would say maybe don’t ignore this, because it’s this year that you have to start doing it, and everyone’s gonna be scrambling to do it.

The kinds of things that have to go in this new report are principal place of business, if you’ve hired full-time US employees, and if you’re a beneficial owner of the company, which you and I would both be that for Scriptnotes, legal name. We have to file your primary residential address or if you got a new passport or driver’s license. Basically things that could look shady in the sense of money laundering, all that stuff has to be disclosed.

**Craig:** I can imagine you running through all these things as you were free-falling through the sky.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Thinking, “Should I write this? Probably not.” You know what? That means that this law is doing its job. It’s making very small business owners think twice, while massive corporations will simply assign a division of A-holes to get around all of this.

**John:** What’s actually interesting is these new regulations apply to companies with 20 or fewer employees. I think because that’s who tends to have the money laundering kind of problems.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** That is gonna affect almost all of us, because unless you’re Shonda or Greg Berlanti, you’re gonna have 20 or fewer employees as a loan-out corporation.

**Craig:** I can’t even imagine that Shonda or Greg have more than 20 employees, because most of the employees are being hired and employed by the studio or network, for writers, etc. It would come down to producing partners, assistants. Then I don’t hire, for instance, our landscape folks. The only people that are hired through my company really are me and my producing partner, and that’s it.

**John:** But how about your chauffeur and your assistant butler? Those are things that should go through your loan-out, because they’re helping you get your writing done.

**Craig:** My chauffeur and my assistant butler I got from overseas.

**John:** That’s nice. Like an au pair service.

**Craig:** It’s an au pair/indentured servitude.

**John:** It’s good, because you’re giving them an opportunity. You’re letting them move to the United States. You have a little space in the back of the guesthouse. It’s a cabinet basically they can sleep underneath.

**Craig:** It’s under the stairs. I call it a Harry Potter suite. It’s lovely.

**John:** It’s themed. I really like that. It makes it really feel [crosstalk 00:11:56].

**Craig:** I love they made Harry Potter sleep under the stairs. That’s fantastic.

**John:** In our house, there is actually a little room underneath our stairs. Is it the same in your place? Can you get into that space underneath your stairs?

**Craig:** I cannot.

**John:** You don’t know what’s hidden there, basically. It could be anything underneath there.

**Craig:** I think the stairs are solid.

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** The stairs going up to your second story, they’re not solid.

**Craig:** Of course they’re not solid. I don’t know exactly what is under there.

**John:** I think Kevin Williamson hid something there for you. Somewhere down the road, it’s gonna come out.

**Craig:** We do have a screening room in the basement, which is under the stairs. That goes down itself. Maybe there is a person still under the stairs that I’m not aware of. I gotta talk to Kevin.

**John:** If things go mysteriously missing, yeah.

**Craig:** Wait, if you buy-

**John:** They have to disclose that. It’s in the standard residential buying of a property.

**Craig:** But I purchased my home from one of the most famous horror writers to ever live. Surely he left behind some kind of nightmare. I gotta check in with him.

**John:** Actually, I am thinking about the geography of when you go down the steps into the basement where the screening room is, there is that little nook where the popcorn machine was originally at some point. That’s kind of underneath the stairs. That could be that space.

**Craig:** I think that is. What is currently there is the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** By the way, we had the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse made in Europe. Folks made it there. I asked if I could have it at the end of the show, and everybody said sure. Shipping it to the United States was such a nightmare, because you had to declare it as a artwork. You had to pay customs. It had to have an assigned value. There needed to be so much paperwork filled out, I think in part because it also needed to be really carefully inspected, because it looked like the kind of thing you would fill with bags of cocaine.

**John:** It’s paper mâché, yeah.

**Craig:** It was so suspicious. I just kept going, “It’s from a show. I like it.” They were like, “Fill more papers out, please.”

**John:** Fortunately, there’s somebody on your payroll who just does that. It’s not the assistant butler. Who was it? Was it your vice accountant?

**Craig:** That was just my assistant Bo, who did a great job navigating the US customs people.

**John:** The thing about being an assistant is you never know what kind of weird stuff you have to figure out suddenly. Here’s a onetime only situation. Handle it.

**Craig:** Keeps you on your toes.

**John:** We have some follow-up. First off, Craig, you’ll be relieved to know there is a MoviePass movie now for you to watch.

**Craig:** There is a documentary on HBO that I will absolutely watch. It’s coming out a couple of weeks from now. It is a documentary about the rise and fall of MoviePass. But I think it should be subtitled “the thing that John and Craig predicted over and over and over.”

**John:** I’m a little upset that they did not interview you for this documentary, because come on. Who would be a better talking head than Craig Mazin on this?

**Craig:** I was really clear about it from the start.

**John:** You work for HBO, and you were available.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was. I don’t know. They seemed to concentrate, for some reason, on people that were actually involved. But I will say that the actual collapse of MoviePass, it was a moment that reminded me that the world still makes sense.

**John:** That there is gravity, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, because so many times, things happen, I’m like, “What the… ” That one at least, we were like, “Finally. Yes, there’s gravity. Exactly. Something that doesn’t make sense actually doesn’t make sense.” I’m gonna definitely give that one a watch. Of course, MoviePass, still out there. Zombie MoviePass trying to come back to life in some, I don’t know, new altered state. But the old MoviePass, oof.

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** I watched the trailer for the documentary. It looks like not only did their business plan make absolutely no sense, but then they were also spending money like drunken sailors.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this trailer. I want to say this trailer’s also the most HBO documentary trailer. It hits all the beats of an HBO documentary trailer. It feels exactly like what it should be.

**Craig:** They’re pretty good at what they do.

**John:** They know what they’re doing. We have talked about streaming ad breaks, so the idea that you write something and you produce a thing and it goes out there, and it might have act breaks already in there. But because of streaming, they make different choices about where those act breaks go. We asked for our listeners who had firsthand experience, who do this for a living, what the realities are on the ground. We had two folks write in. Drew, can you start us off with Lachlan?

**Drew Marquardt:** Lachlan in the UK writes, “I’ve been an editor for 12 years, and for much of that time I was working with one of the biggest broadcasters in the UK. Even if shows were delivered with specific ad break moments, often we would have to re-edit them to change where these ad breaks would happen. This is because we have a different amount of ad breaks in the UK than in other places like the US or Australia. Here, for a 30-minute slot we have one ad break, for a 60-minute slot we have two ad breaks, and so on. So often we would be joining up ad breaks, usually the old dip to black, and then the compliance team would dictate where the new ad breaks would happen.

“Unfortunately, these days, I believe they don’t use editors as much for this job, and the compliance team creates the ad breaks themselves. This means that even if you watch a show on VOD, it still has a title card that pops up every time the linear version would be going to a break, which gets very frustrating when trying to watch any HBO show in the UK. Sorry, Craig, this is the same with Chernobyl and The Last of Us.”

**John:** Again, what Lachlan is telling us is editing is a skill, and even editing like putting in the act breaks, getting out those fades to black is actually a skill. If you try to not use an actual editor to do it and it’s just some functionary who doesn’t have any experience with this, it’s gonna be unartful. It sounds like it’s unartful.

**Craig:** It is frustrating to hear that about the stuff that I’ve done. There are ways, of course, to find a spot and make a reasonable ad break in a show. But if the compliance team, which doesn’t care about any of that and is simply looking for, “Okay, at this point, at this point, at this point,” yeah, that is frustrating.

This is one of the bummers about working for a network that isn’t streaming only. That is that I have no control over how most people watch the shows I make for HBO, because most people are not watching it on HBO. Most people are watching it on the local service that HBO sells it to. For instance, in the UK, I believe that’s Sky. Sky just I guess just shoves stuff in. That’s a bummer.

You know what? I’m not gonna cry. People are watching it, and they can do the math. Listen. You know what a bigger problem is? The fact that people have motion smoothing on their TVs. That’s where I’m gonna cry. I can’t cry over this.

**John:** No. Zack wrote in with more information about streaming breaks. This is his experience doing a series where he had to put in the breaks. Let’s listen to Zack.

**Drew:** Zack writes, “Last year I edited a three-part series for Peacock. For every cut, we were asked to break up roughly 50-minute episodes into six acts, all with loose targets for duration. The execs noted that Act 1 should be longer than the subsequent acts, but overall there was a fair amount of flexibility. I found that mandatory act breaks impose some fun structural challenges on the team. We might send a viewer into a break with a question that we’d answer at the top of the next act or leave a loose end that we’d pay off in two acts down the road.

“We were forced to build well-defined phrases with sharp edges ending each act. Do writers think in terms of sharp edges the way that editors do? A sharp edge often means a clean break between scenes that shifts point of view, shifts a story from an A story to a B story, cleanses the palette, or maybe does all three. Too many sharp edges can leave you feeling a bit disjointed, while too few can make for a soupy edit. Often, the best sharp edges mark the end of the phrase or a movement. If you have a flowy, prelapsey series of scenes all following a single character, story, or theme, that sharp edge will be all the more noticeable when it shows up.”

**John:** What Zack is describing, I think he might’ve been cutting a reality show or a documentary show, because it sounds like it wasn’t something that was written for act breaks. There wasn’t a writer involved in determining where those things go in. They might be looking at, “Okay, given the footage we’ve got, what’s an interesting question to leave at the end of an act break? How do we get people to come back after the act break?” which is really the job that writers have traditionally done in traditional television, which is we think of act breaks as moments that have rising action, that end on a question mark, so that there’s a real intriguing moment to come back. That was very much the art of TV writing for 30, 40 years.

**Craig:** This is the way it should be done, because there are things that are not written with ad breaks in mind. I think that if you are writing a piece that is meant to be viewed all in one, you shouldn’t be worried about this other part. This other part is not your problem. But then if there are artful editors, like Zack, who can at least make it decent and reasonable when it is chopped up, fantastic. But we need those people. They can’t just be arbitrary.

**John:** I think AIs or just human eyes can actually figure out, “Okay, this is the end of one scene. This is the start of another scene. But is that the right place for an act break?”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** It’s not necessarily the right choice. If you were to delay that 30 more seconds, it might be a more narratively useful place to put that break.

**Craig:** Also, it’s more valuable for the people advertising, because if it breaks at a dumb spot, that’s where people might just go, “Meh. Actually, meh.”

**John:** “I’m done.”

**Craig:** “I’m done. I’m not coming back.” Soap operas, that’s all they ever did was somebody would go, “You didn’t know? She’s alive.” Cut. Soap, soap, soap, soap, and then back.

**John:** We’ll talk about this more in the cold open section, but I’ve been working on this project that is a bunch of episodes. These are designed without traditional act breaks. But I also know that ultimately there will be act breaks going into this thing. While it’s not the top of my mind, I am thinking about, where would you slot in these ad breaks down the road? I feel pretty good about these episodes since there are natural places where you can put this thing in and it won’t disrupt the flow, and in some cases will give you that sense like, “Oh, I’m curious what’s going to happen next.”

Sometimes it’s just basic good writing. Scenes should end on a moment that has an energy going into that cut so you want to come and see what the next scene is. Most episodes of TV that are written without intentional act breaks should have that kind of momentum that you can get through it if there is an ad inserted there.

**Craig:** I agree. If, for instance, HBO said, “Hey, everybody is gonna watch your show on HBO in some streaming method. Some people, however, are paying less money and it will be an ad-supported experience. Where would you like to put these breaks?” I would take the hour or two with my editors to come up with those moments. The problem for me is that’s not what’s happening.

**John:** They don’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s what they did with Fallout. Even as I’m watching without ads-

**John:** It fades out.

**Craig:** … it fades out and then it comes back. But for me, it doesn’t matter. I could send it that way, and whatever the company is that shows it to people in, I don’t know, India, they have their own needs, and it won’t have anything to do with those things I put in, and so it’ll be even worse. I’m just gonna not think about it.

**John:** What I admire about Fallout, because they clearly anticipated people are gonna encounter these ad breaks and we’re gonna plan for them, it’s not just about fading to black. It’s also thinking about what is the music doing here, because that is what’s so awkward. If it’s just wedged in, music goes up to a moment and then it doesn’t pay off, or then you’re coming back from an ad break and suddenly we’re at this very high level, like, “Why is the music up here?”

**Craig:** Exactly. Because you will only watch Fallout on Amazon, no matter where you live, they have the luxury of dictating that. I thought that was smart.

**John:** Let’s move on to Andrew who wrote in about email anxiety. We had a previous listener who was so terrified and so nervous to send out an email because they wanted everything to be perfect and they got hung up on it. Andrew has a suggestion.

**Drew:** Andrew writes, “I was listening to your podcast where your listener Richard had anxiety about sending an email, and I had a suggestion. Recently, I was listening to Brian Grazer on someone’s podcast, and he had a strategy for getting the most positive response from emails. Apparently, what Grazer does is he watches the stock market and looks for when the studio he wants to work with has their stock go up. It’s on the day that their stock goes up that he sends emails to people he wants to finance his projects. Maybe this method would make Richard a little less anxious.”

**John:** First off, Andrew, I don’t think we said it was okay for you to listen to any other podcasts. You shouldn’t have been even listening to anything that Brian Grazer said, because you shouldn’t have been listening to any other podcasts. Scriptnotes will tell you everything you need to know about the film and television industry. That’s what we’re here for, not other people’s podcasts.

That stipulated, Craig, this is your strategy, I know, because you are tracking the stock market every day, and you’re only making the calls based on how well a certain company’s stock is doing.

**Craig:** No disrespect to Mr. Brian Grazer, but I don’t think this is gonna ever work. First of all, most of the people that we writers are sending emails to are not the owners of the company or people looking to exercise massive amounts of stock options. But even if they were, whatever the stock market happens to be doing that day can’t possibly be that meaningful to these people. Hopefully, the people that are at that level understand that any day’s movement, other than some insane delta, is not relevant to anything. This feels like a way to make yourself feel better about something. That feels like an attempt to calculate your way to success, which in this business is easier said than done.

**John:** I want to give full benefit of the doubt to Brian Grazer. Let’s imagine he’s talking to Bob Iger. If the Disney stock is just bouncing around its normal amount, I can’t imagine it’s gonna make any difference, because Bob Iger is smart enough to know the stocks can bounce around. Now, if the stock was suddenly down like 25 percent-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … then yes, it’s not the moment to try to sell your expensive thing there. I completely get that. But small normal things, no way.

**Craig:** Also, none of us are selling anything to Bob Iger. He’s 12 levels removed from that. It does not make sense. It’s adorable. It’s adorable.

**John:** Last bit of follow-up here. We’ve talked in the past about AI being used for coverage and that AI is really good at summarizing things, but we’re very suspicious about AI providing any kind of critical analysis of what material actually is or its worth or its merit. Greg in Illinois gave us his experience with The Film Fund.

**Drew:** Greg in Illinois writes, “I recently stumbled upon an interesting example of AI being used for feedback and coverage. The Film Fund is an organization that provides resources to filmmakers to produce short films. Their flagship program is a competition in which the filmmaker pays $35 to submit a one-sentence description of their film’s premise and how they would use the funds if they win. Winning films receive up to 10 grand. For an additional fee of $14, winners can opt for feedback on their one-sentence pitch.

“In a Reddit thread from last year, a couple of contestants complained that the feedback they received was worthless. The founder of The Film Fund replied, assuring them the situation would be much better in future contests, because they’re gonna use AI to generate feedback. These are his exact words. ‘Going forward, we’re implementing a different approach with our feedback service to ensure a consistent and high level of quality. We’ve trained a custom AI model explicitly on what our judges look for in entries and what makes a good pitch in the eyes of the judges. We’ve tested the output by this AI model thoroughly, and it greatly exceeds the feedback responses we were sending previously.’

“To his credit, he appears to be responsive and reasonably transparent. I don’t get the impression he’s trying to scam anyone. But it’s a bit surprising that he doesn’t perceive how this might undermine whatever credibility the contest has.”

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Here’s what I’m saying. Transparent doesn’t mean good. If someone says, “I am going to rob you,” that’s transparent. Doesn’t mean it’s good. This feels dumb. You’ve spent $49 on a thing that you shouldn’t have probably spent $49 on. This AI coverage, I will not believe that The Film Fund’s special training on what they’re looking for is worth $14 that you couldn’t get from a normal, free ChatGPT or whatever, which you shouldn’t be using anyway for feedback on your writing project.

**Craig:** I’ve never heard of The Film Fund, but I’m looking at their website. What I don’t see is that they are registered as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, meaning they’re a business. I see no mention of being a charity of any kind. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any of it. I don’t know if they’re a for-profit company or not. But I will say if you have to pay money to submit a one-sentence description of your film’s premise, that’s ridiculous.

You’re paying $35 for somebody to read a sentence? And then for an additional fee of $14, which is a very odd number – it’s an even number, but it’s a curious number – they now will give you an AI feedback based on the input. The AI’s trained on what the judges did. The judges’ feedback is the very thing that they are also admitting was useless. This is ridiculous!

**John:** It is ridiculous.

**Craig:** It is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. Winning films receive up to $10,000. I don’t know how many they’ve made.

**John:** I’m looking at the examples and winners. They show how much prize money these different people get. They show the example pitch sentences here.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** We’ll look at their thing.

**Craig:** Look at this. Look at this. First of all, on their examples, no one has received $10,000. The most anyone has received to make a film is $6,000. Now, if I have, I don’t know, 15,000 people sending me 35 bucks and I hand out $6,000, okay. But then there are some people who, quote unquote, won a prize of $400.

**John:** Or a three-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

**Craig:** What is this? What is this?

**John:** What is this?

**Craig:** What is this?

**John:** I think it was created just to annoy Craig.

**Craig:** It almost seems like it was. It literally seems like it was.

**John:** AI is being used to just create sites to annoy Craig. That would be a good use of AI is just to build websites that are specifically there to frustrate Craig.

**Craig:** This is really frustrating. I don’t know if it’s the deals that they make money from all the $35 and then they give some out. I guess I would have to look more about them to see. I love this. I hate these people so much. In their frequently asked questions, here’s a frequently asked question. “Do I need to give credit to The Film Fund?” The answer is, “Yes, and we’ll be honored.” How can you be honored by a credit that you are making mandatory? How is that an honor?

**John:** I initially thought this was something European or British, because there are, like The Irish Film Fund, these film funds that are actually national funds, where it’s a whole system by which they help support their local film communities. That’s a valid thing. But by calling yourself The Film Fund, it seems like it’s not even a competition; it’s just a thing.

**Craig:** It’s just a thing. They say, “Where does the money come from? It comes from filmmakers like you who have also submitted their sentence to The Film Fund.” They’re just making people pay to ask a question.

**John:** I do like on the fact, “Why are you doing this?” the answer is, “We know there’s a simpler way to fund films.” That’s a real answer.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “Who are the judges? You can check them out here.” Let’s take a look through here.

**Craig:** Let’s see. No offense to any of these people. One of the judges is the founder and CEO of The Film Fund.

**John:** I’ll take a screenshot, just because this of course could change. But I do want to point out that at least on my thing, there’s an ad being served underneath one of these people’s photos that says, “Notice this site contains real police records, background reports.” An ad is breaking up this thing, making it look like this person is actually a felon, which is not accurate.

**Craig:** The folks here do not appear to be what you would imagine would be judging what films should be financed. I’m sure they’re all excellent people and valid in their own rights. But there’s a certain expectation of a kind of level of accomplishment for judges. What we see over and over in these kinds of things is that’s not what you get. This is a do not recommend for me.

**John:** I will say four of these people I’ve noticed are all from Lehigh University, which I don’t know of.

**Craig:** Oh, Lehigh University, it’s in Pennsylvania.

**John:** Which is the center of all film production.

**Craig:** That is very strange. We have college friends who sat around, and I’m not suggesting they were high or drinking, but they were sitting around going, “How do we make money?” This is operating like the lottery.

**John:** Here’s what I kind of respect. Over the years on Scriptnotes, we’ve criticized so many of these things that are like, “Send us your scripts and we will judge them.” Here they say, “How do we improve on this process? We don’t have to even read the script. We just have to read one sentence.”

**Craig:** “We read one sentence. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna charge people $35.” Usually, it’s $35 to send your finished film into our festival or send your finished script in. No, $35 to send your log line, and then an extra, if you want a little bonus action for our premium service, we’ll have ChatGPT barf some crap out about it, for free for us but $14 for you. Thumbs down. Do not like. This seems very silly. I’m sure they’re gonna yell at us now.

**John:** Yeah, which is fine, but Drew is ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** When they start these things, I’m sure everybody’s like, “At some point, John and Craig are just gonna swing a bat at us, because they don’t like these things.” It doesn’t mean we’re right. It’s just our opinion, man.

**John:** That’s all we can give. Hey, while we’re having a little bit of rants, I have a rant that I’ve just wanted to talk about for a while, and I think this is the moment to talk about it. Can we please stop sending Word documents around on emails? So often, I will get something that is a Word document that should’ve been a pdf. The problem if you send a Word document is like, okay, am I supposed to edit this? What do you want me to do? No, this is actually a press release, but you’re putting it in a Word document so that it looks terrible when I open it in QuickLook or Pages, because I don’t actually have Word installed on my computer. There’s no reason to send a Word document. Send a pdf or a link to a webpage. Do not send me a Word document. It’s so frustrating for me.

**Craig:** It is a rare thing for me to send a Word document. I only do it when I am essentially saying to somebody, “I’m sending this to you, and I’m specifically sending it as a Word document because I want you to have the ability to edit it if you’d like.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That is the only reason.

**John:** If it’s something you want me to be able to copy and paste out of it, you can do that from a pdf.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s literally only like, “Hey, I’ve written this. I’m thinking you’re gonna want to change a few sentences here and there. Do that, send it back to me.” For that, great. But otherwise-

**John:** But I’ll say a Google Doc could be better than that, because that way you can just send the link and they can edit that link.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** For WGA stuff, whenever we have to figure out what’s the press release we’re sending out, what’s the thing, we did it as Google docs, because that way we could actually all edit it and look at it. A little more sympathy for sometimes sending the Excel spreadsheet, because sometimes there is stuff they need to tweak and move around there. But also Google Sheets is available, and maybe try that instead.

**Craig:** Those of us who solve puzzles for a not-living use Google Sheets all the time. Incredibly useful.

**John:** So good. So useful. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the cold open. We’ve talked about the cold open several times on the program before. I know it’s a little bit of a repeat. But I was reminded of how important and how useful the cold open is because of this project I’ve been working on, because I’m getting the chance to write a bunch of cold opens, which is so wonderful and exciting.

I thought we might start by talking about what we’re talking about, because obviously, every episode of television is going to open with something. Sometimes that’s a teaser for what’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s continually the action from what happened in the previous episode. If it was a cliffhanger, it might go right back to this moment. But you also have the option in television to open with characters you’ve never seen before and just establish a brand new thread of something. It’s a great way to introduce a new character who’s going to be important to the series or at least important to that episode.

I just love a cold open. It’s just one of the most powerful things we have in episodic television. Sometimes people are not using the full power of the cold open. I want to just sing the praises of and talk through how it works, when to use it, why we love it so much.

**Craig:** You have a choice every single time. There is no such thing as an episode that can’t have one. The first decision you have to make is do I want to put one here or not.

They are enormously fun. They are fun for the audience. They work like appetizers. They are wonderfully free of rules. They are not bound into the normal narrative timeline, nor are they bound by the normal rules of who’s that and where am I and what’s going on. They can be mysteries. They can feature people that you never see again.

They’re often great ways to reveal information. You can have an episode where 20 minutes in, one character starts explaining something to another and you’re like, “Okay.” You could also just start the scene with one character explaining something to another and you don’t even know who they are or where they are. You’re leaning forward, and then you get to the end of it, and it’s a little short story that has a twist or something that makes you go, “Whoa.”

Then the show starts, and now you’re fully appetized and ready to go into the main storyline. The main storyline feels like an entrée has been served. Psychologically, I find it very comforting. I don’t do a cold open in every episode myself, but quite a few. Quite a few have them.

**John:** I think the quintessential cold open, the one we’ll put a link to in the show notes, is the introduction to Desmond’s character in Lost. Lost, I think it’s in Season 2, opens with this person we’ve never met before. We’re not even seeing his face. He’s waking up. He’s going through his daily routine. He’s inside someplace, but we’re not sure what it is. We would assume naturally as an audience that it is going to be one of the flashbacks that the show is known for, where you’re establishing who people were off the island. Ultimately, we’re gonna reveal that, oh, no, he’s actually down in this hatch that we’ve been working to figure out what’s inside there. It is a tremendous sequence, and it’s done so, so well and sets up this character that we’re now intrigued by and just really broadens the geography of what Lost could be about.

That’s I think what I love so much about a cold open is that you are creating these scenes that you could not put anywhere else in the episode. Almost by definition, if you’re starting in some brand new place, it would be very hard to slide this anywhere else in an episode. It basically has to start, and in many cases should start before the opening titles. You need all of the viewer’s attention. You need it to not be in the chain of events of the normal episode. Once you’ve started the normal sequence, it’s very hard to stop that and go to some place that’s completely different to establish a new person, a new place, a new way that the show’s going to work.

**Craig:** As you described that, something occurred to me that I don’t think has occurred to me before. That is that a cold open reveals a mystery to the audience with nobody in between. In the normal method of plotting in the main body of your story, when there are mysteries, they are discovered by and solved by and revealed to characters, but not in a cold open. In a cold open, it’s just you. That is a very exciting thing for the very reasons you said. It can’t really happen in the middle.

Once we are in the perspective of our main characters, we must stay there. We can certainly see some things they don’t see, but we can’t have scenes that are speaking directly to us. But you can absolutely have that at the beginning, before you begin the main storyline. That’s a great example where instead of somebody finding a tunnel, going through something, or opening the hatch itself and discovering this man, the show says now, this is just for you, directly for you only.

**John:** The point of view is the audience’s point of view rather than any of the one character’s points of view, which is great, so powerful. Honestly, some shows are built around this kind of idea. Law and Order almost always starts with the discovery of a crime by people we’ve not seen before.

**Craig:** Thunk thunk.

**John:** Thunk thunk. Poker Face, one of the things I love so much about that show is, generally we’re starting with a crime itself. It’s a question of when the hell is Natasha Lyonne gonna show up. You don’t know. She’s gonna come up sometime. Generally, we’re not starting with her.

**Craig:** She’s gonna be there when she gets there, and that’s no big deal.

**John:** She might be in the background of something or we see her arrive and we don’t know how are these two things gonna connect. That’s the joy of this. I love cold opens. Also, the sense that you cannot slide it anywhere else in time, this project we’re working on, has really made me appreciate, god, day and night is so tough, because there’s so many times where you would love to move this scene after that scene, and day and night is killing you, where this scene can’t happen before, because then you’re creating an extra day that is impossible. I’m sure you’ve encountered that in your writing as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been more of an issue for me when I was writing movies than television, because you have a little bit more of a timeline flexibility there. But the day and night situation, especially as we enter this next storytelling phase of The Last of Us, is important, and so you do have to stay within the bounds of it. But that’s another reason why a cold open is so valuable.

**John:** Yeah. You’re not tethered to the timeline at all, which is so nice.

**Craig:** At all. Doesn’t even matter what year it is. You could be wherever. You could be in the future. You could be in the past. You could do whatever you want. That is freeing, and also, I think the audience appreciates it. They appreciate that they get spoken to directly without any rules whatsoever, before they settle into the traditional experience of the show.

**John:** Yeah, this cold open I just wrote covers a 14-year time span for a character we’ve never met before. It’s delightful to have the opportunity. We’re going from the past into a time beyond when the events of the series are happening. It’s delightful to give you a sense of like, oh, this is bigger than just this one moment in front of you. We’ll see if that makes it through the end, but that was the intention behind it.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. I see the first one here is from Matt. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Matt writes, “As an Asian American actor, I’ve gone from being basically Johnny exposition guy in every television show and movie I was in, to now seeing true parts with complex, interesting characters being offered to me. One of the reasons I decided to start writing was because I was tired of being the furniture and wanted to be the interior designer. Since I keenly feel the plight of being the guy asked to give massive exposition dumps, what are some ways that writers can give the necessary exposition without relying on a single character for the purpose or at least make it interesting?”

**John:** What I love so much about Matt’s entry point here is that as an Asian American actor, he feels like he’s Johnny exposition guy. It never really occurred to me, but yeah, I could totally see that. I could completely imagine that the size that he’s getting for an episodic role, he’s just the guy who explains the thing and actually has no character beyond that. Hopefully, that’s changing. It sounds like it’s changing for Matt here in his experience.

We’ve talked on exposition a ton before. But Matt’s instinct here is that, like, god, it’s the worst when one character has to do all the heavy lifting. It’s so true.

**Craig:** Yes. For writers, we’ll do a very, very short sum-up. It is just as important to characterize the person receiving the information and to understand why they want the information and why they need the information and also how they feel about the information as the information is delivered. Relationship.

The scene where somebody is – we say an exposition dump. If it’s an exposition dump and that’s how you’re describing it, you’re doing it wrong. It is a conversation between two people who have a knowledge gap. The knowledge that is being imparted needs to impact the other person. The way it’s imparted needs to be crafted. It needs to feel like a little story. It needs to be interesting enough that people lean in, because when we say exposition dump, what we’re really saying is boring. But people can explain things in a way that is fascinating. You just have to write it well. So write well.

**John:** A recent conversation we had on this podcast, I think you were the one who was talking about how an explanation does happen in real life. People do explain things to each other in real life.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** Look for ways in which this would happen in real life, and that’s a way to hopefully keep that scene grounded and unapologetic about its need to get the information out there, because it’s being given from one character to another and not just to the audience.

**Craig:** Think of it as teaching. It’s not exposition. It’s teaching. You’re teaching somebody something. Teaching means that one character takes into account the other character’s education level, information level, what they deserve to know, what they ought to know, and then lays it out in a structured way so that they get it. That is as much fun to write as anything as far as I’m concerned.

But when we think of it as an exposition dump, what we’re really saying is, Character B needs to know and the audience needs to know a bunch of crap. Just have some guy say it. That’s not artful. That is not looking at it as an opportunity. That’s looking at it as a chore.

**John:** I would also say look for moments within those conversations where information is coming out, to have it not just be about that information, but there actually be some character not necessarily in conflict, but some challenge, some revelation that there’s something more there. A scene in which a character says, “Yeah, I knew that, because I’ve actually been following your career over these years.” That’s interesting. That makes us lean in and doesn’t just feel like, okay, now we’re being told this thing. Look for moments where there’s actually some interesting character moment happening there that’s not just about the text.

**Craig:** Yeah, agreed.

**John:** Another question here. It looks like Dean wants to ask us about titles.

**Drew:** Dean writes, “What makes a good title? Does it have to be unique more than it has to be relevant to the theme of the movie? Does a good title help get a script made, or is it just a good script that gets scripts made? Do writers even get the final say on titles, or is that all up to Brian in marketing? What are the best titles you’ve come across, and have you noticed any trends in titles?”

**Craig:** That’s a whole discussion.

**John:** That’s a whole episode. Titles are crucially important and yet the writer who has spent so much time thinking about the right title for their movie does not have the final say. The second Charlie’s Angels was Charlie’s Angels: Forever, it was Charlie’s Angels: Halo, and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle came because the marketing person always wanted to do something called Full Throttle, and that became Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** But yes, titles are important, because it is the first idea a person has about your script, about your movie is gonna be that title. So yeah, it does matter.

**Craig:** There was a trend – I don’t know if it’s still continued – where scripts that were going out, original screenplays, needed to have bizarro titles, long, bizarre, weird titles, because that was what was jumping out, because people were tired of the short, punchy title. But by the time things make it to a movie theater, they generally do have the short, punchy title. Yes, it is up to Brian in marketing.

A screenplay with a boring title I think is at a disadvantage. But if it’s what we’d call a good old-fashioned punchy title or a weirdo title or a title that is somewhat provocative, just to get them to get to Page 1, that’s really all it is, just literally to Page 1, and then off you go. Try to not have a title that feels like a rip-off of something else, just a blatant rip-off. By the time you get to the movie theater, the title itself is not up to you.

Famously, the movie I’m thinking of is title-cursed is Shawshank Redemption. It’s a wonderful film. It was released into theaters, and nobody went to it, because nobody knew what the word “Shawshank” or “redemption” meant, and certainly not the two words together. It just said nope, don’t come here. Then eventually, people found the movie and it is beloved. But it was a flop in the theaters, likely because of the title. But putting Shawshank Redemption on the cover of a screenplay that you’re trying to sell, no problem at all. None. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

**John:** Unforgiven was The Cut-Whore Killings.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ve talked before on the podcast, I think, about there are rules about titles. The MPAA I believe is the one who has a title registry. If you have a movie that’s coming out with a title that is too much like another title, there can be a challenge. There can be a whole issue. Basically, so we don’t have two movies with the exact same title coming out at the same time.

My movie The Nines was coming out the same year as there was a movie Nine, and the Nine and a Half movie. We had registered our title first, and so we had to give permission for the other people to have their titles. It all worked out. But there is a reason why you don’t see too much of a log jam with the people with the same titles coming out the same year.

**Craig:** Yes. First movie I ever had out in theaters, the script was Space Cadet. Turned out Lucas had squatted on that one with the MPAA. I still haven’t seen his Space Cadet film, but we had to change our title. Did I ever tell you my crazy [bleeps] story about this?

**John:** I want to hear the [bleeps] story.

**Craig:** I’m telling everybody the [bleeps] story. I’m in a room with [bleeps]. Already interesting. He says, “Hey, I have registered a lot of titles with the MPAA. I tell my assistants, if you see some interesting words, I go and I register it, because it doesn’t cost that much.”

**John:** It’s domain squatting.

**Craig:** Literally. Then he goes, “Other people happen to need the title, they pay me.” He was literally domain squatting. He goes, “But some of these would be great movies, so I’m gonna give you some names.” He goes, “Oh, this is my favorite. This has to be a movie, so tell me if you want to write this.” By the way, by “this,” he means title, Body Bag. I’m like, A, in my brain, I don’t think that is a very good title, and B, no. But I was fascinated by the thought process of seeing the phrase “body bag,” picking up the phone, spending the whatever it cost, $5,000 or something, to register that title with the MPAA, even though you have nothing, and then asking writers to write a script for a title.

**John:** It’s not even IP. It’s awesome. I love it.

**Craig:** It’s nothing.

**John:** It actually reminds me of this past week. I was approached to do this movie. There’s a director who wants to do this movie. He basically has a story space. He has a cool deck of cool images. This is a filmmaker who could make something really cool. But there was actually no narrative to this. It was exciting, but also it made me really recognize how much we need constraints.

The fact there was basically no constraints other than it looks like this, it was tough to think about what is the story. What are constraints that are interesting to me? What are the things that I want to avoid about the kind of movie that would have this as a pitch deck? Once I got that narrowed down, then it could go like, oh, okay, this is probably what the movie actually wants to be or what’s interesting to me. But the lack of constraints, where it’s just, here’s an image or here is a title called Body Bag, it’s just too open.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** It’s harder because there’s nothing to push against. There’s no walls to it.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** Let’s get to a question from Spencer here. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Spencer writes, “My writing partner Parker and I just finished a new draft of a project that draws on our extremely unusual relationship. You see, I’m a wheelchair user, due to a form of muscular dystrophy. For years before we started writing together, Parker was my friend, roommate, and live-in caregiver. Our script is a crime genre buddy comedy that follows two people in a similar situation as they try to figure out the limits of their obligation to one another.

“Though one of the things I’m most proud of is the level of specificity we were able to bring to the story, I worry that readers and producers will find it too specific. We’ve felt this concern since the very beginning and have leaned heavily into genre conventions and broad-ish comedy, hoping to ease audiences into the often alien way of life that a disability entails. Do you have any strategies or recommendations for taking out a script that deals with such a particular context? And given the reports of the belt tightening across the industry, the representation boom seems over. Are we too late?”

**Craig:** Spencer, you’re asking a question that I think presumes more than exists, meaning I don’t think anybody is actually reading things through the lens of how specific is this or how authentic is this. I think they’re just reading through things to say, will an audience be entertained, moved, feel something, appreciate what we’re doing here? It sounds like you’ve tried to deliver entertainment, because you’re talking about leaning into genre conventions and delivering broad comedy.

I think the things that are unique to your voice and your writing partner’s voice are the things that are valuable in the script. Otherwise, anyone could do it. I don’t think there’s a specific strategy or recommendation here, other than to say when you submit the script, it’s important for people to know that you are in a wheelchair, because the concern will not be, uh-oh, somebody in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair. The concern will be, uh-oh, somebody not in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair.

The representation boom, I can’t speak to that, but the representation concern still certainly exists. I think people are looking for authentic voices when we’re talking about things like, for instance, living with disabilities.

**John:** I completely agree with Craig. Really what matters is what is the person’s reaction to this. Are they enjoying the script that they’re reading and can imagine a movie that an audience will enjoy reading? That’s all great. The specificity that you bring hopefully is just making the script better for its own sake.

I would consider including maybe not a preface page, but maybe a page at the end to say, “Oh, so you know, I actually am a wheelchair user. I’m not some sort of person pretending this experience.” That could be useful just for a person who reads the script without knowing who you actually are.

Obviously, we want your movie to get made. That’d be fantastic. But also, this thing will serve as a calling card for you. The fact that it reflects your own experience, when you come in to have that meeting or get on Zoom to have that meeting, it’s gonna be great that they actually have something to connect you with, like, “Oh, these guys wrote this funny script about the situation, and these are the guys.” That is useful to you when you have those general meetings and you start talking about writing stuff for other people. I think you made the right choices. I hope your script is good.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Let’s wrap it up there. We have a couple more questions we’ll save for a future episode. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, I see you have a One Cool Thing listed here.

**Craig:** I do. John, are you a nail biter or a nail clipper?

**John:** I’m a nail clipper. I’ve never bit my nails.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. I have been biting my nails for so long, but I decided to stop. I stopped for I guess 2024. It was, by the way, not difficult. Not difficult. One of the things that has made it not difficult, one of the best gifts I ever got, from my intrepid assistant, Allie Chang, she gave me a pair of Suwada nail clippers. That’s Suwada, S-U-W-A-D-A. Do you have these, John?

**John:** I don’t believe I do, but now I’m looking them up to see what they are.

**Craig:** Oh, baby.

**John:** Oh, look at them. They look so different. They look more like pliers. Wow.

**Craig:** Exactly. They look like pliers or wire cutters. They’re made by a Japanese company called Suwada. They are so superior to the standard nail-clipping device that we can pick up anywhere, because they have so much better leverage, and the curved nature of the clipping edge itself just is so lovely and fits so right. They work like a dream. A standard nail clipper thing is, what, $8? This thing is $85. But if you’re gonna use it for the rest of your life, couldn’t recommend it more highly.

**John:** It also feels like a nice gift for a person who obviously does need a gift.

**Craig:** Yes, you can’t go wrong with this one. For somebody that was never a nail clipper, now I look forward to it. If I’m rubbing my thumb against my index finger and I feel a little like there’s too much nail there, I’m like, “Oh, I get home, I’m getting my Suwada nail clippers out. Kaching. Kaching.”

**John:** How much did you say nail clippers cost? I almost felt like there was a “how much could a banana cost” moment there, because I think cheap nail clippers are even cheaper than you think.

**Craig:** I was saying $8.

**John:** I think they’re like two bucks. They’re like two bucks.

**Craig:** Two bucks. You’re getting what you pay for with the two buck nail clipper. The handles are kind of this lovely texturized rubber or something like that. Also, it’s a particularly good gift, I think, for a dad, because just standard dads love tools. This is a tool. This isn’t a grooming device. It’s a tool.

**John:** It’s a meaningful tool.

**Craig:** It’s a butch-coded nail clipper.

**John:** That’s what we like. Absolutely. It also feels like for people who have their premium knives that they want to treasure and own, it’s the same kind of thing. Get the best tool for the job.

**Craig:** It’s a good tool.

**John:** I have two little One Cool Things. The first is an episode of Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a podcast that many people have probably heard of where they take an existing song, generally a pop song, and they interview the people who made it and go through the stems and figure out how the song came to be, and just interview things. It’s a short episode, like 15 minutes. It’s great. I’ve enjoyed listening to that podcast.

But one episode I want to point people to is Madonna’s episode on Hung Up, which is a great song. It’s the interview with Madonna, over 40 years we’ve known Madonna, the most direct and just work-focused I’ve ever heard. She’s so focused and smart on it. She’s not defensive. She’s not just doing any of the normal Madonna things you’d expect. Talking about how she and the producer came up with Hung Up and the different iterations they went through, what worked, what didn’t work, trying to get the sample from Abba and hand-writing a letter and going to meet with Abba individually. It just made me really, I don’t know, respect her as a songwriter and producer more than I ever had before. Song Exploder’s Hung Up on Madonna.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My second One Cool Thing is The Ladder, which is a great new experience from the folks who made Lab Rat, the escape room that we love so much.

**Craig:** Hatch Escapes.

**John:** Hatch Escapes. Craig and I were both Kickstarter backers of this thing. We went and played it with a group of 8 people, 10 people last week. It was just terrifically well done. It is different than an escape room. It’s more of an experience. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s all the things you would expect in that escape room in terms of puzzles, but the goal is not to escape, but to do something different. It is replayable in ways that are really clever. I just think it’s a really great evolution of the form.

I want to commend Tommy Wallach and everybody else who put together The Ladder. If you’re in Los Angeles and you love escape rooms, you should book a time for The Ladder at Hatch Escapes. It’s just really, really well done.

**Craig:** I’m waiting to return to LA from production here. Once I do, The Ladder is high up on my list of things to get to.

**John:** It’s gonna be great.

**Craig:** I’m very excited for that.

**John:** Craig, you will see that you are actually a part of the experience itself. I don’t want to spoil any more than that. But you will see Craig Mazin as part of the experience if you go take your time through The Ladder.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Don’t know him.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson, in an homage to Severance, which actually feels very much like The Ladder. It all fits together nicely. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and hoodies. They’re all great. Oh, and drinkware now too. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau, so get your stuff there.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the new [indiscernible 01:03:16] chatty voice features of OpenAI and what it means and how we feel about it. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Before we start, a little context. Craig and I recorded this segment about OpenAI before Scarlett Johansson called shenanigans on the voice that was being used. If you’re wondering why we’re not talking about that, it’s because it hadn’t come out yet.

Craig, recently, OpenAI had a demo for their new features in ChatGPT-4o, which is their omni-media thing, which does a lot of normal ChatGPT stuff but also could handle images and audio and speech all natively. It’s just much, much faster and can interact with you in a chat fashion more quickly and in ways that just feel novel and new.

I’m going to play one little clip. This is a guy named Rocky who is talking to ChatGPT on his phone. Over the course of it, he’s gonna put on a stupid hat. That’s the only thing you should know if you’re not watching this video.

**Rocky:** In a few minutes I’m gonna be interviewing at OpenAI. Have you heard of them?

**ChatGPT:** OpenAI? Huh? Sounds vaguely familiar. Kidding, of course. That’s incredible, Rocky. What kind of interview?

**Rocky:** It’s for a software engineering role, but I just need to know, do I look presentable, professional?

**ChatGPT:** Rocky, you definitely have the “I’ve been coding all night” look down, which could actually work in your favor. Maybe just run a hand through your hair or lean into the mad genius vibe. Your enthusiasm is what’s really gonna shine through.

**Rocky:** I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m just gonna throw this on. What do you think?

**ChatGPT:** Oh, Rocky, that’s quite a statement piece. I mean, you’ll definitely stand out. Though maybe not in the way you’re hoping for an interview.

**Rocky:** Okay. I got it, I got it.

**John:** Craig, what is your reaction to Rocky’s discussion with OpenAI?

**Craig:** The OpenAI personality I find toxically positive.

**John:** People describe it as like a kindergarten teacher.

**Craig:** Yes, like a bizarrely positive and a little bit condescending, slightly patronizing, like, “Oh, Rocky, you silly billy.” I didn’t believe any of it. I’m impressed. Certainly, it’s cool that an AI can look at an image, parse out what it’s seeing, have a general sense of category, and then make some sort of comment.

It’s sort of like, what do I care about a generic comment about my appearance? What possible valuable information can I get there? Generally speaking, we want information from people that we really care about or people that we believe have specific expertise, not from some vague amalgamation, because that’s what JCrew has on their rack. That’s what the amalgamation is. We don’t need that. I’m mostly just unnerved by the toxic positivity.

**John:** There’s a lot of things to unpack here. First off, of course, we’re playing a snippet of a demo, so this is an optimized version of what this is. From the longer live demo, you can clearly tune the personality of the chat bot. This was probably tuned to be incredibly positive and giggly and all that stuff and flirty in ways. You could turn that down. You can dial that pretty easily, apparently.

What is interesting is this is not a sentient system. This thing is not alive. This thing is not conscious. It’s not her. And yet the illusion of it is so clear to see, because it feels like that because it has the ability to have back and forth and actually really enter into a dialog, it crosses that uncanny valley and makes it feel like there’s really a person there, that there’s an intelligence there that is not actually there.

**Craig:** It certainly prompts the question of whether or not – not begs the question, but prompts the question.

**John:** Prompts the question. Invites the question.

**Craig:** Invites the question of whether or not the Turing test is the proper test. I think in Alan Turing’s day, it made absolute sense. But what we’re seeing now is that this person is a real person, is the illusion of being a real person, is not in and of itself indicative of intelligence, and in fact, creating the illusion of a real person talking to you is easier than we might’ve thought.

So much of it just comes down to how synthetic the voice is. Yeah, sure, she sounds real, and I think would pass the Turing test in the most rigid sort of way. But it’s unnerving. I find it unnerving.

**John:** We know that this is a demo of an AI speaking back to us, but I can just imagine a year from now, two years from now, there’d be a lot of situations where we just don’t know if we are talking to a real person or not talking to a real person. That feels like, I don’t know, a social boundary that we’re not really prepared for.

If I’m talking to customer service right now, I get a sense of when it’s a real person, when it’s not a real person. I won’t a year from now, two years from now. That is different. I will know that if I’m talking to an executive on Zoom, that’s a real person. But we may soon not really know if that’s an actual real person we’re speaking with. I don’t know, something makes me feel uncomfortable as a human not knowing that.

In situations where I do know that I’m talking to an AI, I think there could be useful things coming out of that. Siri is so frustrating and useless most of the time. Same with Alexa. But this seems like you could actually get meaningful information out of it. If I was in a situation where I needed to know something, I might just ask the question out loud rather than googling it, and that feels great.

**Craig:** It’s an extension of Siri, which nobody thinks of as being alive. It’s interesting, one of the things that AI seems to struggle with is the concept of being interrupted. Interruption is hard, and yet it is fundamental to the way humans talk to each other. We somehow managed to interrupt each other without destroying each other’s train of thought. We don’t keep talking. There’s an interesting back-and-forth rhythm that I think they have to figure out. Do you know the comedian Ron Funches?

**John:** I recognize that name, but I couldn’t think of what he’s known for.

**Craig:** He’s so funny. He’s so, so, so funny. He has this bit about filling out CAPTCHA things. What he says is, “Why do I always have to prove to a robot that I’m not a robot?” He’s like, “The thing is what the robot is asking me to do, to enter a random series of letters and numbers, is pretty much the kind of thing a robot should be able to be good at. It’s not even a good test. It’s really proving that I am a robot.” I just love that. I love that concept of what the robots think is indicative of humanity and then how they give it back to us.

Look. The AI thing at this point I’m just starting of think of as a meteor that might miss the planet or smash into it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

**John:** There’s things we can do to mitigate certain harms, but there’s overall bigger things that are way outside of our pay scale and what we can control.

I want to go back to interruptability, because I think one of the things that made this demo impressive was there was better interruptability. It wasn’t perfect, but you could just talk over the AI, and it would still hear you when you’re talking over it. You didn’t have to wait for it to be done before you can say the next thing, which is useful and good.

But it’s also a great reminder of, when movie dialog feels artificial, it’s because you feel like people are not allowed to talk over each other, they’re not allowed to interrupt each other, they’re not allowed to interject before a sentence is finished, and in real life we’re doing that all the time.

**Craig:** Yes. Maybe what they’ll get better at is the idea of not stopping when somebody interrupts you, but continuing and then going, “Oh, exactly.” Hearing and talking at the same time is tricky. I feel like right now, AI either listens or talks. Certainly, Siri is horrible at that. Do you find yourself getting angry when you’re like, “Hey, lady, play me the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof,” and then there’s a long pause, and then she’s like, “Playing Hamilton, the 1983 free version.”

**John:** So incredibly frustrating.

**Craig:** I’m like, “What?”

**John:** Here is our daily struggle. While we’re making breakfast, we have Alexa Flash News. Flash News should play NPR’s brief little three-minute “here are the headlines” kind of thing. Maybe 70 percent of the time, that’s what happens, but another 30 percent of the time, anything else could happen. It could play Fox News. It could play on a different speaker in a different room. It’s so frustrating. It feels like I’m in some sort of experiment, where it’s like how much can we torment John before he’s had coffee.

**Craig:** Then you find yourself having this increasingly stern, escalating argument. “I said the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof.” “Now playing Annie.” I’m like, “I said… ” I’ll say, “No.” Now I realize it’s like I’m talking to my dog at this point. “No, Bonnie. No.”

**John:** Maybe what we need is we need the AI’s kindergarten teacher, like, “You did a good job. Oh, Rocky, I think that’s great that you were able to play that.”

**Craig:** I feel like this version would be like, “Sounds like you’re a little frustrated. I get it completely. Doing my best. Tell me one more time.”

**John:** That’s what we’re gonna hear.

**Craig:** Ah! Ugh! Eck!

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** Ugh!

**John:** Ee! Also, now, imagine being a kid. You’re a two-year-old, a three-year-old who’s growing up in this world now. It’s just gonna be very different. The expectation that there’s a disembodied voice who should always be able to tell you things, to tell you a story, to do whatever, it’s just a very different experience.

**Craig:** Then our children will look at that generation like, “Oh my god. The worst.”

**John:** “So coddled.”

**Craig:** “The worst.” Instead of iPad kids, now they’re AI kids. Just sit the kid in front of the AI and let them talk to their imaginary friend. God. You know what? Generation X, John. We were the last ones out.

**John:** The last true generation.

**Craig:** Last true generation before all this crap. We’re the best. (sings) We’re the best around. Nothing’s ever gonna bring me down. I think I can get that out before the copyright kicks in.

**John:** Love it. Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/644standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/agents-and-managers-101).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, agents and managers. How do you obtain them? How do you work with them? And if necessary, how do you fire them? To answer these questions, we will be traveling back all the way to the start of this podcast to search for the answers. That’s right, it is a compendium episode, where you’ll hear three segments with me and Craig back when we were much younger and still full of umbrage. Drew, tell us about the clips that you’ve picked and what we’re going to hear today.

**Drew Marquardt:** We’re gonna start with Episode 2.

**John:** Episode 2, god, yeah.

**Drew:** At the very beginning. That’s how to get an agent or manager. No two writers get their reps the same way, but this is about finding how to get the right agent or manager to notice you.

**John:** I feel this kind of PTSD from those very early episodes, because I was cutting them all myself in Garage Band. Now we have Matthew. But it was a very manual process for me.

**Drew:** You guys sound so laid back in the early ones.

**John:** It’s very nice. Now we’re just all stress.

**Drew:** Then we’re going on to Episode 172, which is the perfect agent. Do you remember the Perfect series? We had all of that. The perfect agent, it’s now you have an agent and how does this work. How does this relationship work? What do you expect from your reps? How do you build and maintain that relationship?

**John:** Great. For sure. Then our final segment?

**Drew:** Is firing a manager.

**John:** Which is one of Craig’s favorite topics.

**Drew:** Craig’s favorite. He’s historically brought a lot of umbrage to this. I went all the way back to Episode 7 for this, because this is his first whack at the subject, and it’s his most balanced on it. It’s much more tact than umbrage.

**John:** That’s great. We’ll listen to these three clips, and then we’ll be back here at the end for One Cool Things, boilerplate and all the other stuff. But do stick around if you’re a Premium Member, because I will be talking through my big change, which is for the first time in my whole career, I now have a manager. Just a couple weeks ago, I signed with a manager. I’ll talk about why and what that process was like hiring a manager and what’s been interesting and good and different about it.

**Drew:** I’m excited to break it down with you.

**John:** Cool. Let’s travel back into time, and we’ll see you there at the far side of these three great clips.

[Episode 2 Clip]

**John:** I think we should focus on something we do know a lot about. We’re going to rip off the band-aid this week and we’re going to talk about something that in six years of running the blog, I’ve never actually written a post about this because it’s just such a dreadful morass of something to talk about.

**Craig:** It’s the worst, it’s the worst.

**John:** It’s the worst, and at least 80 percent of the questions that come into the site are basically this question. You’re ready? I’m going to paraphrase the one question that I’ve heard my entire blogging career.

**Craig:** Just do it, do it fast.

**John:** “How do I get an agent and/or manager?”

**Craig:** Oh, God. Now, let me just say, just so that anyone out there who is struggling to get an agent or manager doesn’t think that we are mocking your pain.

**John:** No, not at all.

**Craig:** We’re not. Really what we are embracing is the pain of the question itself because here’s what’s difficult, guys. If you really get down to what John and I know about getting an agent or a manager, what we know is how we got an agent in 1995. That’s what we specifically know.

Some of the pain of this question is it’s like a 15-year-old boy coming to you and saying, “How do I lose my virginity?” I could tell you how I lost my virginity in 1986. I just don’t know if it’s going to be applicable to you.

**John:** I think I do have a little bit more experience just because I’ve gone through generations of assistants who have become writers themselves and have gotten agents, so I’ve seen their process.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not identical to what my process was and a crucial thing for framing this whole discussion is that there’s not one way it happens. Just like everyone does lose their virginity in a slightly different way, everyone gets to an agent or a manager in a slightly different way. We can only talk about general systems for success that people tend to find when they’re looking for agents and managers. I think we need to start by talking about what the hell an agent or a manager really is, because they’re used interchangeably and they’re actually different things.

**Craig:** Very, very different, yes. There’s something called the Talent Representation Act or Talent Agency Act, I can’t remember quite the exact name, but it’s California state law. Basically, the law says if you want to represent artists of any kind as an agent and procure them employment – that’s the big one – you are regulated. You have to be licensed by the state, you cannot charge more than 10 percent of what they earn, and you also can’t own any of it. For screenwriters, what that translates into actually is that agents cannot produce your material, because producing is a kind of an investment in the material itself.

That was the way it was for a long, long time. Then came the rise of managers who are not beholden to that law and they can, in fact, charge any percentage they want, and they can also produce your material. Technically, however, they are not allowed to procure you employment.

**John:** Now, procure sounds like a very legal term. Obviously I know that there’s a lot of overlap between what an agent does and what a manager does, but what is the difference between procure? The manager is not allowed to say, “Pay us this amount of money.”

**Craig:** The manager I do not believe is allowed to directly negotiate the terms of employment, I think. I’ll have to check on that one. By the way, as a general note, if there’s anything like this where I’m not quite sure, I can always lob a clarification on your blog when you put up the link. I know for sure that managers legally can’t seek employment. In other words, they can’t field requests for employment. They certainly can’t call up and say, “My client is available. Do you have anything that they might be interested in?”

Essentially, the manager is supposed to manage. Again, this is all the technical side of it and then there’s the real side. Managers are supposed to handle your day-to-day life. They help you develop material if that’s the way you want to use them. They help take care of your day-to-day needs when you’re working on a project. Let’s say you’re out of town working on something and they help facilitate your life. They’re not supposed to actually go out and get you a job.

**John:** Right. Now, it’s not an either/or situation. Many writers will find they have both a manager and an agent, and in many cases they’ll have a manager a year before they have an agent. It feels like there are many more managers in the business and that they’re easier to gain access to than an agent.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Agents tend to be gathered together in very big, powerful agencies. There are certainly smaller boutique agencies that represent writers. Managers tend to be in smaller shops where they’re representing a smaller group of writers, or directors or other talented people and focusing on them. Managers, in general, might read every draft, and an agent very likely would not read every draft. A manager might give you notes. An agent would be much less likely to give you notes.

I approach the conversation with a dim view of managers, and this is just my generational bias. I’ve been called out for my generational bias because when I started in this business, the writers who had managers weren’t getting a lot out of their managers and they were just looking for the excuse to fire their managers. Now, more writers who are working regularly are talking about having success with their managers and keeping their managers as an active part of their career even after they’ve had a few features produced.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m with you in the generational bias. I’m somewhat suspicious of managers. I had a manager for a long time, and in many ways it was a good thing, and in a number of ways it wasn’t, and it didn’t end particularly well.

I think that there are basically three reasons that writers gravitate toward… I’m going to give myself a fourth reason. One is, as you pointed out, sometimes they’re the easier representation to get, just to start with. Two, managers are much more willing to help you develop your material. If you’re the kind of writer who actually wants to bounce material off of somebody who isn’t a writer or a producer, a manager can help with that. Three, I think some writers feel, “Look, I can’t have two agents at once. I can’t be represented by CAA and UTA, but I can be represented by CAA and Three Arts. That’s twice the bang for the buck.” I wish I could remember what the fourth one was, but that was probably the most important one of all.

**John:** Those are three good points. To bounce off your third point there, being represented by two different people gets you exposure to more people who you could potentially be working with. And so even though the managers aren’t supposed to be out there giving you employment, they may be sending you out to meet with somebody, and that someone they have you meet with ends up becoming an important link for future employment.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I don’t have a huge problem with… If you love your manager, awesome. New writers who are seeking desperately for representation, and understandably so, I think can actually benefit a lot from a manager. But just be aware – this is the great currency problem – when you are a new writer without a track record and limited earning potential, you’re going to get a certain kind of manager. As your career advances, you owe it to yourself to fairly evaluate whether or not your manager is appropriate for where you are in your career if you advance.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s start the next part about what is an agent or a manager actually looking for. Let’s stop looking at it from the writer’s point of view. I need someone to represent me, to take me in and introduce me to all the right people and get me jobs. What does an agent want?

**Craig:** They want to make money. Bottom line.

**John:** They’re there to make money for themselves, for their agency. They’re there to try to get their clients hired and working continuously in the business. From that perspective, if they’re looking at a range of possible writers who they could represent, they’re going to look for the ones they believe are talented, the ones they believe will work really hard, the ones who can actually land the job – which means going in there to the meetings, for the nine meetings, and convincing a bunch of people that they are the right person to be hired for the job – the ones who are going to deliver. If an agent has a client that can land a job but then won’t actually turn in the script or finish the script or will turn in a really substandard version of what the script should be, that’s going to hurt.

The agent has a limitation of time. The agent can only represent so many clients. There’s only so many hours in the day. They can only put up so many clients for jobs. Taking on a new person is bringing a new person into the fold, someone they have to introduce to everybody, someone who they have to try to keep employed, someone they have to be talking on the phone all the time and trying to get them hired.

**Craig:** Also, just as an extension of that too, when an agent takes on a client that client is an extension of their reputation. I’m vouching that if I’m an agent I have a brand just the way that you and I have a brand. We’re known for writing certain kinds of things. Agents are known for representing certain kinds of people. They take on the wrong person and that person craps out, that’s an uncomfortable phone call for that agent. That damages their standing and that’s going to hurt them. There’s a ripple effect. When writers approach getting an agent and they look at this incredibly steep wall and the barrier to entry and they go, “Why? Why is this so hard to do?” It’s because of that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s important to remember that screenwriting is about pushing those words around on the paper and it’s being able to write a really good script. Screenwriting, the career of screenwriting, is also the ability to land a job and to get paid for what you are doing.

An agent is excited to read a really good script. They’re not going to sign a writer, in general, without sitting in a room with that writer and making the judgment call, could I send this person out on a job and get them hired to do something? They are measuring the social skills of a person who they are going to be possibly be representing.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. You can definitely be a complete weirdo if you are just killing it on the page. If you are what I would consider a conventional screenwriter writing conventional material and you’re just a zero in the room, it’s going to be tough. I have to say that part of the business is unfair, but it’s real.

We can’t deny the fact that part of what we’re offering the people who hire us is a sense of comfort that we’re going to deliver and everything’s going to be okay. They’re just as scared as we are. Everybody’s scared.

**John:** It’s very much a business of trust. As the person hiring you, I am trusting that you will actually be able to deliver me this script. I base that trust on the things I’ve read on the paper but also looking you in the eye and seeing, “Okay, he gets it. He gets what it is we’re trying to do here.”

Yes, it’s incredibly important when you’re talking to the writer you’re bringing in for a million dollars to finish the script that’s about to go into production, but it’s also important just the scale job that you’re trying to get made. Every step for one of those executives is important.

**Craig:** All right. Then here’s the big question as we hit the midpoint of our podcast. Everybody’s been really patient. They’ve listened to us talk about uteruses and the law. John, how do these people get a manager or an agent? We ripped the band-aid off that 15 minutes ago. We’re still dancing around it, aren’t we?

**John:** I think you get an agent or manager through… I can think of three ways. The first is a recommendation. Someone has read your work, has met you, and said, “This guy is awesome. This guy should be writing movies for Hollywood. I’m going to take this script and I’m going to take you, introduce you to this agent or manager, and say you should represent this person because this person is great.” If that person has the ear of the right agent or manager and there’s already trust and taste being established between them, that agent or manager will read your material, say yes or no, and be interested and excited about possibly representing you.

That’s how I got my agent is a friend took the script I had written to his boss. He was interning at a small production company. The boss liked it, wanted to take it to the studio. I said, “I really need an agent. Can you help me get an agent?” He said yes and he took it to an agent he had a relationship with. The agent read it, because this guy who he trusted said that it was worth his time reading. He took it, read it, he met with me, and he signed me. That’s a very, very common story for how writers get represented.

Second way I would say is agents read material that they found through some sort of pre-filtering mechanism. A pre-filtering mechanism could be a really good graduate school program. If you graduated from a top film school and you were the star screenwriter of a USC graduate film school program, some junior agent at an agency is likely reading those scripts and saying, “Oh, this is actually a really good writer. This is a person we should consider.”

Even without that writer hunting down that agent, the agent was looking for who are the best writers coming out of these programs or the best writers coming out of a competition. These are the Nicholl’s finalists. Those scripts get read and those people will be having meetings with the people who think that they are potentially really good clients.

**Craig:** Makes sense. What’s the third one?

**John:** Just scouring the world to find interesting voices. I don’t know how much of this story is really accurate, but the apocryphal story of Diablo Cody is here’s a young woman who’s writing a funny blog. An agent reads the blog and says, “This woman can really, really write. She’s funny. She has a voice. I bet she could become a screenwriter.”

I don’t think all those details are quite accurate, but there’s always those writers who, they were doing standup and they’re clearly very funny and someone sees their act and says, “I think that person is a performer, but I also think that person is a writer and there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.”

**Craig:** I like those. Of course, all of them are predicated on you being a good writer and writing a good script, as is always the case, but those all make sense. I actually asked an agent at CAA named Bill Zotti. I gave him a call earlier today and I asked him the question. Of course, he groaned, because it’s that question, but he had a couple of pieces of really good advice that I figured I should pass along.

One is to make sure that if you are specifically pursuing an agent, to really know who they represent and ask, is this agent appropriate for my material. He said one of the most frustrating things is when he’ll get query letters or log lines for the kind of movies that his clients just don’t write.

Right now there are a lot of resources out there that are relatively inexpensive, like IMDb Pro for instance, where you can actually see… Let’s say I write movies like Judd Apatow. “Who represents Judd Apatow? Let me see.” I write movies like John August. “Who represents John August? Let me see.” Okay. If I send that person a query letter and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan of John August. I’m aspiring to write like John August. Here’s my log line,” you might have a shot. Whereas if you send it to a guy that represents writers who write rated-R broad comedies, that person’s going to go, “What do I care? It’s not for me.” Do your homework. If you’re going to go through the effort of trying to break the rocks to get a rep, do your homework about the rep.

The other advice that he gave that I thought was pretty smart was to get a job in the business, which seems so blindingly obvious, but yet so many people resist it. I know why, because it’s hard and it involves a commitment that you may not be willing to make.

He said, “Listen, 80 percent of the people in the mail room at one of the big talent agencies are not really interested in being agents.” They’re there to learn the business because they want to do other things. They want to produce. They want to write. They want to direct. When you work in that business and you work in that place, you get to know the other people there.

You work next to a guy who suddenly is now an assistant to an agent. You say to him, “Listen, I’ve written a script, and I’m going to tell you what the idea is.” If he loves it, he’s got a chance now to impress his boss with a great piece of material, so he’s going to read it. These personal connections are invaluable. It’s nearly impossible to do that kind of thing from Rhode Island.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say what your example stresses is the horizontal networking. Everyone always thinks that to become successful you have to meet more powerful people and get more powerful people to love you. It’s really not that case at all. It’s been my experience, but it’s also been the experience of all my assistants, the way they got to their next step was by helping out everyone else at their same level.

They were reading other people’s scripts and giving them notes. Those same friends were reading their scripts. Eventually, they wrote that thing that was, “You know what? This is really good. This is the script I’ve been waiting for you to write, and I think I know the right person to take this to.” It’s always been those people who were doing exactly the same stuff you were doing who were the next step.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think people should think, as they are horizontally networking, about how to market themselves, because the funny thing is Hollywood with one hand is saying, “Get out, stay out,” and with the other hand is saying, “Please, somebody show up,” because they’re hungry for new talent. They’re desperate for new talent. Nothing makes them happier than a writer that’s better than a guy who makes a million dollars that they don’t have to pay a million dollars to.

They’re actually looking, believe it or not. If you can market yourself properly… For instance, we have a couple of friends who wrote a pretty crazy script and just put it out on the internet and marketed it as this insane thing, and it caught on.

**John:** You’re talking about the Robotard 8000?

**Craig:** I’m talking about the Robotard 8000. You may say, “Why would you put your screenplay on the internet, and why would you say it was authored by the Robotard 8000?” Why? Because they have agents at CAA and they’re working. It really got them a lot of attention. Also, it didn’t hurt that other writers that people trusted were saying, “We read this script. This was really funny.”

Similarly, I’ll tell you, if I were 22 again and I were in a writer’s group, I would say – and you and I didn’t have this in the 90s – “Let’s get a web page for our writer’s group, and let’s just start blogging about the experience of our writers group. Let’s track the progress of our scripts and the log lines and the rest of it.” If one of us catches somebody’s attention, suddenly our writer’s group has a little bit of buzz to it. “What will this writer’s group come up with next?” That’s why that Fempire thing was so cool, with Diablo-

**John:** Dana and Lorene.

**Craig:** … and Dana and Lorene. It was like, okay, there’s a group. Now, it’s not really a group. They all have to write their own scripts. But something about it, there’s a little bit of sparkly dust to it. It’s interesting. How do you make yourself interesting? Maybe then somebody will be attracted to your script.

**John:** We talked about marketing, but it’s really almost positioning. People need to know how to consider you or what to consider you as.

Here’s a terrible way to go into your first meeting. You wrote a really good comedy script that people like, and so they brought you in. A manager and agent sat down to meet with you. They say, “I really liked your script. It was really funny. What do you want to write?” It’s like, “I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.” The manager is going to hem and haw and make conversation for about another 10 minutes, but they’re not going to want to sign you, because they were thinking about you as a comedy person. Let them pigeonhole you for five minutes until you can actually get something going. They need to know how are they going to make the next phone call to somebody else, saying, “This guy has a really funny comedy script, but he’s exactly the right person to hire for your period action movie.” That just doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. Listen, these guys, what is their training in? Managers and agents are not there to tell you what to be. Their expertise is watching trends and patterns and pulling people out that fit what they believe is going to generate cash. They can’t tell you who to be. What they can do is see who you are and say, “That looks like money.” So know who you are. Go in there and be who you are.

It doesn’t mean that you have to go in there as Michael Bay. Not everybody has to make $200 million movies. Not everybody has to sell $3 million scripts. To be successful in this business, you just have to work. If I could walk into an agent’s office and say, “I will never make more than $200,000 a year, but I will make $200,000 every year for the next 20 years and I won’t bother you a lot,” that’s an instant signing. Why not? That’s great.

It’s not about how much you’re going to do, but just will you do. If you walk into an office and you say, “Look. I wrote this script and this is how I want to come off. These are the movies I love. This is the niche I want to fill,” if they feel like that’s a real niche and that niche needs filling, that’s a big deal. But they can’t tell you who to be.

**John:** Exactly. You have to be able to come to them with material that shows what your talent is, and a story, or at least a way of presenting yourself that leads them to believe, “Yeah, I see what he’s going for and I think he or she can achieve that.”

**Craig:** People have to understand that agents and managers – let’s call them representation – they’re never going to be your mommy or your daddy. They’re not your savior. They’re not Superman. What they are, essentially, are the vanguard of the endless decision process that leads to a writer being hired. They’re the first people in line to say, “OK, I’m willing to take a shot on you.” You still haven’t made a dollar when you get an agent. But it all is driven by you.

**John:** I always get the question of, how do I get an agent or manager? Generally, it’s the person who’s like, “I just finished my first script. How do I get an agent or manager?” That’s like, okay, you wrote a script. That’s great. After your second script, then I’ll believe you actually can write a second script. Or they’re like, “We just started working on our first script. How do we get a manager?” It’s acknowledging that part of the process is the ability to prove that you can actually do this repeatedly.

A thing I think we’ll probably say endlessly in the series of this podcast is that the career of being a screenwriter is not about one script. It’s about being able to write 50 scripts. While there may be one script that really gets representation’s attention, they’re really signing you for the next 30 things you’re going to write. They would love to be able to sell this one script. They mostly want to be able to sell you every year to different clients, to different producers, different studios, to continue generating cash flow and continue making movies.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a certain naiveté about the question in and of itself. Again, why we hate the question is just that some people are asking it and they haven’t quite earned it yet. “How do I get an agent or a manager?” Maybe the better way to phrase it is, “Which agent or manager should get me?” Start thinking that way.

Then if you think that way, you realize, “I’d better have something worth getting. I’d better know who these people are. I’d better know what I want and where I want to work and what kind of movies I want to be known for.” It’s the American Idol syndrome. “I go on TV, they like me, they pick me, I’m a star.”

**John:** The lottery mentality, which kills me about screenwriting, is that, by writing this one script, I will sell it for X dollars and then I will be set and everything will be wonderful and happy for here on out. It rarely happens that way.

I really liked the way you rephrased it, and I’m going to rephrase it again slightly, is, “How will the right agent find me?” If you can think about it in that perspective, a lot of things become more clear. How do I make myself visible enough that the right agent will recognize my talent and my determination and say, “This is the client I have to represent.”

What you may discover in that process is that – I say “the right agent find me” – the right agent probably isn’t the superpower agent who has Judd Apatow. It’s more likely the guy who has just a couple of clients, but they’re really good clients.

I left a bigger agent and went to a smaller agent right before Go. I made the change because I needed somebody who was generationally closer to me, who was hungry in the same ways that I was hungry, and I could grow with. I get frustrated when people aim too high, too fast. You want the person who can grow with you, ideally.

**Craig:** So true. The only thing worse than not having an agent is having the wrong agent, because then you feel like you are represented and everything’s going to be fine, but it’s a mismatch, so you have all of the lack of benefit of no agent, but none of the drive to get a new one, because you think you have one. That’s the worst situation.

I don’t care about the size of your agent, how big they are, who their clients are. If you’re just starting out and you’re lucky enough to attract the eye of a very powerful agent, you should ask, because it’s going to happen anyway, that they assign a junior agent as well to you, because you’re going to need more help, and you’re going to need more attention. They’re going to be busy talking to people that earn $20 million a year. They have directors and actors who out-earn every screenwriter. They just won’t talk to you. Get the right guy or girl.

**John:** And if you get the wrong guy, you can tune into a later podcast in which Craig will tell you how to fire your agent or manager.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** It’s actually one of Craig’s specialties. It’s one of the things I think he’s best known for, is really how to sever ties and move on with grace. I’ve seen him do it for many, many other screenwriters. It’s a master class.

**Craig:** I’m the Kevorkian of talent representation.

[Episode 172 Clip]

**John:** Last week we talked about the perfect studio executive. This week let’s talk about the perfect agent and what makes the perfect agent, what that person should be doing for a screenwriter, what our expectations should be when we’re talking to an agent. Craig, get us started.

**Craig:** I think that we do have quite a few agents and agent assistants who will soon be agents listening to us, so hey, lean in, listen carefully. I’m very simple about what I look for in an agent. Primarily, let’s talk about the real simple stuff. Call us back.

**John:** Always good.

**Craig:** Call us back. Don’t be impossible to reach. Call us back within a reasonable amount of time. That’s the big one.

**John:** Let’s define reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time is 24 hours at the outlier, and if it’s not 24 hours, then it’s some communication that acknowledges, “Got your message, I will get back to you ASAP.”

**Craig:** Yeah. My feeling is if I call before lunch, I get a call before the end of the day. If I call after lunch, I should still get a call by the end of the day, but if not, first thing the next day and an acknowledgment that the call was received. That’s a real simple thing. I know that this is something that is talked about a lot in the agency hallways as a kind of nuts and bolts things. I cannot stress how important it is. Ultimately, the constancy of communication is the glue of the agent-client relationship. It’s as simple as that.

The other thing I look for in an agent is clarity. When a writer asks an agent, “What should I do? Should I do this job or this job? Should I pass on this? Should I accept it? Who should we give this to? Is this the right producer?” what we want desperately is the same thing that the people that hire us want: clarity and comfort. We want our agent to give us an answer. If there is no answer, then explain why there’s no answer, and then explain that either way will be okay. But this wishy-washiness or asking questions back – we’re not looking for an Ericksonian therapist to just rephrase our questions. We want answers.

**John:** When you proposed this topic, I went through and sort of made my list of archetypes of sort of the things I think about when I think of an agent. And not all agents are going to be all these people, but generally these are the kind of roles an agent fulfills in a writer’s life.

One is as adviser, which is just what you described, is the person who has an informed opinion about what should be done on a project, in a situation, what is the overall shape of what this experience should be.

Secondly is as kan advocate. You want your agent to be someone who is like on your side. And so when people are pushing you around, they’re pushing back. And that’s a really crucial role because sometimes the agent has to be the bad guy. The agent has to say, “No, he delivered. Pay him.” And convince on the next step if you want the next step. That’s a critical function of an agent and sometimes one that they are reluctant to perform because they’re trying to maintain all these other relationships. But from the writer’s perspective, we just need you to stick up for us.

Third archetype is sort of the connector. And really good agents are smart at being able to put people together who they think can work well together. That’s putting writers in rooms with studio executives who actually know what they’re doing, setting up a lunch between a writer and a director because there’s probably something they could work on together, bringing the right material to the writer, because this is a book we have and we think you would probably like it. That’s a crucial function of a good agent.

**Craig:** Let’s stop there on that one, because a lot of these things are sort of constitutionally required for agents. Some of them are things that agents have to earn their way towards. The truth is that we want from our agents a certain amount of connectivity. And there are all sorts of words for this, juice, or whatever you want to call it. We want our agent to be able to get the people we need to get on the phone on the phone. And if you can’t get those people on the phone, then you need to have a relationship with a senior agent who can.

**John:** That’s a crucial point, because a lot of times as newer writers, you’re going to be working with a junior agent, someone who doesn’t have all the history and all of the contacts and all the access that the top people have. But in some cases, those younger agents have tremendous numbers of contacts, they’re just at a lower level. And those can be incredibly valuable, and they can actually be faster than some of the very top-tier people can actually get that information. That can be really useful.

Obviously, if your agent is plugged in at CAA and they have this vast knowledge network of how everything is set up, that’s awesome. But even if your agent is at a smaller sort of boutique agency that deals with just TV writers, that can be exactly perfect if that’s what you’re trying to do.

My first agent was just a terrific agent, but his client list was mostly very esoteric indie writer-directors. He was really good at dealing with sort of specialty film arms of things, but that wasn’t who I ultimately was. And it got to be very frustrating, because he didn’t know the people who I needed to be in rooms with. And that’s why it didn’t last.

**Craig:** Exactly right. There’s another thing that I think the perfect agent is capable of doing, and that is switching their tone from every kind of communication they have, except for their communication with their writer clients, and the communication with the writer clients. We know when we’re being agented.

So, what is being agented? It’s being handled, cajoled. There’s that agent talk that’s smooth and fast and all facts have suddenly become fogged by war. And everything gets twisted around. That’s what they do. And they need to be able to do that. When they’re dealing with other agents, when they’re dealing with producers, when they’re dealing with studios, when they’re dealing with business affairs, they need to agent people. That’s their job.

But when you’re talking to us, before you get on the phone with us, take a breath and say this: “This person I don’t agent. This is my client. This person I can just calm down, relax, and be honest with.” I know. Sounds crazy. But we actually appreciate honesty more than anything. Don’t hide bad news from us. Don’t sugarcoat bad news. Don’t flimflam us. And if we challenge you on something and we’re right, don’t think that by saying, “You know what, that’s a really good point, you’re right,” that it makes you weak. It doesn’t. It makes us like you more. Save a certain tiny nugget of honest, normal you for us, and agent everybody else.

**John:** Part of that honesty is being honest about why a project is coming to you or why a project is not coming to you. And that’s a very difficult conversation to have.

Craig, you will be able to better articulate what the legal definitions and differences are between an agent and a manager. But my perception is that any time somebody comes to my agent with, “Here’s work. Here is work we would like John to do,” I think he’s legally obligated to tell me about it. Is that correct?

**Craig:** It is. Yeah. A lot of times they will glide over that, because they know that you’re busy and unavailable and wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t need my agent to call me up and say, “Hey, listen, we got an offer. You just started writing a script. We got an offer for you to do an episode of an animated program in Albania.” I don’t need to hear about it.

**John:** Yet I think one of the crucial things is – and this is the conversation I have quite often – in one of those sort of check-in calls, there will be like four things we’ll talk about, and the last thing will be, “Oh, and I got this thing for you. Here’s the project. Here’s the producer. Here’s why I think it’s a pass.” And that is just a godsend when you hear what that is.

Agents are fairly describing what it actually is and why it’s probably not interesting. And sometimes I’ll say like, “Actually, that does sound really interesting,” or like, “I’ve always liked that person, so I do want to take a look at it.” But a good agent is able to say, “This is why it’s probably not going to be right.”

In some cases, especially for a newer writer, they might say, “Okay, there’s this project over at this studio and they’re meeting with writers. They asked about you. I think it’s a fishing trip. I think they’re just basically bringing a bunch of people into the room and seeing what might stick. And you could be wasting a tremendous amount of your time.” I so appreciate that. And as a young writer, I might be panicked, like, “Wait, I’m not going to go for this job?” A smart agent might say, “You know what? I don’t think anyone is ever going to get that job. I think it’s basically just a let’s see what sticks kind of situation.”

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. There’s another nice benefit to letting your clients know when you’re passing on things for them, in that it makes them feel good, that people want you to work for them. Look, if you say don’t do something, we’re not doing it. We’re very simple that way. We want to do everything. We want you guys to be able to help us say no to things. It’s obviously a very valuable part of this. Sometimes as agents, you will smell some blood in the water and we won’t smell the same blood.

I’ll get a call, “Something came up at the agency. Our biggest movie star is excited about doing this thing. It’s a book. And everybody is running around like crazy. But I put your name in and they really responded to that. This could be huge.” Look, again, we’re being agented there a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. But at least you’re being candid about what’s actually happening there.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And it’s good to know. And then if we don’t smell the same blood and we go, “You know what, I get why they would love that. I just don’t think it’s for me,” then you let it go. That’s okay. Just don’t jam us in, because we’re not dumb, we know how the agent business works. You guys make 10 percent of what we make. The person who makes the most amount of money, that’s the most important person. We know that. And it’s okay to shepherd us all together. That’s part of your job. But then if we don’t get it and we don’t want to do it, just be respectful and let us not like it. That’s okay.

**John:** That shepherd function is really crucial too. When Aline was on the show last, she talked about how her agent of many, many years, they were on a phone call and Aline was venting her frustration about this project and these people and the people being impossible. And the agent basically pulled her aside and said, like, “Get over yourself. Call me back tomorrow. And figure out how you’re going to actually do this project, because you’re being crazy.”

And that’s a crucial thing. That shepherding role of saying like, “You know what, you’re not actually being reasonable here.” It’s almost like a parent. Like, you know, reminding you, “You know what, this is your job. Your job is to write this movie. Write this movie. Get it over with. Get it done. And move on.” And that’s a crucial thing to have happen too. Sometimes you as the writer are the problem, and a very good agent can find the right way to tell you, “This is a you thing. Get through it. And let’s get onto your next project.”

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, Aline and I actually have the same agent, and I can hear him saying all that. And frankly, we want that specificity. It goes back that we want to be spoken to honestly and we want clarity. If the clarity is you’re being insane, if my agent ever said to me, “You’re being insane,” I would think I’m being insane.

A good agent should not be afraid of his client or her client. If you’re an agent and you’re worried that your client is not going to respond well to the truth, so your job is to somehow figure out how to hide the truth in a thing, like the way that I feed medicine to my dog by putting it in pudding, we’re going to know. Don’t be afraid of your clients. If your client can’t handle what’s true, then they’re not going to be able to handle it with their next agent or their agent after that. Truth is a great defense.

**John:** I absolutely agree. The last thing I would say about the great agent is, the analogy I think I’ve often made is that if you’re having heart surgery, you don’t want to go to the woman who only performs heart surgery three times a year. You want to go to the surgeon and she performs it seven times a week. You want the person who is the pro at doing this thing.

And sometimes as a writer you have to step back and realize, like, “Oh, you know what? You actually do this job. You’re actually the person who makes this deal. I’m not going to sort of worry about every little step of this process. I’m going to let you and maybe my lawyer go off, make this deal, figure out all that stuff, and then report back to me what the results are. And I can say yes or no.” But I see sometimes, especially newer writers, freak out about each little bit of a deal, and that’s not generally a helpful thing.

**Craig:** It isn’t. I totally agree. There are times when we have a disagreement. And what I end up saying is, “Listen, let me tell you why I don’t want what they’ve offered, even though you think it’s good, because of this and this. It’s important to me. It’s important enough that I’m willing to say, no, I don’t want to do this.”

And a good agent hears that and goes, “Fantastic news.” As long as you’re in sync with your client and they’re saying, “I don’t want to do it. I would rather not do it than this,” that’s empowering, and don’t fight anymore. Now just go with that, unless you feel that they’re being insane. Then tell them they’re insane. There needs to be that just honest communication. The most important advice I can give to you on your path to becoming a perfect agent is to not agent your client.

**John:** I think that’s great advice.

[Episode 7 Clip]

**John:** Question for you. When you get an email from somebody you don’t know, do you google them?

**Craig:** It depends on the content of the email. But if it intrigues me in any way, yes.

**John:** The reason I ask is because I wanted to start today with a question, and it’s clearly a genuine question. This person put in enough work to the question that I don’t think that this was any sort of scam deal or anything. But as I looked up this person’s name – I didn’t recognize it, so I googled it – it came up as an adult film star.

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** I don’t think it’s actually the adult film star who was emailing me. But it’s a person who, because of the nature of the question, chose to use a handle, which was the adult film star thing, so that I wouldn’t actually print it. But of course, it was a female adult film star, which I would have no idea if it was actually a female.

**Craig:** If you said the name, I would pretend that I didn’t know it.

**John:** Oh, very nice. That’s the lovely thing about an audio podcast is no one can see your facial reaction. I’m going to choose to name this person Tina, which is not the name that originally came on the email. Let me read it to you:

“About a year ago, a manager from a reputable company contacted me because they were a fan of my online videos,” which I presume were not adult videos. “I agreed to work with them. Unfortunately, this manager also represents people with lots of IMDb credits – big people, mostly actors though, a few writers. Over the last year it has become painfully obvious they have zero time for me and have put zero effort into helping my career get off the ground.

“Any general meeting I’ve gotten over the last year has been a direct result of my own efforts. I am beginning to realize that this manager and I don’t agree on anything creatively. Their notes are contradictory and vague. When they’re not, I find them to be flat out wrong.

“My question is, if I cut ties, I’m back to square one with no other representation possibilities on the horizon. At the same time, this manager has made it clear I’m last on their list of priorities. Even if I weren’t, the difference of opinion on everything seems counter-productive. Is it worth just keeping the manager or risk going it alone?

“I’ve actually spoken to my manager about this. I asked him if he had the time for me. He said if I didn’t, they could maybe pass me along to someone a little lower at their company who may be able to champion me a bit more.” It’s a confusing note. I think it’s actually the writer saying that, so the writer suggesting that. “They said, ‘No, no. I have the time. Don’t worry.’ Well, I’m worried.”

**Craig:** This is, talk about a softball question. 90 percent of the question is really an explanation of how poor of a job this manger is doing and how bad of a fit they are, and then 10 percent is generalized anxiety disorder. The answer is cut ties, of course.

**John:** I may disagree with you on this.

**Craig:** Let’s go. Let’s do this.

**John:** I don’t want to be the serial monogamist of these relationships, but I feel like it may be a situation where she needs to find the next manager before she leaves this current manager. I don’t know that being free and clear and floating in the Hollywood ether is going to help her any more than being with a manager who, while not helping her, isn’t an anchor in any way to her.

**Craig:** Well, here’s where I would disagree. It is difficult to switch representation without actively trying to do it. That is to say, without actively trying to get a new representative. It’s a very small community. As bad as a manager may be at their job, every manager seems to be amazing at sniffing out when their clients are trying to leave them. It becomes difficult to do a full-court press on your own behalf.

If there is any opportunity that this writer has to find a better manager, that opportunity doesn’t disappear simply because they don’t have this person. This person’s literally a zero. That’s what the question stipulates. In my mind, I think by cutting ties you give yourself every opportunity to get out there, do a full-court press and not run into anybody that said, “Oh, I would, but your manager is a friend of mine,” or, “We share a client,” or, “I don’t want to poach.” Just get rid of him. I don’t know, that’s my feeling.

**John:** Devil’s advocate, I will say that there’s other people who this writer could be bringing into his or her team who may be helpful, and the manager could actually be an asset getting them to it. I feel like you maybe go to your manager and say, “Hey, look, I really want to try to find an attorney. Can you give me some suggestions of people I can meet with who are good attorneys?”

It could help open the doors to some of those things which aren’t a huge burden on the manager’s time. Then you have a pretty good attorney. And then when it’s time to leave this manager, you have a pretty good attorney who can help make the next set of connections.

**Craig:** But it’s difficult to get an attorney if you’re showing up with no opportunity for lawyering.

**John:** That’s true. You’re not going to get a lawyer unless there’s actually some contract to negotiate.

**Craig:** Right, and that seems to be precluded by this relationship. I don’t know, I guess the underlying sentiment behind my advice here is that we as writers tend to project an enormous amount of power onto these representatives, fueled by our own anxiety that we will never love again.

But the truth is you’re not being loved now. It’s a bad marriage, get out of the bad marriage. Look actively and wholeheartedly for a new marriage. You found this person. You’ll find another one. I also feel like a bad manager is worse than no manager, because while you have your bad manager, you’re hamstrung and you can’t do better.

**John:** Craig, you are going to leave this manager. You’re going to advise Tina that she should leave this manager. What does Tina say to this manager?

**Craig:** Really simple. You call the manager up, no need to make a big production out of it. You lead by saying, “Listen, I made a decision to let you go. I’m going to end our professional relationship.” You start with that, right off the bat, really dispassionate.

Just say, “Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out the way I would’ve hoped. I had a certain series of goals for the two of us. They haven’t quite gelled, I’m sure you would agree. We’ve been together for X amount of time. It hasn’t resulted in employment. And frankly, it just doesn’t seem like you have the time for me or the attention that I would’ve hoped. The decision is final, but I do appreciate the fact that you took a shot with me to begin with. I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope you understand.”

**John:** That sounds reasonable and mature and grown up. I will say that when I left my first agent, I didn’t have that level of sophistication. I felt the need to actually pick a fight and be able to have the reason for why I was leaving. He was genuinely a friend. He was just simply the wrong agent for me to be with, and so I felt the need to pick some sort of fight that he wasn’t doing a good job with me, so he would get angry with me, and therefore I’d angry with him and say, “I think I need to go find another agents.” The whole time, I had actually already started the whole process of figuring out who I was going to meet with next.

**Craig:** Right, that works. Look, the most important thing is that whatever method you employ, you employ it post-facto to the decision. You don’t use this breakup speech to build up to the decision. You lead with it. The decision should be unilateral. It should be a fait accompli, and then you roll out your dismissal plan.

**John:** What I just realized is that I led this conversation with talking about googling people, and I just googled my old agent yesterday, because I was curious. Someone said, “Whatever happened to him?” And I didn’t know what happened to him, and he’s fallen off the radar.

**Craig:** You mean the Google radar?

**John:** He doesn’t seem to exist in the last several years.

**Craig:** Is it possible that he never existed and this is like a Beautiful Mind thing?

**John:** That would be kind of amazing if he never existed. You go back through all those old contracts and those phone calls, and you see the other side of it, and I’m just talking to myself. I basically rented this empty office, and I would go there.

**Craig:** This is the moment where Agent Kujan drops his coffee mug on the floor.

[End of Clips]

**John:** We are now back here in 2024, or whenever you’re listening to this podcast. It could be 2054 by the time you’re listening to it. My One Cool Thing is also time-travelly. This is the 25th anniversary of Go this year. GQ magazine had a great oral history retrospective of the making of Go. I was interviewed, along with Doug Liman, the director, Sarah Polley, many of the other actors. Desmond Askew I’ve not seen since we actually shot the movie. It was great to get this retrospective on how we got the movie made, how it almost didn’t get made. Paul Schrodt did a great job putting together this oral history.

**Drew:** I loved hearing from William Fichtner. I know he’s in that movie, but he just seemed to have such love for it and such passion for it, even though he’s in it.

**John:** I was genuinely surprised, because I would say during production, he was just always annoyed by me. At least that was my perception, because it was a really chaotic production. If you read the piece, you’ll see that it was a chaotic production. I was always meddling with things, but I needed to meddle with things, because Doug always had the camera on his back. Conversations that would’ve happened over in video village had to be right in front of the actors, because Doug had the camera on his shoulder.

**Drew:** He was rigging a light on Breckin Meyer.

**John:** Yeah. But I’m glad he had a great time it. Actually, it was a very difficult shoot but a really fun shoot. It really captured the joy of making and putting that movie out there in the world.

**Drew:** Cool.

**John:** Cool. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thank you so much. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on my signing with a manager.

Now, Drew, before we go though, quite crucially, I wanted to talk about a traumatic experience you had this week and maybe talk through this a little bit. As everyone knows, we are a Highland house. All of our writing is done in Highland, which is the app that we make, and it’s what screenwriters should be using. But you this week, for a different project or something that’s going on, you had to use Final Draft. Tell us about Final Draft.

**Drew:** You don’t pay me enough. You don’t realize how good you have it until you go back to Final Draft, because god, what a nightmare.

**John:** You were discussing just putting in a parenthetical was…

**Drew:** Yeah. In Highland, all you have to do is type a parenthetical and it automatically formats. In Final Draft, you have to hit tab twice. If dialogue gets caught in an action line, you’re screwed. You have to retype all that.

**John:** It’s a really different thing. I’m sure if I had to do it, the muscle memory would come back, but I’m so happy not to be thinking about… Just don’t have to touch that tab key.

**Drew:** You’re very lucky.

**John:** Brutal. Thank you for all the hard work you did and in putting together this episode. In tribute to all your hard work, this outro is especially applicable.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Drew. We’ve talked about this on the podcast, that Craig and I have never had managers. We didn’t grow up with them. It wasn’t such a big thing when we started in this industry. Craig especially was always very suspicious of managers or the need for managers. I have always tried to keep a more open mind. But I definitely thought of managers as being a thing that newer writers might need, because they needed more hand-holding. They needed somebody to walk them through the process. They needed extra bubble wrap around them to help them do their thing. That was not what I needed, because I’m a very established writer. I didn’t need that extra point of entry. But as you, master of the calendar, saw, I ended up having six manager meetings and I went and met with a bunch of managers.

**Drew:** Yeah, six, which felt like a lot. Yeah, it’s surprising.

**John:** The reason why it ended up being six is, when I started making the decision to look for a manager, I went to Ken Richman, who’s my attorney, to get suggestions for who we should meet with. He had good names and good numbers. I couldn’t stop at one place.

But it also reminded me of when my daughter started looking for colleges, that yeah, you want to take a look at certain schools, but really you’re looking for types of schools. When we did our first college tour, we were looking for, okay, this is what it’s like being at a big school in a big city, versus a big school in a tiny town where the college takes over the town, or what it’s like to be a small college in a little, small town. What’s the right fit? What’s the right vibe gonna be?

These were actually six very different types of managers to meet with. I needed a sense of what is it gonna feel like, as much as how specific those individual managers might be.

**Drew:** Did you go into it knowing what you were looking for, or did you have an idea?

**John:** To get into it, I guess we should start with explaining why I was even looking for a manager, because I’m a very experienced screenwriter. I didn’t need a lot of help on the screenwriting front. But I’m not a very experienced or established director. One of my priorities the next couple years is to do more directing. I needed a manager, I felt, to shepherd that part of my career, and so really focus on that. That was one of the things I was really looking for.

As I was sitting down to meet with these managers, I would talk about what my priorities were for the next couple years ahead, what was working great and what I felt could work better. You sent through a list to all these managers beforehand of, like, “Here’s all the stuff I’m working on. Here are my priorities for what I want to spend my time doing.”

When I actually sat down to meet with these places, you realized they really were so different in how they worked and how they functioned and how they felt, because some of them were really small. One was a single manager. Some were really small, little, boutiquey kind of places. Some were producing shows and they were doing a whole bunch of stuff and they had a bunch of different clients. They had sports people, and they had their own research department and all this stuff. Some felt like they were as big as the big agencies, like the CAAs or the WMEs. There really was a huge range of things.

I asked similar questions of all the places, but it was also fun to hear their explanations for why they were set up the way they were set up. The places who don’t produce would say, “We don’t produce because we want to focus entirely on client service, really that old agency model, just focusing on what our clients need.” The places that did produce would say, “Because we’re out there producing, we actually know what it’s like to produce, and we actually get a lot of firsthand experience on what it takes to make something this year, next year, or the year after. We’re much more in contact with the places that you’ll be working with.”

**Drew:** What is the argument for the client services then? Because as we just talked about in the episode, I know there’s a workaround, but managers can’t legally represent their clients in a contract situation. What would they be doing? How would that be working?

**John:** I’m so happy we’re recording this without Craig, because right now Craig would be tearing his hair out, because one of Craig’s great frustrations is that managers should not, under California law, be doing some of the stuff that they end up doing, which is figuring out what the actual deal is. Managers can put you in the room, but in theory it should be your attorney and your agents who are doing that stuff. Some of my big writer colleagues don’t have agents anymore. They just have their managers, and it’s working out great for them. So it’s certainly a possibility.

I did think about, if I were to have a manager, would I still need an agency? Some of the conversations I would have with these management companies is, “How do you work with agencies? What is the overlap?” because there is overlap. Different explanations, but some would describe it as being like the manager is the general leading the charge, but you need the army, and that army is often the agency. The manager might be the person who’s saying, “Okay, there’s these 15 calls we need to make. I’m gonna make these 10. Can you make these five?” They can be the CEO of the representation of that one client.

**Drew:** Does that make it in any way awkward with your agents?

**John:** It can, and so I had conversations with agents too about, “How do you feel about working with managers?” Some, they would say, in quite polite ways, that there are certain managers they love getting on the phone with and certain managers they dread getting on the phone with, and that sometimes it feels like it’s interfering with their ability to represent the client.

In most cases though, managers represent many fewer people than an agent would. An agent might have 100, 150 clients they’re supposed to be repping, whereas a manager is focused on just a much smaller list, and so they can provide a little bit more direct attention to what that person needs that day and the day after and be thinking about a year down the road, what’s best for the client.

**Drew:** You picked a manager. How’s it going so far?

**John:** Good so far. What I would say is I found that the manager is more likely to be on Zoom with me. For example, we had a Zoom with the foreign finance people at the agency. It was good to have that manager there to ask the extra questions that I wasn’t thinking about.

It’s been nice that they have different connections than my agents might. Even just on an email chain, a manager could say, “Oh, we rep them,” or, “I know that person, and so let me make that introduction, and that’s a thing that could work,” or, “It’s not public knowledge yet, but they’re gonna be busy for the next 18 months, so I don’t think that’s a good person for us to pursue next to direct this project.”

That has been good and useful to have one outside person and an ability to reach outside the silo of… Part of the reason I was looking for a manager is because if you’re at an agency, yes, they in theory could work with everyone, and they should have information on all the stuff, but it’s hard for… If you’re at CAA, it’s a little bit weird for them to reach out to WME about one of the WME clients, whereas a manager can just pick up the phone and do it.

**Drew:** That seems like a huge… Obviously, you have a giant contact list, but your contact list expands exponentially, and knowledge too with that.

**John:** Yeah. All that said, it’s new and it’s different and it’s a little bit weird. As we established on the podcast, I kind of like being a little bit uncomfortable and trying things that are outside of my comfort zone. For me, for that, it’s been good. It’s a change. It’s a development. It’s fun that we’re doing this episode now, looking back 12 years to when we first started the agent and manager conversation, for me to suddenly have a manager, which I’ve never had before.

**Drew:** I’m excited. I think it’s a cool new chapter.

**John:** Cool. Drew, thanks for getting this episode together.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Episode 2 – How to get an agent and/or manager](https://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-episode-2)
* [Episode 172 – Franz Kafka’s brother, and the perfect agent](https://johnaugust.com/2014/franz-kafkas-brother-and-the-perfect-agent)
* [Episode 7 – Firing a manager, and trying new software](https://johnaugust.com/2011/firing-a-manager-and-trying-new-software)
* [How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t)](https://www.gq.com/story/how-the-craziest-cult-movie-of-1999-got-made) by Paul Schrodt for GQ
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* This episode’s segments were originally produced by [Stuart Friedel](https://stustustu.com/). Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/643standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/its-brutal-out-here).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** You’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, if one were to eavesdrop on the conversations happening at Los Angeles restaurants or the chatter occurring on Zoom meetings before everyone gets there, you might assume things are pretty rough in Hollywood these days. Today on the show, we’ll look at what’s going on in the industry, its historical analogs, and some suggestions for what might fix it.

**Craig:** I’m sure that they’ll listen to that, right? We’ll suggest what to do.

**John:** We’ll suggest the things.

**Craig:** And then they’ll do it.

**John:** The industry bigwigs will do it.

**Craig:** They’ll do it.

**John:** It’s not even just the industry bigwigs. It’s really the structural fundamental changes that will happen, or maybe we don’t need to do anything. It’ll all sort itself out.

We’ll also answer listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what happens after we die. No, Craig, we’re not talking about the afterlife.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** What specifically happens to all of our accounts and passwords and other aspects of our digital lives and what preparations should we make, should Craig or I or Drew, for that matter, suddenly keel over and all our stuff is there.

**Craig:** Sweet release. Yes.

**John:** Sweet relief for us, but not for our heirs, not for everybody else.

**Craig:** No, everybody else is gonna have a mess to clean up. But we will be free, released-

**John:** Free.

**Craig:** … back into the simulation.

**John:** Clear.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Drew Marquardt:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** First we have some follow-up. To start us off with, Javier in Peru apparently has some corrections about our Star Wars beer ads.

**Drew:** The Star Wars beer commercials were real, but not in Peru. They happened in Chile.

**Craig:** Ah, all right. Then apologies to Isabela Merced, who is Peruvian, and ha ha Pedro Pascal, who is from Chile.

**John:** Love it all. But apparently, that was not the only mistake Craig made in Episode 641.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**Drew:** Daniel wrote, “Craig referred to the birthday paradox and got it wrong in the same way that Johnny Carson famously did. The paradox is not that if you have 23 people, there’s more than 50 percent chance that at least one will have your birthday. In fact, that’s very unlikely. The paradox is that in a group of 23 people, there’s a more than 50 percent chance that at least two of them share the same birthday. This is actually a simple calculation, as it’s one minus probability that they all have different birthdays.”

**Craig:** You know what, Daniel? Absolutely correct. This isn’t me being defensive. I knew that. I think I just said it wrong. I misspoke. But yes, I did in fact know that that was what it was, so you do get the gold star for the correction. I have no problem saying oh, darn it, I blew it, but in this case, I just misspoke. I did know the nature of that.

**John:** Now, apparently, Craig was not the only person who made a small mistake or a small issue of disagreement in 641. James wrote in and actually send audio. I think because of the nature of this, we’re gonna play James’s audio, which is fantastic. Let’s take a listen to James.

**James:** In addition to the email, John, I thought you ought to hear from a native New Yorker. I was born in Brookdale Hospital. My father was born in Brookdale Hospital. We are still here. Our accents are still here. I’m a Black dude, so you gotta throw in the AAVN, whatever. My parents are from the South, so I got New York, I got down South. But I always tell people either go from y’all or yous, depending on who I’m talking to. You know what I’m saying?

I understand what you saying, but Brooklyn has more people than Philly. We gotta stop seeing four or five gentrifiers in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and they represent Brooklyn. No, they don’t. They will be in another city in five years. My mother is buried in Brooklyn. I’m just saying that to say that we still here. You gotta move around.

I don’t know where to send people these days to find a real New York accent. But it’s not the vegan dude with the mustache and his stupid lumberjack, whatever that is, that nonsense. He wasn’t wearing that in high school. Come to Brooklyn, he gonna change all of a sudden. Whatever, dude.

But like I said, the Brooklyn accent is still in effect, no question about it. I’m writing characters. All my stories are set in New York City with real New York natives. I gotta hear that accent, because like I said, people only associate the accent with white people, to be honest with you. But like I said, we out here. It’s funny, because whenever rappers from New York go anywhere, the first thing they talk about – these are Black rappers, of course – is our accent, because they know where we from: New York.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** I love James so much. I just want to hug him. That is the sound of my youth. James, Brooklyn-born Craig over here. Absolutely. There’s a generational thing. There are different kinds of accents inside of Brooklyn. What we think of as that classic Brooklyn accent, I would say it’s an accent that was predominant in the mid-20th century and mostly among white people. Very specific things. For instance, my grandfather wouldn’t say “toilet.” He would say “TUR-lit”. The TUR-lit. That is a specific thing. But Black Brooklyn accent is also a specific thing. That was awesome. That was a great example of it.

There are all those different accents. What he’s referring to as, I guess we would call them the hipster Brooklyn people, I agree. My mom grew up in Bensonhurst, and she still has that accent. The mid-20th century Brooklyn accent’s very strong.

**John:** It’s fantastic to hear James’s voice. On 641 I talked about how the fact that when casting breakdowns say they want Brooklyn accents, what are you actually talking about? They probably honestly really want James. But if you actually look at who’s living in Brooklyn right now, you can’t guarantee that a person that you pluck off the street in Brooklyn is gonna have that accent. I was just in Brooklyn actually this whole last week. I was there for the Brooklyn half-marathon, which was really fun. I got to run through all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It was fantastic, and I loved it. James also makes the very good point that Brooklyn is huge. Brooklyn would be the fourth biggest city in America if it was its own city.

**Craig:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s nuts how huge Brooklyn is. In that giant not-quite-city. You’re going to find all sorts of different accents, but this is the one that I think people are really talking about. We just need to actually denote specifically what you want when you want to hear James, because we want to hear James.

**Craig:** I’m gonna go ahead and put an R rating on the episode here. Hannibal Buress has one of the funniest things. He’s talking about these people in Brooklyn that James is referring to with their lumberjack shirts. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s like, “I don’t mind if you want to wear a lumberjack shirt and have a waxed curly mustache, but don’t talk to me like you aren’t standing there looking like a carnival face motherfucker.” Carnival face is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Carnival face. We are so far past the whole hipster thing. We’re probably 12 generations of pop culture cycle hipsterism now. God only knows what it’s up to now. I sure do like James for just being as real and true Brooklyn as possible. God, I hope he’s a Yankees fan. I don’t know what to say. If he’s a Mets fan, it’s gonna break my heart. James, can you just let us know, Mets or Yankees.

**John:** I want James making movies too. I’m glad he’s listening to the show. I’m glad he’s writing. I want to see what he makes.

Also in Episode 641, we talked about gendered words. We’ve talked about blonde with an E versus blond without an E. Ian wrote in to point out that there actually is a male equivalent. The male word for brunette is brunet. Really, it’s without the extra T and the E on the end. I’ve never seen that used in English. Have you?

**Craig:** I have not, but it’s certainly consistent with the way French works. Brunette is not a word that I ever use anyway.

**John:** Yeah, it’s weird.

**Craig:** What’s wrong with just brown? Brown hair?

**John:** What is wrong with brown? It got me thinking as we had this discussion. Why don’t we just use the Anglo-Saxon word for blond? Because there were Anglo-Saxon blonds. Why don’t we use that? I looked it up, and the Anglo-Saxon word for blond is whitlock.

**Craig:** Great. Let’s use it.

**John:** Which means wheat-haired. Whit is wheat, and lock is that… I had a friend, Paige Whitlock, who I went to college with, who had blonde hair.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Her name was Paige Blonde.

**Craig:** That’s on theme. Also, there’s towheaded, which we usually use for children. My oldest kid was a towhead. I guess that’s a slightly different meaning. Yellow isn’t really a great descriptor of what blond hair is, because blond hair is more of that kind of lightish brown. To me, truly yellow is you’ve dyed your hair.

**John:** There are people who are almost just platinum blond, but it tends to be really young people, who have strikingly blond hair.

**Craig:** Towheads.

**John:** Towheads.

**Craig:** Towheads.

**John:** Also in 641, we asked people who had to deal with putting in the act breaks and streaming shows if they had firsthand experience to write in. Somebody did.

**Drew:** JG writes, “I have a few features running on services like Prime, Tubi, and Roku. The service that distributes those movies to those sites, Filmhub, requires that you provide metadata with commercial breaks for each movie. Their rule is you have to offer a break every 12 minutes or less, but not more. As a producer submitting the movies, it’s my job to go in and fill in the time codes for where each commercial breaks will take place. My goal was always to find the best or least intrusive spot for the breaks. But I suspected if a producer didn’t provide the metadata, the system would randomly insert the commercials within that 12-minute framework. It was a frustrating and time-consuming process, because as we know, movies aren’t designed for ad breaks. I know I opted for more breaks than I might’ve needed in order to put breaks at what felt like the most opportune moments.”

**John:** This feels like delivery requirements. We probably have talked about this on one of our 642 episodes before this. If you make a feature and you are delivering a feature to the buyer, they will have a whole long list of delivery requirements, which is not just, “Here’s the finished film,” but, “Here’s all the audio. Here’s all the paperwork that shows that we actually control all the music in this.” Delivery requirements will also be apparently now this metadata for where the commercial breaks should go. Not surprising that they’re asking for it, but JG had to do this him or herself.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s actually a good point. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about delivery requirements. We’re so focused on how do you write a screenplay, how do you get something made into a television show or a movie, but there is a kind of industrial aspect of all this, where what you provide needs to meet legal requirements. It is a product to some people.

We think of it as art, but there are people who must make sure that there is some sort of quality control and product uniformity. That means there is a minimum run time that it must hit. There are long lists of requirements for credits. How large are the credits? Where do the credits go? How big are the credits? Is that per individual deals? Is that per union bargaining agreements? There are certain delivery requirements in terms of sound levels. There are delivery requirements in terms of the fidelity of the image. Do you have to submit in a certain resolution or more or less? Do you have to supply it with sound that is capable to be both stereo only or surround? Is it full surround? Is it 5.1? Is it 7.1? Blah blah blah blah blah. All that technical stuff, there are just entire departments working on that, to make sure that when you and I get our job done, that wherever it ends up, it’s theoretically hitting some minimum level of quality.

**John:** Where our listeners are gonna probably run into this is that if you go off and make an independent film, you’re like, “Great. I spent the money. I made this independent film. I maxed out my credit cards. I’m selling it to this company.” They say, “Great. Here are the delivery requirements.” Suddenly, you have tens of thousands of dollars more expenses you have to incur in order to deliver the thing that they are buying. That could be a real drain. On my movie The Nines, we had to deliver in this format and that format and the other format. We had to deliver a cut negative. There were things I required.

**Craig:** Negative cutting, there’s something that no one worries about anymore. Hey, kids. Listen up. You would film on film, and then by the time you and I were working in the business, the images would be transferred to video using something called a Telecine. Then that video would be digitized into your digital editor, your Avid probably. You would edit on that. That would create an EDL, an edit decision list. Every single shot has a frame. Then when all that was done and the picture was locked, they would send those just reams of paper with all of the ins and outs of every single shot. Then negative cutters would take the negative of the film and a splicer and a chopper, and they would begin to assemble it painstakingly over the course of I don’t know how many days, creating one long Frankenstein negative that was the edited film. That was then run through and reprinted onto a single negative. Then that was the thing that they made. I believe that’s how that worked. Then we ended up with a DI, digital interpositive, and all that other stuff.

Now the workflow, unless you’re dealing with Christopher Nolan or a filmmaker that’s really committed to physical film, all that’s gone. There is no more negative cutting.

**John:** Yeah. Not only would you need to deliver a print or something else that could be distributed, as Craig was saying, the sound has to be in this format versus that format. You had to deliver a print that has the sound printed on it. There were all these requirements. Some of those have gone away. As JG is saying, now there are new requirements.

I didn’t have to, at that point, supply where the commercial breaks are. With my movie The Nines, one of the things I was required to do was to deliver a broadcast-ready version of the movie, basically a sanitized version of the movie that could be aired on, realistically, cable. I remember talking with the company who was doing that, and here were their suggestions for how we were going to get that done. It was crazy. As far as I know, it hasn’t ever aired on basic cable, but there is a cut someplace that could do it.

**Craig:** Somewhere. We went through this on Season 1 of The Last of Us. We had to go through a delivery process that held two weeks to convert the image into HDR, high dynamic range, which some televisions can make use of. That two weeks was brutal actually, because we were right up against it to try and get things done. A lot of movies and television shows are right up against it because of the proliferation of visual effects, how many visual effects there are, getting those visual effects delivered in time and then shoving it through the rest of the sausage factory, including things like HDR and all that other fun stuff. Yay the people that do the delivery stuff, because god knows I would butcher it.

**John:** Oh, yeah, also because it’s a job that you are doing once. You are doing maybe once or twice a year if you’re just doing a lot of stuff. You would need a person whose job it is to do that every day, who actually understands what these things actually mean on paper and what they actually take in time. That’s why you have post-production supervisors and-

**Craig:** Sure do.

**John:** … contractual obligation people who oversee stuff, people who are figuring out what the credits are, what that run is. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** There’s a reason that there are all those names in the credits.

**John:** Now, before we get on to our main topic, a few episodes back we had Ken White come on, and he did a great job of talking through the realities of the law we see on TV and the lawyer-client relationship we see on TV versus realities. I was thinking we should do that for some other professions, because there’s professions we see all the time in film and television, and we don’t know what the actual realities are behind that. This is a thing where our listeners may be able to help us out.

Some things we would love to be able to talk with people about. A private investigator. If you know or are a private investigator who does the kinds of things we see on TV but the reality version of that, we’d love to talk with you. A military specialist. We see all these military actions in film and television. We don’t know what the realities are behind that. Public school teachers, especially in high school. There’s a whole genre of teacher movies. We could talk a little bit more about teachers. Police officers, of course. We see cop stuff all the time. Be curious to see what the realities are there. Then we have a few more long reaches. We have an astronaut on deck. We could talk about that.

If you have suggestions for this is a person who actually does this job who could be a great guest on Scriptnotes, write in to ask@johnaugust.com, because in the weeks ahead, we’d love to do more of those kind of episodes.

Let’s get on to our main topic here, which is, man, things are just terrible, or they feel kind of terrible. Literally, at dinner last night, I was sitting with a group of other writers and filmmakers. It’s really tough to set up a project now, to sell a project right now. Craig, you may be a little bit insulated from this, because you’re up in Vancouver, you’re doing your TV show. Your head’s down, doing your work. But for the rest of us who are down here in Los Angeles, it is really weird and tough in a way that is just different than previous years.

**Craig:** Insulated though I may be, because I have a television show that’s on and running, I hear about it all the time. There’s no part of me that’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what everyone’s cranking on about.” No. There has been a significant – I hesitate to use the word correction, because that implies that things were wrong prior. There has been a significant change in both the quantity of shows that are being made, the way they’re being made, the amount of episodes that are being made, the costs of those series. Everything has changed in such a way that there’s a squeeze now.

I think that a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with were anticipated by and partially addressed by the strike. The things that the Writers Guild were looking for dovetailed entirely with the problems that we see now. What’s important to always keep in mind is the Writers Guild negotiates a collective bargaining agreement for people who are hired. The Writers Guild, even with the minimum guaranteed room size, that’s not going to be something that keeps 9,000 people at work if there aren’t 9,000 jobs. It’s just not how it goes. There is no way to insulate the workforce from a contraction like the one we’re seeing right now.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. We’ll put links in the show notes to two different articles. The one that had the most people talking about it the last couple weeks was one by Daniel Bessner, he was writing for Harpers, called The Life and Death of Hollywood. It’s really recapping what’s been happening over the last few decades and how we got to this moment. For a lot of people, it’s gonna be very familiar territory. But there were a couple of quotes and interviews in there that stuck out.

The first one I want to talk about is Alena Smith. She wrote and created the series Dickinson for Apple TV. She says, “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multi-billion dollar grant from the tech world, but we mistook that and were, frankly, actively gaslit into thinking that was because they cared about art.”

What’s she’s saying here is that we did, with a rise to streaming, just get suddenly a whole bunch of new opportunities to make weird, cool shit, but we shouldn’t ever confuse ourselves that they wanted to make the weird, cool shit because they wanted us to be artistically satisfied. They were chasing audience. They were chasing just esoteric, strange audience. Their whole goal was to get as many people as possible to subscribe to these shows. They really weren’t that obsessed with how successful any individual show was. Now, the correction is that they really want those shows to be hits, and that is likely largely driving some of this contraction and this retreat to safety that we’re seeing in the things they’re actually choosing to make.

**Craig:** I think the phrase “too good to be true” comes to mind. You said they were chasing an audience. I’m not even sure they were chasing an audience. I don’t even know what they were doing. In terms of the amount of content that was being created, it seemed like they were trying to build overwhelming libraries of stuff. Instead of saying, “Hey, come to our new store, because if you like pants, we have pants,” they were saying, “Hey, we built a new Walmart. We have literally everything you could possibly ever want. Go wander the aisles.” It’s Costco of stuff. What they weren’t doing, and I couldn’t understand it, was having any concern whatsoever with who, if anyone, was watching some of these shows.

When the Warner Bros-Discovery merger happened, there was this immediate convulsion, because under the direction of the CEO, they took off a bunch of things from the streaming service. In the articles, there were these little mentions that some of the things that they had taken off were being watched by tens of people, so in a statistical sense, unwatched. There was so much stuff. Because everything is expensive when you are creating demand, high labor demand, the cost of things, not necessarily of the writers, but the cost of production and key actors start to go up. Everything inflates. What we ended up with was a bubble.

The only thing that I would say to Alena is that the studios and networks have been actively gaslighting writers forever. This is not new. They are constantly lying to us any time they say, “Hey, we love you. We love your mind, and we love what you do.” They’re lying. What they’re saying is, “We hope to god that whatever it is that you do, which we may not even understand, people become obsessed with and pay us to watch.” That’s all they’re ever saying. That’s all they’ve ever said. That’s all they ever will say. But they dress it up in all sorts of alluring phrases.

What changed during the bubble time was they actually didn’t seem to care about anything. They just wanted stuff to get made. It was almost like in the late ’80s and early ’90s when home video made it so everything was profitable. In this case, profit didn’t matter. Therefore, they made everything.

**John:** I’m really glad you brought up the difference between audience and just doing stuff to do stuff, because it reminds me of criticism I see of web traffic. For a long time, these websites were generating huge numbers of eyeballs. People were seeing stories on these sites. Everything was about chasing views. But there’s a difference between views and audience. An audience actually likes the thing you’re doing and wants to come back and see it again. They actually really engage with the content you’re making, versus someone who drops by your site and then immediately bounces back off and leaves. Many websites are having to retool and really think about who do we actually want to attract to what we’re providing, and how do we keep them engaged and involved.

That does feel like the same kind of distinction we’re seeing here is that they were trying to build these megamalls and recognizing that most of these stores that they were opening up, no one wanted to walk into.

Also in this article, they were talking about the short-termism that happens is because once you actually start just looking, like, quarter by quarter, how much are we growing these things, when you have investors really wanting to see, “We have to have a return on investment immediately,” that’s not a very good way to make movies and TV shows. You need to be able to think a little bit longer than just the next quarter for how you guys are doing and then to try to correct out of the situation, you end up making these gargantuan cuts that are so brutal.

**Craig:** We are getting pretty violent pendulum swing/whiplash syndrome here. A healthy industry does make money, because if they don’t, then they fall apart and they stop hiring us. We have a vested interest in a healthy industry. If the industry decides, “We actually don’t care about profit anymore. We’re just gonna borrow crazy amounts of money and spend crazy amounts of money with no goal in sight,” then it is inevitable that they are going to then pendulum swing back to keep themselves alive. The pendulum swing will be too much of a squeeze, too much of a minimization, because they are now trying to pay back their own bad decisions.

But ideally, this whiplash pendulum effect settles down and we find ourselves back in some kind of healthy balance, where the studios are making money, don’t feel like their backs are against the wall, are no longer in a wild cocaine spree of spending, and then hopefully are able to go back to the way it used to be. “Here’s some safe stuff. Here’s some slightly risky stuff. Here’s a little bit of this. Here’s a little bit of that. But overall, we have a balanced slate.”

**John:** There’s a quote here from Jason Grote, who is talking about prestige TV. He’s really talking about the HBO model of prestige TV, so like The Sopranos, and when you suddenly got like, “Oh my god, we have this really good TV.” He’s pointing out that it wasn’t about a bunch of new people coming into Hollywood. It was a bunch of people who actually really knew how to make TV shows, who were suddenly given the opportunity to make the TV shows they really wanted to make. That feels like a crucial distinction. It’s not just about newcomers making brand new stuff. It was actually like, “Oh, let’s actually take some chances on some people who actually know what they’re doing.”

**Craig:** Yes, and I’m a beneficiary of this. No question. There are a lot of people who worked for a long time, making the things that they were told to make, the way they were told to make them. They had to fit in a certain box. There had to be ratings. There had to be this. There had to be that. It had to be for a particular budget, repeatable for 22 or 26 episodes a season. All of those restraints suddenly disappeared. You did get remarkable stuff. Now, there are some things that are excellent that also get huge audiences. There are things that are excellent that don’t.

I think a lot of those things in part suffered more from where they were and how they were, or often, not even, marketed, because in the crazy gush of content, it was almost like nobody making the stuff had time to even tell you about it. They threw it in your face as you were walking by. Maybe you took it, and maybe you didn’t, and then you just kept going.

But that’s absolutely true. Vince Gilligan is such a good example. He was making great network television. It was standard network television. But when you said to him, “Hey, do what you want.” Same thing with David Chase. Charlie Kaufman worked on – was it Alf? I think it was Alf. When you let certain writers go free… But no question; it wasn’t like prestige TV helped, for instance, under-represented writers. It didn’t.

**John:** Wrapping up on Bessner’s article here, I think his last suggestion is frustrating, because he undercuts it immediately after he says it. But he’s talking about, oh, the one change which would actually make a big difference is if we let these writers control the copyright on the things that they make. As we’ve talked about since probably Episode 1 of this show, there’s a reason why that doesn’t happen in the U.S. It’s because that’s what lets us have the powerful union that we have. The other good counterexample is, in lots of other places in the world, writers can control the copyright. It’s not like it’s awesome for them there.

**Craig:** No. When you see somebody suggesting that the answer to a screenwriter’s ills is retaining copyright, you know you’re dealing with a tyro or somebody who is simply from the outside and doesn’t get it. It is a nonstarter and it’s a bad idea. You’re absolutely right.

We can simply point to the rest of the world and say, “Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television or film are being compensated the way American writers are. Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television and film get a pension the way American writers do, get residuals the way American writers do, get credit protections the way American writers do.” You can’t. You can’t. The copyright suggestion just falls apart anyway, because we don’t publish screenplays to be read by people. It is a part of a composite work. That’s kind of a huge red flag that maybe somebody didn’t do the research they needed to do.

**John:** The second article we’ll put a link in the show notes to is One Weird Trick for Fixing Hollywood by Max Read.

**Craig:** I like this.

**John:** He starts out by talking about how among his screenwriter friends, it is just really tough. It’s the same conversation you and I have about our screenwriter friends. The only things that are getting made, in his case he’s hearing about ultra premium limiteds, which are a six-episode miniseries that has an A-list star. I would say even that is very hard to shop and get made right now. No one wants to buy those things. I’ve been out with things like that, and it’s still really tough.

The number of projects that have, “That’s a great writer,” the script’s already written, there’s a director on board, there’s an actor on board, the number of those that have not sold in the last six months is just mind-boggling. There’s no guarantees about what’s going to happen.

What I did like about Max’s article is that he points out the bigger issue that the industry as a whole is facing is that we have a lot of new competition for the amount of time that people would normally spend watching TV or going to a movie, and that’s because we have phones, we have other things that are going to keep our eyes entertained during the day. That’s time that we’re just not gonna be watching TV. The amount of hours viewed of the television that’s being made or the movies that are out there is gonna suffer.

**Craig:** This is an odd argument to me, I have to admit. Billions of people are watching things that are on Netflix and Amazon and Max and network television, which still earns millions of viewers a week. The old stuff, Suits and Friends, these things get recycled again and are watched by millions and millions of people and then discussed on TikTok. TikTok, in fact, is where a lot of these shows get their popularity in the first place.

You and I talked about how our kids got caught up in this crazy TikTok phenomenon of watching Criminal Minds, a show that was never intended for 16-year-old girls to watch, and yet there was this massive wave of girls one summer – mostly girls as far as I could tell – watching Criminal Minds and discussing it together on TikTok.

I don’t understand, A, the argument that the problem with television is that people aren’t watching it. They are. We have fragmented the audience across 4 billion shows. At peak TV, the John Landgraf phrase, I think there were over 600 television shows made in a single year. The audience probably grew, but it was spread out over 600 shows. This is a division problem. It’s not an addition problem.

Second, I don’t understand how to solve Hollywood by going off and supporting or helping YouTube and that. That’s not Hollywood. That’s a different thing. We need to protect this business as it functions here, because what people do on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and Twitter is not Hollywood. It’s its own thing, which is massive and incredibly profitable and valid, but it’s different.

**John:** It is different. I’m gonna make his argument that I don’t fully endorse, but just so it’s actually made. His metaphor would be, let’s say you are a home builder who’s building apartment buildings, and then a few blocks away you see there are these hobbyists who are building things that are basically like buildings, that are competing for the housing of people around you, but they’re doing it much cheaper and without any of your protections. You would be thinking about that. You would be looking, like, “Shit. How am I going to be competing against them if they are doing it cheaper?”

**Craig:** If I bought into the premise that we’ll call the paramedia is limiting the audience or ruining the audience for what Hollywood does, yes. There’s an argument to be made that the theatrical experience has been permanently damaged by both the pandemic and the paramedia, but not the streaming business. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that the business plan made no fucking sense. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that they were spending more than they could ever hope to make back, with no end in sight. All of them decided they should try and outspend each other.

But the viewership is enormous. Enormous. We’re talking about tens and tens of millions of people in the United States alone, much less the rest of the world. Netflix has an audience that has, I don’t think, ever existed before in terms of size. I include them, of course, as part of Hollywood. I don’t buy that the audience is being taken away.

My concern about the way things have been going is that none of it made any sense. It all felt a little bit like MoviePass to me, where you and I would look at it and go, “You spend $80 billion try and get $5 billion? Why?”

**John:** The answer is because there was a time when tech companies could do that, and sometimes it had great outcomes because of that. Google was an example, or Amazon was an example of companies that burned money until they became incredibly profitable. I think there was a thought that these legacy studios could burn money and then suddenly become profitable. Netflix was able to do that. In order to compete against Netflix, we need to become Netflix. It didn’t quite work out that way.

**Craig:** It didn’t work great. I think that there’s been a settling in. We do have some more convulsions on the way, because Paramount is clearly up for sale. As we’re talking, maybe it’s already been sold. I know Sony has put in a bid. Disney bought Fox. Let’s say Sony buys Paramount. We’re now squishing ourselves down, but in a way also getting back to the number of things that we used to have, because if you include Amazon and Netflix and Apple, those are three big studios. We’ve lost Fox. We’re about to use Paramount. We’re getting back almost to the same number of studios that have always kind of existed. It will be interesting to see in the years to come if we can achieve some kind of stability again in our business.

**John:** In talking with agents and managers and other folks who are on the sale side of stuff, they will agree that this is a really tough time. But there are some, I won’t say brighter spots, but there are some areas that are less affected. There’s still money to make indie features. That pool of money is still out there, and there’s still a market for that. There’s ways to do that, especially things that come to a certain price.

I was talking to a documentary filmmaker who said that he’s been working on this thing that he was originally gonna pitch as a three-episode documentary series. You can’t do that now. People aren’t gonna buy that now. But he can make it as a documentary feature, so, “Great. I’m gonna pivot. Same story. I’ll do it in 90 minutes versus I guess 90 minutes in three episodes.” It all works out. The same thing happens for narrative features as well.

I also think we just need to be mindful that, the classic truism, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. People can be so gun-shy to actually try to do something that they’re looking past simpler things they could try to do. If these $200 million movies are not working out for you and you’re losing money on them, maybe take a look at the Anyone But Yous, smaller movies that are successful, and just try some of those, because there may be some different ways and different kinds of movies and series you can make that are gonna be cheaper, that can actually give you the outcome you want.

**Craig:** This has been going on for quite some time. The squish of the small movie preexists all the Netflix stuff. It preexists the pandemic. The chasing of massive things really accelerated with the Avengers. You can draw a line where the Avengers came out, did what it did, and everybody said, “Okay, I guess this is our business now, because the amount of movies we have to make and the amount of swings we have to take to match one of those.” One of those gets you four more of those. That keeps your business afloat for years. Years.

**John:** We are making some big, expensive movies that pay off. Dune 2 was incredibly expensive. It paid off. It’s not going to generate a bunch of more Dune movies, most likely, but it was great that it happened. We of course had Barbenheimer, was a great success for both of those films. Those films were very profitable and big successes. I think what we’re urging this industry to do is to take a look at what were the things about those films that were successful. They were made by great, visionary filmmakers who were swinging for the fences and doing interesting things. It wasn’t a retreat to safety that made those things giant hits.

**Craig:** I’ll point to a movie that is one of my favorite examples. I think the budget was something like $60 million. This movie was from 2019. In 1990 or 2000s, that would be the classic $35, $40 million movie. Joker. Joker was a hard R. It was kind of an art film. It borrowed a little bit of comic book shine, but barely any. There were superpowers. There were really no action scenes. It was an art film. The box office for Joker is $1 billion. Joker: Folie à Deux is coming out. That is the kind of bet that I think is well worth taking and is terrifying.

**John:** Let’s also talk about Joker is that not everybody liked it. In fact, a lot of people hated Joker and to this day hate Joker. You know what? That’s okay, because it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone in order to be a giant success.

**Craig:** People talk about the four-quadrant movie. There are movies you can make that everybody likes. There are very few movies you can make that everybody loves. But what you can do are make films that some people love so much that they will evangelize them, they will market them for you, they will see them multiple times, they will buy them again when they come on the streaming service. Joker is a great example of that and the definition of a risky pitch. By the way, the sequel looks just as risky to me.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Good for them. It’s a big budget.

**John:** Here was the bet. The bet was that there wasn’t an audience for it. It wasn’t the bet that everybody in America will want to see this movie. It was that it was talking about there’s gonna be an audience, and that by definition of audience, people who will genuinely love this movie.

**Craig:** Yes. That kind of artistic risk taking, which I think you could also see with Barbie… There’s so many ways to make Barbie bad. There are about a million ways to make a bad Barbie.

**John:** Oh my god. Almost every way is to make a bad Barbie.

**Craig:** There’s pretty much one way to make a great one. Trusting somebody like Greta Gerwig, that’s risky. It is. They used to just have a bland filmmaker deliver a bland script for these things, to hit the thick middle and hedge their bet, and they didn’t do that with that one.

Oppenheimer only gets made because Christopher Nolan is the kind of filmmaker who gets to do stuff. That’s it. Again, nobody’s sitting there thinking, “Oppenheimer’s gonna make a hell of a lot of money.” How much did Oppenheimer make? $965 million globally.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That’s insane. That’s insane. That’s a biopic of the guy that ran the nuclear program. We’ve made movies about the nuclear bomb before. We’ve made movies about the father of the nuclear bomb before. Universal said, “We will take this huge bet. We will spend $100 million on this.” An algorithm most likely would say, “Oh, that’ll get you $30 or $40 million.” But instead, they made almost a billion dollars, because it’s a quality film. What’s the bet there by Universal? Good movie, people will come and see it. That’s old-school thinking. Really old-school thinking. You know what else we see out there that’s old-school thinking? Ads on television shows.

**John:** It’s craziness.

**Craig:** We may be hurdling ourselves backwards to 1988. Let’s find out.

**John:** Craig, a term I heard this last week, I saw it in a blog post by Hannah Ritchie, who writes about environmental issues, was the Moloch trap. Have you ever heard this term, the Moloch, M-O-L-O-C-H?

**Craig:** I only know that from the Bible and Watchmen. What is the Moloch trap?

**John:** The Moloch trap, it’s these forces that coerce and cause competing individuals to take actions which although are the best for them individually, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off. It’s almost impossible to break out of that cycle. Tragedy of the commons is kind of an example of that.

But there’s a lot of things in environmental science that are Moloch traps, because, okay, I recognize that burning coal is bad for everybody and it’s bad for this, but if I stop burning coal, then other people are gonna burn coal. It’s very hard for any one individual to make a change or any individual nation to make a change, because the forces force you to do that.

I do feel like there’s a Moloch trap happening with the streaming wars, because it was like everyone was trying to do this thing. I think everyone recognized this thing we’re doing is unsustainable, but if I don’t do it, then I’m worse off.

**Craig:** Right. Basically either we’re all sinking together or one or two of us need to sink. I don’t want to be one of the one or two that sinks.

**John:** It’s hard to break out of the Moloch trap, but you do it by basically changing your motivations, by embracing innovation. The case of environmental science, it’s now cheaper to make power without burning things, which is great. Now it’s like we’re out of this cycle because we just don’t do those things, because it’s actually cheaper to build solar panels or turbines or other things. We’re not competing on these limited resources anymore, because we can just do stuff, and we actually think about abundance rather than limitations.

I do wonder whether there’s some way we can be thinking about changing our motivations and our goals here to break out of the cycle. Instead of always thinking about subscriber numbers or this or that, really thinking about what are the markers of success that we want for this. Profitability, sure, but with ads or with other stuff. Is there other ways we can think about how we’re judging whether this project was worth making, that are not purely based on the impossible metrics?

**Craig:** Hollywood is not a great place to try and metric yourself to success. The reason is, unlike basically every other industry, there’s something going on here that is incredibly unpredictable and also incredibly attractive. Our business creates culture, which is exciting and alluring, and predictable, sort of, a little bit, sometimes, but mostly not. Betting is really on human beings saying to you, “The thing I love and like, a lot of people will love and like.” You don’t know if that’s true or not. Your gut may not be particularly good or it may be okay. Your job basically rests in their hands.

Hollywood will always frustrate the modelers and the quants. It’s why I think people that just want to make money don’t bother with Hollywood. But if you want to make money and be part of something exciting and meaningful, yeah, Hollywood.

**John:** That’s why people make Broadway theater. That’s why people invest in independent films. The last point I’ll make here is that I think we’ve talked about the quants. They are doing these calculations that are incredibly esoteric, and it’s really hard to know what is the purpose behind, that they’re basically the navigators in Dune who are adjusting this device to get them from one place to another place. But this is not Dune.

I think there was something really good about the simplicity of Nielsen ratings and box office weekend grosses that lets you know was this a successful thing or was this not a successful thing. During probably five years of streaming, no one knew. We never knew, was this successful, was this not successful. I don’t know what actually worked. I think that by making it so opaque, we were really hurting ourselves.

**Craig:** It’s a really tricky thing. Have we talked about the new subscriber data thing on the show?

**John:** The WGA one?

**Craig:** I don’t think it was a WGA thing. It’s more a method of measuring, because one of the questions is, if you put all this stuff out there on your streaming service and it says, “We have a whole bunch of subscribers. Lots of them watch this,” did that show keep them subscribing? Hard to say. In fact, impossible to say. But one of the things they look at is, when we put a new show on, are there new subscribers? Are the new subscribers clearly coming in for that show? Now, it’s impossible to draw a perfect line, but you can kind of see these waves.

They are trying to find ways to figure out which of these shows is actually contributing to the subscriber money and which are not. It’s hard to say, because let’s say you make a show and you put it on your streaming service and not a ton of people watch it, but those people are subscribing to your service only for that show. That’s valuable. Then you could have a show that a lot of people watch, but nobody’s gonna cancel it if the show gets canceled. Then what is that worth? These are very tricky things to figure out.

**John:** They are tricky. I can see why an individual service might want to look at those numbers, but I don’t think it does the industry as a whole, or certainly the filmmakers they’re working with, all that much good to just trot out these weird, esoteric numbers. Tell me, is this show a hit? How many Americans or people worldwide are watching the show? Because that’s what really matters culturally is knowing this a very popular thing. There’s a reason why – what is the new Netflix series, Baby Reindeer?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** It broke out. We know it broke out because people are talking about it. They can also tell us that the numbers are really big. It’s great to see. That’s also again an example of a weird show that shouldn’t work and does and a risk that somebody took and it paid off.

**Craig:** We used to have a line we could draw between watching and money. Like you said, people bought tickets. Every person that came to see the movie put money in your pocket. When there were ads, every single person that watched the show put money in your pocket. When you take away the ads and you take away the tickets and you just have a store that people can wander through and it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, how do you know that people are paying for the buffet for the shrimp or the salad? You don’t. You just don’t know. Even in success, I think a lot of times these people might be going, “Okay, but is this success meaningful?”

Let’s go back to the quote we got from Alena Smith, who said we were actively gaslit, because they don’t care about making an impression on culture, actually, I don’t think. I don’t think they care. I think what they care about is money. I think they are deeply confused about what is actually putting money in their pockets and what isn’t. They’re looking for something to hold onto, but it’s a lot of sand. It’s not that I’m gonna go so far as to say that I sympathize with the people sitting in the rooms trying to figure the math out. But from a problem-solving point of view, it’s a tricky one.

**John:** The only point I’ll slightly push back against is you said they only cared about money. I think one of the issues was they weren’t caring about money for a number of years.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** They were just caring about growth, and then they realized. “Oh, and money will come at some point.” It’s like, but will it? That’s not sustainable.

**Craig:** No. That’s a classic Silicon Valley think. Hollywood of old, those people were like, “I’m not making a picture unless I know it’s gonna make money, and that’s it!” I like talking like Tony Shalhoub from Barton Fink. That was the way it goes. Then suddenly, there were these other people like, “We got a better idea.” Silicon Valley is remarkable. They do these things that sometimes turn into these world-changing, axis-shifting, gabillion-dollar businesses.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Sometimes they just set massive piles of money on fire and dance around it. It’s so bizarre. I don’t know what’s going on up there.

**John:** We got our Quibis.

**Craig:** We got our Quibis. We got our FTXs. We have our things that just were like, what in the hell is it? But hey, man, you know what? We just write them.

**John:** We just write them.

**Craig:** We just write them.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one here is from Ellie.

**Drew:** Ellie writes, “I’ve been receiving some incredible feedback on the first draft of my screenplay. However, I’m finding that I’m now super scared to move forward with any rewrites or editing things that I know that I have left to revisit on the second draft. It’s like the excellent feedback has made me feel scared and completely frozen. I literally feel tense. It’s quite a timely story, so I really feel I want to get this out in the world ASAP. Perhaps I’m also afraid of the unknown of what I’ll do with a second draft. Ach, help. How do I unfreeze myself?”

**John:** I hear you, Ellie. That’s a familiar state, because here’s the thing. Your first draft, it wasn’t perfect, but it was complete and full and you loved it. It was an expression of what your original intentions were. You get this feedback, and they’re describing something that’s maybe even better, but you don’t know that you can actually do it. That’s probably a fear, a perfectionism. There’s all sorts of things that are holding you back. Man, you just gotta go for it. You gotta jump in and I would say pick some random moment in that thing and get going.

**Craig:** I too have had this, Ellie. You’ve described it so well that it’s making me feel tense, because I’ve been here so many times. I’m gonna say something that is maybe a little bit scary, but there’s some sunlight at the end of it. The second draft is usually worse than the first.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s just part of the process. This is one of the reasons why. Your first draft was knitted together, and now you’re starting to pull stuff. You know that you have to change things, and you know that there are some things you want to change. But now when you pull stuff, you’re gonna make wounds, you’re gonna diminish some things. You might step on something that it turns out was incredibly important.

Allow yourself to write the second draft that is worse than the first draft, as long as you can say to the people you’re working with, “I’m gonna go for some stuff on the second draft. This one will be a little messy.” The third draft is where it’s all gonna happen, because that’s the one where you get it back and then some.

**John:** Ellie, a technique that might work for you, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but actually start with a blank page. You might want to just open up a new document, and in this new document, type bullet points of, like, “These are the new scenes. This is the new stuff that’s happening.” Start to write those new scenes. Then from your old script, copy through the scenes of the moments that are actually gonna come through unchanged, where you’re not doing anything, because that may actually help you avoid the problem of just like, “Oh, I don’t want to damage this perfect thing that I built,” because you realize you’re damaging it. Think of the second draft as a new thing that gets to pull from your first draft. You approach a new thing differently than a rewrite. By letting it be a new thing, it may be actually a little less scary for you.

**Craig:** Yep, that may work. Basically, try anything you want and give yourself permission to suck. It might suck. That’s okay. Third draft is around the corner.

**John:** We have a question on a different kind of paralysis. Here’s Richard. Let’s take a listen.

**Richard:** Hello, guys. Richard here from the UK. I wanted to ask you something that seems to just steal so much time for me. I’ll set the scene if I can. You’ve made a really promising contact, and they’ve asked for some work, and you’re readying an email, a one-pager, and maybe even, say, a script. You reread your breezy yet professional email about 17 times, and then you worry that maybe the one-pager has got a typo, so you go through that a few times, and then the script, scanning for mistakes that may have eluded the 27 rewrites that you’ve already done. Then obviously, you better reread your email with fresh eyes, or maybe, oh, we should change that word. Then you think, oh, if I’ve spotted a mistake in the email, then maybe there’s one in the one-pager. Before you know it, four or five hours have just passed and it’s time to pick up the kids and start their dinner.

Both of you have obviously had to send some super important emails to some super important people. Can you give me any advice on how to cut out this excruciating ordeal. Thanks, guys. You’re the best.

**Craig:** We are the best. Thanks, Richard. I wonder how long Richard worked on this.

**John:** Absolutely. How many times did Richard rerecord his question to us?

**Craig:** Here’s some good news, Richard. Yes, we have certainly written our fair share of emails and documents and things. The fact is if you look at the emails you get back from these people, you will find all sorts of mistakes in their emails. You are dealing with an illusion that our minds create whereby all of our decisions are important. Emails are glanced through, scanned, sometimes barely. The documents that you send will have moments in them that make people sit forward and go, “I want to make this.” You can have an entire sentence missing. If it’s working for them, that’s okay. If you are riddled with spelling errors and typos and you’re actively putting forth the attitude of carelessness, that will call things into question. But ultimately, the quality of things is what matters. If you find yourself in a loop, just stop the loop and send the email.

**John:** You’re in an anxiety trap. You’re anxious because you’re anxious. It feeds upon itself. It’s real. It’s natural. You gotta get out of it. What might help you out would be to literally set a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, and take a reasonable amount of time to reread the email, take one last look at the document you’re attaching. When the timer goes off, press send and walk away from your computer, because you’re not doing anybody any favors by obsessing over things that are not important and not worth obsessing over.

**Craig:** There’s a feeling sometimes when you send these things. You’re about to hit send, and you think, “I’m sending you me.” You’re not. That’s the scary part is I’m sending you a document. I’m sending you an email. This is me to you. If there’s a flaw in it, there’s a flaw in me, and I will be rejected. None of that is true. It’s a way for us to imagine a control we do not have over people’s impressions of us. You could be given a year to perfect an email and a document in terms of editing, the surface editing you’re describing, and it would not change their opinion of you or the work in any significant way.

**John:** For our Premium Members, we sometimes send out emails about live shows or other things coming up or Three Page Challenges. In Mailchimp, the service we use, there used to be this thing right before you sent the email. There’d be this animation of a big monkey finger, a sweaty monkey finger above this red button for pressing send. It’s very effective and really anxiety-producing, like, “Oh, shit. Is it really ready? Is there anything left to fix?” They got rid of that image, because I think they probably did some surveys and realized that’s actually making it worse for people. It’s too true to the experience. It no longer says that. Now you can send it out more willy-nilly and it doesn’t do that, freak you out.

**Craig:** Do you really want to send this email?

**John:** Really want to?

**Craig:** I mean, I’m a monkey, but I’ve read it. Do you really want to send it? I mean, if you want to, but I wouldn’t.

Richard, you’re gonna be all right.

**John:** He’s gonna be fine. Let’s do our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is this artist named Lola Dupre. I have no knowledge of who she is. I just know her artwork is just so effing cool. I’ll put a link in the show notes to her archive, her gallery. She makes these portraits of animals and people that are collages, and so they’re distorted. It’s an image of a thing that’s just been distorted and pulled into different directions. They’re all really, really cool. Craig, you’re looking at this now too. Help me describe what you’re seeing.

**Craig:** There are images of let’s say cats, and it’s somewhat caricatured, but most salient, the cats have 20 eyes or there are painted images of people and the length of the face is really distorted. One of these is wonderful. I might just get that. It’s an old-school Mac with a keyboard, but the keyboard has like a thousand buttons on it. This is amazing. I love that one.

**John:** It’s all great. They’re done through collage. Basically, she’s starting with one original image, and then just by overlapping and overlapping, she’s distorting the dimensions of it in ways that are just really, really cool. It just made me happy to look at and just things I would love to have on my wall. Lola Dupre, an artist. We’ll put a link in the show notes to her shop and her gallery.

**Craig:** Very cool. Looks like most of her stuff has been sold. You’re doing great, Lola. I have two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none, so I’m trying to make up for it. First is Codenames Duet. We’ve talked about Codenames.

**John:** Which I’ve played. It’s so much fun.

**Craig:** It’s so much fun. Codenames Duet, I played with Melissa. If you just have two people, you can’t play against each other, of course. The idea is you both have the same board of words. You each have different words on that board you’re trying to clue to each other. You need to work cooperatively to get all the words uncovered by a certain number of turns. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a very clever way for two people to play Codenames, and it’s just as interesting. There’s something nice about the cooperative experience. As opposed to the, “I beat you,” it’s more like, “We beat it.”

**John:** Now, Craig, we haven’t talked about the new Scrabble, and so all the controversy over, in Europe they came out with an alternate version of Scrabble, which is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game. There was all this Sturm und Drang about like, “Oh my god, they’ve ruined Scrabble.” But it actually reminds me of these cooperative games like Codenames Duet, where basically you’re trying to work together to get a thing done.

**Craig:** I don’t know why people would be annoyed that there’s a version of Scrabble that people can play cooperatively. Who cares? Just play your regular Scrabble. It’s still there. It’s not a problem. I think sometimes people are just looking for stuff to get angry about. Scrabble is made by, what is it, Mattel? They’re a company. They’re trying to make money. Who cares? Do you know how many versions of Clue have been made?

**John:** One or two.

**Craig:** Yeah, like 400,000. My other One Cool Thing, I landed on this because I was talking with somebody about the Bible and weird Bible verses. I thought, “Oh, I bet you the internet has a great collection of weirdest Bible verses,” and they did. They had lots of them, but there was one that I loved so much that I need to read it. This is my new favorite Bible verse. This is from 2 Kings Chapter 2, Verse 23.

“From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.” There’s so much going on here-

**John:** There’s so much.

**Craig:** … that I love. First of all, at first I was like, you can’t kill kids because they called you baldy, although I was not aware that people were yelling “baldy” back in, whatever, 300 BC, but fine. But then I was like, wait a second, 2 bears mauled 42 of the boys. That means there’s more than 42 boys. Now, that’s a riot. That’s 70 boys now following you screaming, “Get out of here, baldy!” I’m afraid.

**John:** I don’t understand the bears’ agenda. It’s [crosstalk 01:04:16].

**Craig:** The bears don’t have an agenda. The bears have been sent by the Lord. But this is the next mind-blowing part. He only sent two bears. Two bears mauled 42 boys. That’s 21 boys per bear. Let’s say these bears are real quick. It takes maybe five seconds to fully maul a child. You got 21 of them. That’s almost a minute. After 30 seconds of watching your friends being torn apart by bears, how are you not running?

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Just run. Why only send two bears? Also, I like that there happen to be woods nearby, and also that the Lord was like, “Oh my god, no. You can’t call my guy baldy. Oh, bears, that’ll work.” Bears.

**John:** Bears.

**Craig:** It’s just such a great verse. “Get out of here, baldy!”

**John:** I’m looking it up on Biblia, which is showing me the different translations of that same section, because I was wondering was baldy just one esoteric choice that one translator chose to make. But no, baldy is common in most of this.

This is from the New International Readers version. It’s slightly different. “Elisha left Jericho, went up to Bethel. He was walking along the road. Some young fellows came out of the town. They made fun of him. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have hair on your head,’ they said. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have any hair on your head.’ He turned around and looked at them and he called down a curse on them. He did it in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods. They attacked 42 of the young fellows.” It’s not just a weird translation.

**Craig:** That’s what happened. That’s the story.

**John:** That’s what happens.

**Craig:** That is the full story of what happens when you start saying “baldy.” Is it possible that the two bears were just large, hairy gay men? Because now this is getting good.

**John:** Now it makes more sense.

**Craig:** Now this is getting good.

**John:** Could they really maul these? Maybe they were carrying a maul. They were carrying a giant hammer.

**Craig:** We know they’re big. We know they’re big guys.

**John:** They’re big. They’re big guys.

**Craig:** I just love this verse. I think it’s “baldy.” Ultimately, it’s just-

**John:** “Baldy” is pretty great.

**Craig:** That is a word that you’re not imagining people in the time before Christ or even shortly thereafter saying “baldy.” It’s so mean. As a bald person, I’m in love with this.

**John:** I’m thinking of our D&D Zoom group and just how many bald heads there are. We would all be subject to these taunting youths.

**Craig:** “Go away!” Why do they care? Why are they so mean? Anyway, they got what was coming to them.

**John:** They do. That’s a lesson learned. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Baldy.

**John:** … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Baldy.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ben Singer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. We love when you send little audio clips, so keep doing that. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to do about all of our digital stuff and what to do with it after we die. Craig and Drew, thanks so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Bye, baldies.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so as we’ve established well on the show, you believe we’re living in a simulation, so therefore your death has no impact on you, because you’ll just return to the cloud. But your loved ones will still be around. Melissa will have to deal with, oh my god, all of Craig’s computers and stuff like that. Have you done anything to help her out in this situation, or, god forbid, you don’t die, but you’re in a coma, and she has to deal with that stuff, what are you doing to make her life better and easier?

**Craig:** I have thought through all of this, and I think everybody should. Of course, Melissa and I have done some estate planning, which you do not need an estate to do. You just need something. You own a spoon, you can do estate planning. We have provisions should either one of us die or become incapacitated medically. Because I use 1Password, she has access to my 1Password, which means she has access to all of my passwords. If I drop dead, she can use that to basically get into any account that I’ve created and cancel them, or perhaps cause mayhem.

**John:** Absolute mayhem.

**Craig:** What about you?

**John:** I had to deal with some of this when my mom died, because she was the last of that stuff. We had a bunch of her accounts and things like that. To her credit, she made good lists of where her physical bank accounts were and that kind of stuff, and I had to deal with all the closing off of her estate. For the digital stuff, because my mom was not technically all that sophisticated, I just had a list of all her passwords anyway, so I could get into her Gmail and all that stuff and deal with those situations that came up.

With Mike and I, we have similar situations where that stuff is in 1Password and most stuff will be pretty easy to do. I was reading a blog post this last week that was talking about, it’s one thing to have all the accounts, but that doesn’t tell you what a person actually needs to do. This blog post is recommending a document that’s like, here’s how to be me, basically just talking through, like, this is all the stuff that I’m actually doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that’s keeping stuff going, because Mike is paying a bunch of our bills that I don’t really know about. Here’s where this thing is. This is the phone number for the tree guy, because I don’t know who that person is. That kind of stuff we haven’t done a great job of sharing, and we probably just need some sort of shared document for that. God forbid something happens to both me and Mike, because Amy has no idea where any of this stuff is kept.

**Craig:** Yeah, that probably would be good to have somebody be able to provide her that. We have a trust set up. If the two of us go down, then there is an executor of the trust who has to operate with the fiduciary responsibility to the people who are assigned stuff, like our children. They would help them. That would be their gig. Part of the trust is making sure that those people are compensated fairly, so they’re not working for free.

But yes, there are ways to make sure that your kids are helped. I never had this issue, because my mother is still alive, but my parents didn’t have really much in the way of assets for me to worry about. Same for my grandparents. I didn’t have to think about it, but certainly my children will.

**John:** Drew is reminding us here in the Workflowy we did talk about some stuff on this area back in 594. Drew, remind us, what did we actually get into?

**Drew:** We were talking more about what happens to the things you’ve written after you’ve died. We had a little bit of estate planning. That’s always good.

**John:** In terms of the stuff we’ve written, I guess there’s all the things that I’m halfway through on. I have just a big Dropbox full of the finished projects and the stuff that was started that never got finished. I have a Notion database of my 36 projects that are in some form of active development in my brain. But that’s not gonna be so crucial. It’s worth something, but it’s not gonna be worth a lot. The Big Fish musical that I did with Andrew Lippa is an asset that I do control copyright on, and that will be a thing that my heirs will have to be thinking about and thinking about future productions and what changes they will allow to make to that down the road. But that’s not gonna be a, “Oh crap, in the next 24 hours, what stuff do I need to get done?”

**Craig:** It is gonna become an issue going forward. There’s an entire generation of old people that are on Facebook, and no one knows their passwords for anything. They barely know their passwords for stuff. When they die, there are just gonna be all these just floating accounts of dead people just hanging out.

**John:** Closing those accounts is an important thing too, or arguably, it’s an important thing. I think zombie stuff out there is gonna be bad. You don’t want people to be getting emails from dead people about stuff. There was a service – we’ll try to find a link to it – that basically checks in that you’re alive on a regular basis and then has a plan for if you don’t respond in a certain period of time, it starts closing things down, which could make sense.

**Craig:** I think Facebook has a, “Hey, here’s a thing to fill out for when you die.” They’re aware of it. Probably costs them money. All these dead people hanging around on our Facebook. I’m sorry. Meta.

**John:** Meta.

**Craig:** Meta.

**John:** But then I feel like in the not too distant future, we’re also gonna have to worry about, what about the AI versions of ourselves? Do we want to continue after we die versus not continue after we die? I think it was Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, was talking about, I don’t know if it was her husband or some other person, that she has basically an AI representation of their work as a chatbot. She finds it therapeutic to chat with this representation of a friend or husband or somebody. Yes, and also, should I have the ability to say no, you can’t do that? It’s weird.

**Craig:** If they make an AI chatbot of me, it’s mostly just gonna be saying the following to people: Get out of here, baldy!

**John:** With that, another Scriptnotes is resolved. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [The Life and Death of Hollywood](https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/the-life-and-death-of-hollywood-daniel-bessner/) by Daniel Bessner for Harpers
* [One weird trick for fixing Hollywood](https://maxread.substack.com/p/one-weird-trick-for-fixing-hollywood-6f0) by Max Read
* [Moloch Trap](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/moloch)
* [Lola Dupre](https://loladupre.com/archive)
* [Codenames Duet](https://codenames.game)
* [2 Kings 2:23-24](https://www.bible.com/bible/116/2KI.2.23-24.NLT)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ben Singer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/642standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/what-characters-know).

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Episode 641 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do your characters know, and how do we know if they know it? We’ll stare in the epistemological looking glass and offer some guidance on building characters who feel appropriately informed. We’ll also look at TV ad breaks and what they’ve become in the age of streaming shows that may or may not have predetermined act breaks. We’ll also answer some listener questions, and in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what should you do when meeting a famous person, and what should you not do? Craig?

**Craig:** I did not get the memo that we’re being British.

**John:** We’re being very British on the podcast today for no good reason.

**Craig:** I’ll do it for the entire time. Just curious why.

**John:** Some mornings I wake up and I’m just channeling the spirit of Claire Foy. Claire Foy is still alive, and yet Claire Foy’s voice as the Queen in The Crown just seeps into my body, and I just want to channel that Claire Foy energy.

**Craig:** We’re doing Received Pronunciation. That would be very, very appropriate.

**John:** Extreme Received Pronunciation.

**Craig:** Oh, so RP. We’re so RP, darling.

**John:** So RP. It’s just fantastic. We’re not required to keep doing it, but it’s just fun sometimes to just be in that space-

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** … be in that voice. I remember when I got to college, this young woman said, “What is your accent? I like it, but what is your accent?” I’d really had no idea, but later I realized it’s just closeted gay kid. That was my accent.

**Craig:** Yes, there is a gay accent.

**John:** Striving gay kid.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s so specific. What a specific dialect. Striving gay kid. I like that. Did we talk about that documentary about gay voice?

**John:** I think we did.

**Craig:** It is interesting. It’s a thing.

**John:** I think that documentary was Do I Sound Gay?

**Craig:** Do I Sound Gay?, yeah, I think that’s what it was. But then there’s the RP version. Do I Sound Gay? Do I?

**John:** Yeah, is it gay or British? It’s hard for people to distinguish at times.

**Craig:** There are so many reasons that our British listeners are angry at us right now. I work with a lot of British people, like British actors who are doing American accents, like Bella Ramsey. We also have British directors. We’ll do our versions. “Here’s my London. Here’s my East London. Here’s my Northern England. Here’s my this.” There are people who are amazing at accents, there are people who are decent, and then there are people who are horrible. I was talking with Mark Mylod, incredible, multi-award-winning director. He said, “I can’t do the American accent. I can’t do it at all.” I’m like, “Oh, sure you can.” Have you heard when British people do a bad American accent?

**John:** Oh, it’s so bad.

**Craig:** It sort of sounds like this. This is how they do. I was like, “Oh, do it. It’ll probably be that.” He said something like, “I’m going to… ” It was like a monster.

**John:** It’s because he’s trying to go rhotic. He’s trying to put his R’s back in, and that’s a way to do it.

**Craig:** There’s an attitude, like (monstrous noises). I was weeping laughing, because it’s incredible.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** It was incredible. Loved it.

**John:** Loved it so much. I was talking to a dialect coach yesterday. He often works with actors who get the audition requests for, “Okay, you’re going in on this accent,” and they’re like, “Crap, I need to quickly get up to speed on that.” One of his frustrations, which I can totally understand, is that the breakdown will say New Jersey or Brooklyn or this thing, and that’s not actually a real thing. Basically, the New Jersey accent is an Italian American accent, so it’s not specific to New Jersey. It’s really specific to a cultural group. But they don’t want to say the cultural group, so they’ll put it on a region. People in Brooklyn don’t actually speak with that Brooklyn accent anymore.

**Craig:** Not anymore. My parents did, and my mom still does. They’re not Italian. It’s a different vibe than the Sopranos style. There’s just a different kind of thing going on there. New Jersey has about 12 accents. The weirdest one, although probably the most common one, is the Bruce Springsteen, Central/Southern Jersey. It’s sort of Philly. It’s sort of country. It’s a weird one. It’s a really weird one.

**John:** It’s a really weird one.

**Craig:** We’re going down to get a hoagie. Anyway, that’s our show.

**John:** That’s our show. It’s I think really good. As always, our show was produced by Drew Marquardt and-

**Craig:** Drew Marquardt.

**John:** Drew Marquardt and-

**Craig:** Marquardt.

**John:** … edited by Matthew Chilelli. Before we get to the wrap-up, we have some follow-up. In Episode 637, we talked about AI transcription and specifically we wondered whether our own transcriptions for our show, which we’ve done since the very beginning, were currently being done by a human or if they were just humanized versions of AI transcriptions. We have an answer. Drew, help us out.

**Drew Marquardt:** Our very own transcriptionist, Dima Cass, wrote in, says, “Hey, y’all. I’m Dima, a real human, and I’ve been happily transcribing Scriptnotes for over two years, since Episode 536. I actually just hit 100 episodes. I transcribe everything from scratch as opposed to using any AI. I have, quote unquote, ‘humanized’ AI transcripts for other jobs, but I personally find it time-consuming and tedious. I imagine there would be a lot of editing involved if Scriptnotes used AI transcription, because John speaks rather quickly-”

**John:** I do.

**Drew:** “… almost blending words together sometimes, while Craig tends to make sound effects and use different accents.”

**Craig:** Look who’s using different accents today, Dima.

**Drew:** “You also often discuss pronunciation, which is sometimes a difficult thing to capture in written words.”

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**Drew:** Which I’ll say Dima does a great job doing. “I’ve been doing transcription for a decade now, and AI has actually taken some of my jobs over the past year. The current trend is that entities will hire transcribers for half the price and have them touch up AI transcripts. It’s similar to what’s happening with script coverage work.

“I know most people don’t enjoy transcribing, but I’m one of the strange few who does. I learn a lot and it fits my lifestyle as an introverted, neurodivergent queer person living in the Bible Belt. Thankfully there are still some fields of transcription in which humans are still preferred over AI, for instance in legal proceedings where every detail is very important.”

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Then Dima sent a photo of themself “squinting in a huge field of tulips as further proof I am a human.” Yeah, Dima’s a human being. There’s a real Dima, unless AI… That does sound like an AI prompt, doesn’t it?

**John:** I will say, this is Dima posing in this field of perfectly lit-up flowers. It could be an AI backdrop. Tell me that doesn’t look like it could be an AI backdrop.

**Craig:** I just think, “Dall-E, create neurodivergent queer person in Bible Belt squinting, huge field of tulips.” I love the cardinal shirt. He’s got a shirt with a cardinal on it. Dima, thank you for doing this. It’s really nice to meet you. I’m very glad that you’re a human being. Look, let’s face it. Everybody knows that John makes the decisions around here, but to the extent that I get a vote, I vote that we never use AI and we always use a person to do this.

**John:** Yeah, I think it’s great. There’s subtleties that a human being is gonna understand about what’s important and what’s not important. Dima does the transcripts. Drew reads through the transcripts to make sure they fit what we want, gets them posted up there. We started doing the transcripts early on just for accessibility, because we have folks who are deaf or hard of hearing and need to be able to read it. It’s better for them. But then other people who don’t have those conditions also benefit from the transcripts. And it also means we can Google search and find if we ever talked about the thing we’re thinking about talking about, because we probably did. So transcripts are good.

**Craig:** I love the fact that we have transcripts. I myself would vastly prefer to read through a transcript than listen to a pod… Oh, god, look what I just did to Dima. “Listen to a pod,” and then I cut off the word “podcast.” I’m now thinking about Dima all the time. Also, I get to say Dima is wonderful. And now Dima gets to transcribe “Dima is wonderful.” Thank you, Dima.

**John:** Good stuff. In Episode 637 we talked about gendered words in English. We had some feedback on that.

**Drew:** Adam Pineless wrote in, “Another interesting gendered word like fiancé or divorcé is blond, because blond for men is spelled without an E.”

**John:** That one I’m kind of willing to let go a bit, because it’s only when you’re using it as a noun that you do it that way. I get why it’s confusing for people to use it in English. It’s strange for us.

**Craig:** “Blonde” to me is actually in the same category as fiancé and divorcé, and that is French words that are gendered. “Blonde” is a French word. I was actually talking about this with Melissa the other day. People have basically stopped using “fiancé” with the single E to describe a male betrothed. Everyone just uses the two E’s now.

**John:** I see the opposite more often.

**Craig:** Oh, sorry. You’re right, you’re right. It’s the other way around. It’s that there’s only one E, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one uses two E’s. Sorry. That’s exactly right. No one uses the two E’s. There was an interesting case where I thought about the word “née.” N-E-E we will see as born as.

**John:** Born as.

**Craig:** Typically, it was used for a woman who had taken her husband’s last name. Melissa is Melissa Mazin née Frye, and it’s N-E-E with the accent on the first E. But you never see “ne,” N-E. But now you can, now that we have marriage between men. Mike August could be Mike August ne, N-E, and then whatever his last name was. But I have a feeling that we’re never gonna see N-E.

**John:** I also haven’t heard people pronounce that aloud. But I bet there’s a whole generation of people who have seen that word but never pronounced it, and they’re gonna say née [nee], because we don’t know what to do with that thing.

**Craig:** Now we have a new thing that we need to… Look, maybe we lost the battle of begging the question, but we will not lose the battle over ne.

**John:** Of ne.

**Craig:** Never. Nay!

**John:** Never!

**Craig:** Nay, I say.

**John:** Craig, here’s a question for you. “She had blond hair.” Spell blond.

**Craig:** In that case, I would use not an E. I would go blond without an E.

**John:** I think that’s right. I think that most style guides will say that.

**Craig:** “She is a blonde,” I would use an E.

**John:** But should you even say “she is a blonde”?

**Craig:** Why not? “She is a redhead. She is a blonde. She is a brunette.” I have no problem with that. There’s a word for this. Synecdoche, is that it, where you take a part of what someone is and use it to describe the whole?

**John:** Charlie Kaufman could tell us that.

**Craig:** Synecdoche, I’m looking it up now. “A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole.” I guess, yes, a blonde. Or a metonymy.

**John:** Fun. In Episode 635, you were talking about dialog and character voice, and we have feedback on that as well.

**Drew:** Matt Yang King writes, “I loved your discussion on character voice, but I noticed you guys were missing a huge resource. One of the major websites I use when wearing my acting hat is the International Dialects of English Archive. It’s an incredible asset for anyone who wants to know the flow and cadence of various different languages and how they’re spoken in English. Also, it’s hugely helpful in building a real, grounded character. Every person who speaks into the archives speaks from a common script, so that you learn how they pronounce similar vowels and consonants, and then they give a little talk on who they are.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You’re absolutely right. This is by Paul Meier. If you’re gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna pick up his book, Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen, which I was working through this last year when I was studying dialect and accents. Independently, I also learned how to write stuff in the IPA, which you’re gonna see in this book as well. Really, really useful.

You wouldn’t want to stop at this website. You should go beyond that and look at YouTube and other places. But it is really handy that they are all speaking through the same script. You could get a sense of, like, oh, what does this person from Glasgow, what does it sound like when they’re speaking versus this person from Northern Ireland. It really is useful on that level.

**Craig:** This site is really cool. Just looking through it, I picked Africa, and then I picked Cameroon. There are three different audio examples of people from Cameroon at different times – they even list the year – speaking English, so that you can zero in on accents that granularly, which I think is fantastic.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to the first of these examples here. This is Cameroon 1. It’s a 32-year-old man from Kumba, Cameroon.

**Man From Cameroon:** Well, here’s a story for you. Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower.

**John:** Great. They’re gonna be reading through the same script. You heard him rolling his R’s. He had a trill on his R’s, which is really interesting.

**Craig:** There is a specific thing going on there that is a little bit surprising to me. We do hear this kind of generic African English dialect, which that doesn’t sound far off from it, but there are very specific things going on. I thought it would be a little bit more French, more French-ish, because it’s Cameroon. But the point is, this is a great website. You can go and listen to all these things and avoid either just being wrong or being generic.

**John:** The other thing I would recommend people take a listen to is Accent Tag, which is a series of YouTube videos. Basically, just follow the hashtag #accenttag, and it’s people who do read through a similar script, and then they talk about their lives a little bit. They’re reading through also how they pronounce certain words, which can be really funny just to hear how vastly different it is and sometimes how unaware they are about the choices that they’re making, because people say, “I don’t trill my R’s at all,” and of course they’re trilling every one of them.

**Craig:** I’m gonna start trilling my-

**John:** Trilling.

**Craig:** Tapping the R’s.

**John:** Little tap there. Great stuff. I encourage people to take a look at that. That is dialectsarchive.com.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** Our main topic here, this was prompted by a couple different things that happened this past week. Before we hopped on the Zoom for D&D this week, we were talking with Kevin, our friend who was on Jeopardy. I wanted to know specifically, when he was ringing the buzzer, did he always know the answer to the question. Craig, what do you think? Did Kevin always know the answer as he buzzed in?

**Craig:** I’m gonna say no. I’m gonna say yes and no. I’m gonna say that there was a part of his brain that knew that he knew the answer before the answer appeared, and that was the part of the brain that was buzzing in. And then there was a second for the answer to actually make its way from one section of the brain to the other. How close am I?

**John:** I think that’s pretty close. He said he mostly knew the answer. But really, I think what was so fascinating about the conversation, it really came down to what does it even mean to know a thing. Are you buzzing because you know it or because you think you will know it in time? Kevin described situations where they record Jeopardy, and six months later it shows up on TV. He’s watching the episodes that he was in. A question would come up, and he wouldn’t know the answer, but then the Kevin who was on screen got the answer right.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** What does it even mean to know the answer to something? It’s very situational sometimes. You’re in the moment and you know it in the moment, but you don’t know it beyond that. I liked that as one aspect of knowing a thing.

But then also, during the D&D game, a thing happened which often happens in D&D, which is last week you encountered a new creature that none of you ever had seen before. It’s a Kruthik, and none of you had any idea what the hell this thing was. You asked, “Can I do a nature check to see if I know what this thing is?” And you rolled and you failed. You had no idea what it was. But then this past week, you encountered a troll. And you all know what a troll is, but would your characters know what a troll was? Again, we’re rolling dice to see do your characters know what this thing is and what its unique disadvantages are or abilities are.

**Craig:** One of the things that DMs deal with – you’re DM-ing now, so you have to deal with it – is metagaming. We all know lots of stuff. You play lots of campaigns. You meet things. Since we’re not in a game right now, and I know a lot about D&D, when we encounter a troll, I, Craig, know that trolls regenerate health, unless they take acid or fire damage, in which case they don’t. But it’s really important then for fair play and for fun play to deny your character that knowledge. There’s no reason for a character that doesn’t know about trolls to think, “You know what I should do? I should throw fire at it.” But if you deal with a troll and you learn that, then yeah. We have to do the same thing when we’re writing.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the point.

**Craig:** We know everything. But what do our characters know, and what should they not know, and how did they learn it? And also, what’s the knowledge gap between what the audience knows about a character and what they know about themselves?

**John:** Yeah, it’s tough, and it’s really like, what is the theory of knowledge that is informing the author, the piece, and the characters inside the piece, and the audience? There’s all these different things you’re trying to balance. You have no choice but to acknowledge the meta-game behind it all, because the audience is aware of things, because they’re aware of the genre, they have a sense of this, and they also have a theory of mind about what the characters inside this story should know or should not know.

An example will be, I’ve seen things happen in movies where I as the audience know something, and suddenly this character knows this thing, but I know that they could not know that. There was no opportunity for them to have learned this fact. We’re willing to forgive that or it seems natural if some time has progressed. But there was never that moment. They never got that call from the other character telling them that thing, so how do they know that this thing is possible? Those are things that screenwriters are always, back of your mind, thinking about, wondering about. What do the characters know about what’s going on? Do they have a sense of what genre of movie that they’re in? These are all challenges.

**Craig:** The converse is also a problem. I see this frequently, where you think, “Why are you willfully not knowing something?” It’s helpful, of course, to put obstacles in front of your characters, but if they are willfully not aware of something that they should be aware of because of what you’ve been watching, it’s incredibly frustrating. Similarly, it’s frustrating when characters withhold knowledge from each other for no reason whatsoever, other than that it will deny a scene from happening. If characters should be sharing information with each other, then they should share the information.

I have a particular sore spot with characters saying the following cliched line: “I want to show you something.” “What?” “Just trust me.” And then they show them a thing that they could’ve just described or mentioned. They could’ve said, “By the way, you need to know that the dog next door has two heads.” “What?” “Yeah. Come on, follow me.” It’s a frustrating thing. As we often say, anything that makes the audience stop and notice that they’re in a movie is harming the illusion we are intending to create.

**John:** The other vector we have to consider is, is this character specifically well informed about a subject or in general, because if so, we need to signal that pretty early on, or else it’s gonna be really frustrating when they suddenly have information, like, “How did they know this? I didn’t know that they were a doctor. I didn’t know that they were this kind of thing.” Or if they’re specifically uninformed, I think you need to clue that in to the audience quickly.

A thing that occurred to me in the office yesterday is a character who doesn’t seem to know anything about dogs at all would be surprising. You say, “How old is your dog? How old do you think he is?” “I don’t know, 30.” That’s absurd. Any reasonable person should know that dogs do not live to be 30, but that could be a really good character moment, as long as we’ve established that it’s plausible this character is that dumb.

**Craig:** If a character does say something like that, everyone should stop and say, “What?” and then grill that person on their stupidity, their weird knowledge gap. But you get one of those. You don’t get multiples, unless the point of the character is that they are absolutely idiotic.

**John:** Drew brought up in the office yesterday a good corollary example, which is, in Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick is a Navy pilot, but he doesn’t know anything about boats, and so he’s on the sailboat and has no idea how to sail at all. That’s good. That’s funny. I get that. It’s surprising, and yet it made sense for the character, and it was a good moment in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Navy pilots fly, and they land on boats, but they don’t sail, so that’s reasonable. That is a reasonable thing. It’s also a kind of thing that maybe some people wouldn’t necessarily be aware of, because they think of the Navy as boats, boats, boats. But yeah, I’d buy that completely.

**John:** We’re coming up with characters who are gonna be in our story. We have to be thinking, okay, what do they know, what are their subject areas, and then within the story, how much information do they have that the audience also is right there with them and knows, versus they’re ahead of the audience or the audience is a little bit ahead of them. Finding that balance is really tough.

There’s movies where characters know a lot more than the audience. Gone Girl comes to mind, where there’s a whole con being played on the audience, which is very important. But also Civil War, which I just saw this last week and really, really liked a lot, the characters in that movie know a lot more than the movie will ever tell us about what’s actually going on in the world. For me, it worked, because they’re not gonna talk about that stuff, because everybody around them knows it, so there’s no reason for them to discuss it. That was something that worked for me about that movie is they know really what happened that brought us to the Civil War, even though we as the audience never will.

**Craig:** One of the worst phrases you type in a screenplay is “as you know.”

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** If you know it, why are you saying it? There is an unspoken contract that there are things that we both know. Now, how we get that to the audience can be difficult. Let’s acknowledge that for a second. The reason that “as you know” came into being is because sometimes two characters who both know a thing need to impart that to the audience somehow.

**John:** Now, Craig, I just want to point out, you just “as you know”-ed me to do that.

**Craig:** As you know.

**John:** As you know, as a screenwriter, but now we have to share it with the audience.

**Craig:** We have to share it with the podcast audience, yes, as you know. Now, as we know… I like that. That’s fun. We meta “as we know”-ed.

How do we do it? How do we get that information across? There are some good old-fashioned tips and tricks. The easiest and most obvious is bring a third party in who doesn’t know. There’s also a version where someone is saying, “Look, I went through the normal thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It didn’t work,” so that part of the way they’re imparting that information to their friend is, “It’s obvious to both of us, but the reason I’m running it down is because the outcome isn’t what we expected.” You have to come up with ways that feel naturalistic to share that information.

**John:** Some cases, you will be able to just show it directly to the audience, just actually show the thing and cut away from the characters doing the thing and actually put that information out there so the audience directly knows the thing that the characters inside the world would know. That’s great when it works, but it may not be the right choice for your movie. Some movies cling very closely to their characters. The camera feels like it’s right over their shoulder the whole time, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to cut away to something else to give that piece of information. But other ones are jumping all over the place. If you’re doing The Big Short, you could jump all over the place, because that’s the style of the movie, and you can talk about a thing. You can talk directly to the audience about a thing if you want to, because that’s the rules you’ve established for your world.

**Craig:** Yes. And even inside The Big Short, before they would get to the fourth wall breaking, where people would explain what a derivative was, you had Steve Carell’s character sitting with somebody, and he’s saying, “Okay, explain this to me, because I’m a finance guy, but this is a very specialized thing. You’re saying that blah blah blah blah blah?” And the guy’s like, “Yeah, and in fact, we then take these things and we repackage them into derivatives of derivatives.” And he’s like, “Wait, what?” And then you cut to somebody explaining. But you do have a character that we’re invested in who is asking questions and revealing that there are gaps in his knowledge, which makes sense, given what that story was, that people were literally finding out as this was happening, that these, I think, going to call them weapons of mass financial destruction had been created.

**John:** We’re gonna go back to our probably most cliché phrase on this podcast: specificity. But I think you also look for what is the specific conversation that these characters would be having that would reveal to the audience the thing we need them to know but would actually be necessary for the conversation for them to be having to move forward to do the next thing. That’s actually moving the scene forward, but in the context of moving the scene forward, will also provide this explanation and give the audience the knowledge they need to have to go forward.

**Craig:** That’s right. We have to think about how we do this on a day-to-day basis. There are times where you might say to somebody, “I arrested this guy. I brought him in. What do you think happened next?” And then the other character says A, B, C, D, and E. And the first guy says, A, B, C, D, and then not E, weirdly, H, because he’s setting this person up to make the story interesting, and in doing so, there’s our package of information. But it’s natural. We just have to make sure we don’t do that lazy thing of people just dumping information at us. And similarly, we can’t do the lazy thing where people are missing information. We’ve talked about the cellphone problem. If they had the information, now what?

**John:** What should also be clear is that there’s times where you don’t need to see all the connections being done, because you feel like enough time has passed that it’s naturally going to happen. I think through Succession. In a given episode of Succession, sometimes they’re really tight and it’s almost real time, but sometimes we’re covering a period of a couple weeks, and then, yeah, those communications were had, but I didn’t see them. But I believe that Logan knows that this thing is happening. All those pieces were put together behind the scenes. If you trust in the storytelling enough, you’re not gonna worry about how did this person find out this thing, because they spoke it. It’s gonna get through.

**Craig:** I have a personal thing. I don’t know. It’s part of my style, maybe. I don’t know. Part of my voice. But my thing is that there are times when people need to explain things to other people, and the best way to go about it is to just do it, to embrace the active explanation. We do explain things to each other all the time, so it’s okay, as long as the characters are acknowledging that that’s what’s happening.

Part of the problem with an elegant exposition is that people try to make it elegant. But here’s the deal. It’s either don’t be elegant and just say, “I am now gonna explain something,” or be elegant and don’t enough notice that the explanation happened. But anywhere in the middle, lame. It just comes out lame.

I personally have no problem embracing explanations. If you look at Chernobyl or if you look at The Last of Us, you’ll see scenes all the time where people are just saying, “Can you explain what happened?” and someone says, “Yes, here’s my… ” Now, explaining things is its own art. You have to be interesting when you explain things. The people who are explaining things have to be good at telling a story. That’s important.

**John:** But Craig, the examples you’re making, like Chernobyl in particular, those explanations are germane, because those characters really would be explaining those things to the other people around them. They were actually necessary to do, so it doesn’t feel forced on. Where our concern is is when characters are explaining things that don’t need to be explained within context of the world, that they’re just there for the audience so that the audience can be up to speed. That’s the real challenge. That’s where you need to search for elegant ways to get that information out there.

**Craig:** You need to be elegant. You can’t always have somebody explaining something. But when you have information that is actually interesting, then just do it, just explain it.

**John:** Another thing I think is crucial about these explanation scenes, when it is a straightforward explanation, is it doesn’t mean that all conflict stops. There needs to be something else that’s happening and that’s not just we’re on all the same page together. There has to be some urgency that’s getting you through the scene. Otherwise, we’ll be informed but we’ll be bored.

**Craig:** Correct. The scene must have a beginning and an end. And the beginning is not as important as the ending. The ending of these scenes cannot simply be, “All right. Now I know.” The ending of the scene needs to be personal. It needs to have some sense of a relationship. And it needs to explain why the information we received is relevant not only from a plot point of view but from a personal point of view. It must come back to the human being. Otherwise, it just floats there as info.

**John:** Yeah. A show I liked a lot on Netflix this last year was The Diplomat. One of the things I enjoyed about it was that there were moments where you just had to explain things, but all the explanations came kind of in conflict, because there were competing ideas. You’re jostling for supremacy within them, and also a lot of interpersonal conflicts that were happening at the same time the explanations were coming out. And that made for good scene work. And it was a delight to see when that show was working so well.

**Craig:** I love it. Personally, I love when information is relayed, and I’m excited and interested. I love The Big Short. I don’t understand money. I still don’t understand money. But I loved learning. Even if I have forgotten, I don’t think I could explain it as well as I could have, say, an hour after I saw the movie the first time. But while I was watching it, I was fascinated by it.

When I watch shows of any genre where the information is revealed in fascinating ways and it seems like there’s craft and art to characters learning, explaining, and also when there’s a lovely and satisfying gap between what I know and what the character knows, whether it’s that I know more than the character knows about themselves, like, say, the movie In and Out, where we all know he’s gay from the start, but he just doesn’t get it yet, or when somebody knows way more than I do, like for instance, My Cousin Vinny. Marisa Tomei is on the stand, and she suddenly has this epiphany about the tire marks. And she’s like, “No. The defense’s argument is wrong.” Okay. She knows everything now. And Joe Pesci knows what she knows. And he’s like, “Really? Why do you think that?” And I’m like, “Okay, now they both know something.” And the gap between what they know and me not knowing is curiosity, and I’m leaning all the way forward knowing that I’m gonna be satisfied, which is wonderful.

**John:** Let’s circle back to the troll problem, where the audience is ahead of the characters, where the audience knows how trolls work and the characters inside the story don’t. There can be frustration from the audience, like, “You dummy. This is the rules. You don’t have this. You don’t understand how vampires work,” or whatever. There’s a fundamental sort of disconnect there. To me, the crucial thing here is you need to establish your characters well in the world well enough that the audience is on board with understanding what the characters could know and could not know and that they’re on board the ride and they’re willing to turn off that part of their brain that is aware of the genre and the rules around the genre.

**Craig:** It’s frustrating for us when we watch. It’s not necessary. There is a way to do it correctly. There are some television shows, I think because, specifically procedurals, they just don’t have the time sometimes. We’ve gotten more time as storytellers in television where you don’t have ad breaks. But good old-fashioned ad break television, like the kind you and I grew up with on the networks, they just didn’t have the time. They have to just dump the information out. It’s tricky. It’s also why you see procedurals that work in specified job areas are incredibly popular, because it allows them to say information that is specific, that we wouldn’t otherwise know. I don’t know necessarily why doctors are constantly explaining medicine to each other, but the fact that we don’t know any of it helps.

**John:** Yeah, it does help a lot. You just mentioned ad breaks, which segues naturally to our next topic, which is that we’ve talked on the show before about shows that were written without act breaks, like Chernobyl, but now they have ads inserted into them, and those ads were inserted kind of randomly. There’s no plan for it, because you didn’t plan for a moment where this ad would go, which was so different than how we used to do television and still do television on a broadcast model, which is that you have acts that build up to rising tension, and at this moment of great tension, fade to black, a commercial goes in, you come back out of the act break, pick things up again and move on. That was a way we wrote television for 50 years, and now we don’t tend to do that very often. We’ve talked to writers who were doing spec pilots, like, “Are you putting act breaks in? Are you not putting act breaks in?” That’s a choice you make.

This last week, I think it was Chris in our office, was talking about he was watching an old episode of The X-Files, which is a show that had act breaks in it. He was watching it on Prime. But they didn’t use the actual defined act breaks. They just inserted their ads kind of wherever, and it was really frustrating.

**Craig:** Yes. I know that some of the stuff that I do for HBO does get chopped up and ad-breaked in other countries or in other services. I try to just not think about it. Then again, as film writers, you and I have dealing with this our whole lives, because traditionally, movies would eventually sell to broadcast or cable, where they would be chopped up and ads would be shoved in.

**John:** Almost all the Bond movies I watched were on ABC, the Sunday before school started in the fall. I absolutely loved them, but they were full of random ad breaks.

**Craig:** Full of random ad breaks. Now, my One Cool Thing this week, I won’t give it away, because I don’t want to give the audience too much information, but it is a show that has been made for a premium streamer, and that streamer now has options. You can either watch ad-free or not ad-free. Even though I’m watching ad-free, there are moments where the shows just cuts to black, and then, boop, we’re into the next scene, and it’s very clear that the way they built it was like, “We are picking the ad breaks.” You won’t have to watch ads when you watch it ad-free. But you’re gonna see the moments where the ads would go. You just don’t have to sit there for 15 or 30 seconds.

**John:** But here is the question. Will those ads really go in those spots? Because that’s the issue. Are they keeping track of the metadata for where those things go? Because clearly, in X-Files, they were not. Oour own Drew Marquardt spent the afternoon yesterday looking through a bunch of shows to see which ones were actually inserting where the natural ad break would be and which ones were not looking for the act breaks at all. Drew, what did you find as you were scanning through stuff?

**Drew:** It was a very scientific process. Prime it seemed like would have an act break at 19 minutes no matter what and 32 and a half minutes no matter what. But things like FreeV, which is also an Amazon service, would put act breaks where they were supposed to go, for both shows that they didn’t produce or ones that they did, and Peacock seemed to be pretty good about it too.

**Craig:** I think that what’s going on is some sort of dictate that says ads must happen at a certain point or wherever, and we don’t care where the ads used to go. But when they are making their own shows, that dictate is certainly built in. There’s no chance that they’re making their own material with ad breaks that they’re gonna ignore. Those ad breaks are obviously designed by whatever algorithm runs the kingdom.

**John:** I hope we’ll have some listeners who write in who actually have first-hand experience with how this works on the other side and will break whatever NDAs they’re gonna be breaking. My guess is that for a show like The X-Files, produced by Fox, for Fox, I think, Amazon licenses it, they get the video file. I wonder if they are not getting special metadata about where the actual act breaks are, that they could slot those things in, and they’re just putting it wherever, or they’re getting that metadata and saying, “Screw it. We don’t care. Our own internal metrics show that it’s most effective for us to put these commercials here and here and here, regardless of what the original plan was for the show.”

**Craig:** I suspect it’s the latter. I remember my first internship in Hollywood was at Fox Network. When we would review the shows before they air, it was just clear. On the tape, every quarter inch, it would go to black, and then there was a second, and then it would come back. It’s pretty clear. I think that Amazon basically is like, “We can’t put as many ads in as network put in for whatever this medium tier is, and yes, our data says that people will deal with two ad breaks in this point and this point, and we’ll just shove them in there.”

**John:** Obviously, YouTube works that way. If you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, it’s just shoving in wherever they want to put it in. I didn’t watch Mad Men on its original run, but my recollection of people talking about it was Matthew Weiner didn’t write act breaks at all, and the commercials would just show up where they showed up.

**Craig:** It was on AMC. I didn’t watch it as it was airing either. I watched it after. So I don’t know the answer to that.

**John:** I don’t know what the right answer, the right choice is here. Clearly, we’re in this transitional, frustrating moment where you don’t know as a show creator how much you should be planning for where those act breaks are gonna be, where the ads are gonna go, or just ignore it, and the algorithm’s gonna figure it out. And even if you got an answer from your executive, is that gonna really hold true when people are watching two years from now.

**Craig:** I know that Max does have an ad-supported tier. No one has asked me. I know that much. Maybe they haven’t asked me because they know that I would be like, “Rah rah rah-”

**John:** “Rah rah rah.”

**Craig:** … and just be like, “Shove it anywhere. It doesn’t matter. You’re ruining it, so just ruin it however you want.” That is basically what I would say, so my guess is they just haven’t bothered asking.

**John:** I think maybe you could just start putting digital logos on characters’ clothes, and it’s like NASCAR.

**Craig:** I don’t know if this is real or not, but it was making the rounds on social media. It was an old broadcast of Star Wars. It was in, I think, Peru perhaps. They didn’t want to stop the show to do ads. So instead, when Obi-Wan reaches into his little footlocker to get Darth Vader’s lightsaber to give to Luke Skywalker, they just stop and cut to a cooler being opened with a bunch of beer in it, and they do a little beer ad. And then they go right back to him handing him the lightsaber, which is kind of incredible and horrible.

**John:** Apparently, it was real.

**Craig:** Oh my goodness. Really?

**John:** We’ll find a link to the story about it.

**Craig:** Incredible. It’s terrible, but also hysterical.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good stuff. Let’s try to answer some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us?

**Drew:** Eerie Resemblance writes, “So a film recently came out featuring the same job as the industry I’m in and, arguably, what I do within that industry. The main character was also a woman in my industry, which is a big deal because we are still under-represented. Someone from the film reached out and invited some women from our field to watch a private screening about two months before the release. Turns out the main character and I share a lot of commonalities, including a very similar name, we work from the same company, and we are even from the same state. Also, I focus on the same issues as this main character was.

“I was able to give feedback to the people contracted to show us the film. They said they would pass it on. But I’ve listened to y’all’s podcast long enough to know that two months before release is zero time to change anything or really take notes. I’m wondering if filmmakers actually take any of these notes when they do stuff like this, or was this just checking the box because we are three women who are in the same industry as the main character? And secondly, as I mentioned, the main character’s coincidences with me were eerie. But I’m giving the writer of the benefit of the doubt that it was just three crazy coincidences, and I found it kind of funny.

“But my question is, do y’all think about the consequences of creating a character, especially in a story that’s highly traumatic, who’s very close to a real person? Obviously, you can’t worry about that all the time, but are there ethical considerations to think about when it comes to your research and how that character may psychologically affect that person or a small group of people that they’re based off of in real life. I’m actually really glad that I’ve been listening to this podcast before seeing this film, because I think if I hadn’t been, the movie would’ve messed with me a lot more.”

**John:** So many good questions in here and issues that are brought up. I want to start first with what was the purpose of that screening, Craig. Why do you think she and the other people who do what her job is were invited to see that early screening?

**Craig:** This feels like manipulative PR move. Eerie Resemblance, your gut is correct. If the movie is about to come out in two months, this is box checking. They’re not gonna be changing anything, unless there’s some very simple thing an ADR line would address. Otherwise, no, they’re looking basically for cover, to say, oh, we screened it for all these people, and they really enjoyed it. This feels like CYA stuff to me.

**John:** I think their logic was probably – let’s say there’s 10 people who might have an opinion about this specific thing. If the movie comes out and they react really negatively to it, we’re gonna have to deal with that. But if we can sort of preempt that by showing it to them and getting them on our side to some degree, that’s gonna help them out. And so that’s probably why they were bringing you in.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think it’s preemptive. Now, the other question is an interesting one. The fact is that, just as the birthday paradox, if you have, I think, 23 people, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that one of those people will have your exact same birthday. This is gonna happen.

Eerie, the name was sort of close to your name. They were from the same state. They work for the same company. Once you’re working for the same company, the odds are you might be from a state like the one that the company’s in. Lots of names are similar. It was probably not intentional. In fact, it’s actually quite annoying how fussy lawyers can be when they say, “Oh, this is actually too close to this person.” Screenwriters and filmmakers are smart enough to know to not just try and duplicate another human into their script. They’re aware that there’s a legal problem on the other side.

**John:** We can be more specific about that. At some point in the development process, the screenwriter’s gonna have to sign something that says, “These are not based on real people.” There’s gonna be some kind of contractor sign that’s making that clear. Or if they are, you’re gonna have to go through a lot more scrutiny on that. You’ve dealt with that in some of the stuff you worked on.

In terms of names, that becomes a thing. One of the clearance reports they’re going through is they’re gonna look for the names of the characters in your story and the people who actually do that job in the real world. And this could’ve been flagged. This could’ve been a thing that was a concern. It’s not your exact name. We know a little more of the details. And it didn’t set off their alarm bells. But there have been times where I’ve had to change characters’ names because it was too similar to an actual real person who existed in the world.

**Craig:** The thing about names is, if you name somebody Cassie, that is possibly close to Cathy, Catie, Cara, Carrie, Cass, Cat. Names don’t really mean much. If it’s not your name, it’s not your name. Even if it’s your first name and not your last name – and it wouldn’t be your first and last name – it just doesn’t really matter.

The issue is, do we think about the consequences of creating a character who’s very close to a real person? I gotta be honest with you. No, because we’re trying not. The fact is, we’re not trying to be close to a real person, or we’re saying we are doing a dramatization of a real person. If we’re dramatizing a real person, then they’re out there, and they can complain, or maybe not. Maybe we bought the life rights. Maybe we haven’t. We’ll be accountable to that.

But if we’re creating a fictional character that does a job in a certain way for a certain company, no, we’re not thinking, “Oh, what if there happens to be somebody that has a similar name that does this and works for that same company? What will the psychological impact be on that person?” No, I don’t think we do. Because what can we do, other than confining ourselves, out of hyper concern, because somebody at some point is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me.” We’re writing people that are supposed to remind you of real human beings, just not specific ones.

**John:** I would say I mostly agree with you. I think there are situations where even if you’re not thinking about the specific individual, you’re thinking about the people who are in that position and how the existence of your movie or TV show might negatively impact their ability to do the work they’re doing. Let’s say your show involved some NGO workers in Malawi and South Africa and portrayed them in a very negative light. That could be true, and it could be absolutely accurate within the course of your movie, but it could also make it very difficult for the people who are really doing that work to not be kind of painted by that brush, not in a legally difficult way, but in a… I don’t know. I think there’s some moral and ethical considerations you’d have there about are you making their ability to do their humanitarian work more difficult by your portrayal.

**Craig:** If you’re portraying an organization that is clearly meant to be like another organization, and you are suggesting that that organization, even if it’s fictional in your movie, is corrupt or whatever, then yes, you can impact an organization. You have ethical obligations, I think, as a screenwriter.

One of the things that I was worried about when I did Chernobyl was not coming off as an anti-nuclear-power show. That was not the purpose. In fact, it was important for me that the main character explained very clearly the difference between all of the nuclear reactors in the West and the one that they were using in Chernobyl, which was just wildly different and didn’t have a containment building around it, etc., because the fact is I support nuclear power. I don’t think the lesson there is no nuclear power. I think nuclear power is kind of essential if we’re gonna avoid continuing climate crisis. But I’ve said so. I made that as open of an opinion as I could. I still got a whole lot of crap from paid nuclear industry lobbyists who were super cranky. I don’t care about them. That’s their job. They’re paid to be cranky. But I felt like I fulfilled my obligation as a creator to at least not be wildly misunderstood. Yes, we do have to think about that. But an individual’s name, no. Somebody somewhere is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me,” and there’s nothing we can do about that.

**John:** Yeah, sounds good. Let’s try one more question.

**Drew:** John in LA writes, “About four months ago, I met a producer who has worked in development at several big companies. Last month, she sent me a young adult novel that I really responded to. We’ve emailed and called several times about adaptation ideas. At the end of our last call, I asked her if she’d hire me to adapt the novel in full. She said yes and told me to, quote, start thinking about my contract. I’m not in the WGA. She has a new production company that is not yet a Guild signatory. Her intention is to become a signatory. Is it appropriate for me to ask if she’ll do the Guild paperwork so I can get a fair deal? I feel awkward making that ask.”

**John:** You should not feel awkward.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This producer has worked in Hollywood, has worked in this industry. Since their production company that’s not yet a signatory but is intended to become a signatory, guess what? They can become a signatory with your project. You can break that seal. Hurrah.

**Craig:** I’m a little nervous here, John in LA, who’s writing about this, because the producer says her intention is to become a signatory. That’s a little nerve-wracking. Let’s make this easy for you. You shouldn’t have to ask anything, nor should you be thinking about your contract. Not only are you not in the WGA; you’re not a lawyer. What you need is a lawyer, and the lawyer can do all of this. Here’s the thing you need to be aware of, John in LA. It’s not as simple as saying, “I’m hiring a WGA writer, and I’m hiring them under a WGA deal because I’m a signatory.”

To be a signatory to the Writers Guild, you need to prove a certain amount of financial security, such that you demonstrate that you are able to meet your obligations as a signatory, specifically paying out residuals. You can’t just say, “I’m a producer, and I’m gonna hire a WGA writer. Just give me some boilerplate WGA stuff and I’ll sign the thing and I’ll be a signatory.” It’s not that simple. It’s not that simple, because people have done that in the past and then just not paid.

**John:** Yeah, reneged on it.

**Craig:** Right, not fulfilled their obligations. You need a lawyer. The good news is she’s saying she wants to hire you. She’s saying she wants to be a signatory. The lawyer will get paid therefore. So you should find one that’s willing to paper this for you, and they can have that discussion with them. It’s as simple as that. If her intention is to become a signatory, she should begin doing so. That’s on her.

**John:** It’s not an onerous process to become a signatory. I had to do it for my movie. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Exactly. They ask you a bunch of questions. You show them some evidence. You sign a piece of paper. Voila.

**John:** Exactly, because ultimately, when it comes to residuals and paying out stuff down the road, you’re basically having to guarantee that any future contracts that the thing is sold to will take care of the residual. It’s doable, and so this person can do it. It’s fine.

**Craig:** It is fine and is doable. They just need to do it. If that’s her intention, she should convert her intention into reality, and your lawyer should be thinking about your contract, not you. You don’t do that.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. First off, it’s a Patreon but also a website called tacticalmap.com. For the DM-ing I’m doing right now for our group, we’re using Roll20, which we’ve talked about, which is basically a virtual tabletop that we’re all looking at the same thing. You need maps for that. Some really good maps I found that are inexpensive online are at tacticalmap.com. It’s a guy who just develops some really beautiful top-down maps of different scenarios. We have a cliffhanger going on right now where there’s a troll attack. There’s this great fort in the mountains. It was perfect. I got this map, threw it in there, put some trolls in there. We’ve got a party. I like tacticalmap.com. You can find these maps.

Then my other one is a game that I wish we had played with you, Craig, while you were in town, because you would absolutely love this. It’s called Letter Jam. The concept behind this is, it’s a cooperative word game where you have a bunch of players around the table. Each of them has a letter on a stand in front of them, but they can’t see their own letter. They’re trying to work together to get through all of the words that are in front of them. They could say, “I can make a four-letter word using four player letters and this wildcard.” Then you’re going around the table. It’s who can make the biggest word and what that is, but without ever revealing that word. Then you are taking those clues on your little clue sheet, trying to figure out, like, what the hell is the letter in front of me. Its really smartly done.

**Craig:** I see, I see. People are saying, “I can make this word.” You’re like, “Okay, that person said they can make this word. This person said they can make this word.” I’m learning who maybe has what letter-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … and who maybe doesn’t have what letter. That’s interesting.

**John:** That person never says what that word is, but instead, they’re putting little tokens in front of different people’s spaces to show, this is letter 1, 2, 3. You can see the other stuff. You can never see what yours is. It’s really smartly done.

**Craig:** Sort of like Cluedo but with letters. I like it. That sounds like a fun time.

**John:** Letter Jam is a Czech game, but you can find it on Amazon and other places. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** Fantastic. The Czechs make excellent games, like Codenames.

**John:** Like Codenames. The same company that makes Codenames.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go. They’re great. My One Cool Thing this week is the television show Fallout. Now you have the information. Fallout on Amazon.

**John:** On Prime.

**Craig:** On Prime. I loved it. I loved it from start to finish. It was so well done, I thought. A lot of the reviews for it would talk about The Last of Us and video game adaptations, and I wish they wouldn’t, because to me, it’s taking away, first of all, from what those folks did at Fallout, and saying, “Oh, this one’s also a video game.” It’s like, “Okay, and these two movies were both adapted from books. Let’s compare those.” There’s no point. It doesn’t matter. It’s a wildly different show, different tone.

I played Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, and I’m just a fan, a Fallout fan. I thought that they did a terrific job of adapting that in the way it should’ve been adapted. It was just a fun watch. It was well acted. Walt Goggins is terrific in it. It might not be for everyone. It’s an overtly kind of gory, kind of like that comedy gore, which is true to the game. I thought it was great. I just loved it from start to finish. They’ve been renewed for Season 2. Not at all surprised to see that. I look forward to that, I assume, in… It’s a massive show. I know what it takes to make a show this size. I think they probably are bigger, budget-wise, I think. I hope so, based on what I saw. It was like, oh my god, this is insane.

**John:** But I saw they got their California tax incentive for Season 2, so they’ll be here, so that’ll be great.

**Craig:** Maybe I’ll come visit the set if they invite me. I’m a fan. I really enjoyed the show a lot.

**John:** That’s great to hear. It feels like the kind of show that my husband will not want to watch, so I think while he’s gone this weekend, I will burn through it myself.

**Craig:** Now, I will say-

**John:** You still would want to-

**Craig:** You know what I’m gonna say.

**John:** Yeah, you want it to be a weekly show.

**Craig:** Not only do I want it to be a weekly show. This, of all shows-

**John:** Of all shows should’ve been.

**Craig:** … should’ve been a weekly show. Hey, Jeff Bezos, I know you listen to our show. He does not. That’s just stupid. I don’t know how else to put it. I wish there were a different way.

**John:** He doesn’t even run Amazon Prime Video, but still, yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know who does. The most polite way I can say it is, it’s just fully stupid, because that show-

**John:** The footprint is smaller than it should be.

**Craig:** It’s so much smaller than it should be, and that show is such a “oh my god, I can’t wait to see what happens next” show, which is why you should make them wait. Make them wait a week. Then with, I think it’s eight episodes, you’d have a cultural conversation over two months.

I’ll just keep pointing over to Shogun, which has one more episode to go. Tuesday, when this episode airs, that night will be the finale, the finale, the finale of Shogun. People have been talking about it for months, because it goes one a week via Hulu.

There’s no reason for Fallout to be all at once. It just felt wasteful, like, I’m gonna cook you a week’s worth of food, and then you just throw it after, because you consumed it all too much. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to maximize the discussion around something as good as Fallout that is so watchable and addictible – addictive.

**John:** Addictive.

**Craig:** Addictive. I said “addictible.” That’s not a word.

**John:** Addictible, yeah. It could be.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be.

**John:** The kids will make it a word.

**Craig:** Damn kids.

**John:** Damn kids. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Oh, dear.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re fantastic. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what you should do when you meet a famous person.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought you were gonna say what you should do when you get lots of emails from English people complaining.

**John:** You can send those emails to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Ask.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Ask@johnaugust.com.

**John:** Ask@johnaugust.com. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, let’s talk through what a person should do when they meet a famous person. And by what you should do meeting a famous person, I don’t mean you or me, who actually have different contexts, but you’re an ordinary person. You meet a famous person. Let’s talk through the different contexts in which this might happen. First off, you were called into a meeting with a famous person, a famous actor, a famous director, producer, who cares. How do you acknowledge or not acknowledge the fame differential between you and that famous person?

**Craig:** In the context of a professional meeting, you want to acknowledge it as little as possible, because you don’t want to seem like you don’t belong in the room. The tried and true method is to simply say, “I’m such a fan. It’s so lovely to meet you.” I do that with actors that I cast in the show that are famous and have done lots of things. It’s 99 percent of the time exactly true. And beyond that, you don’t want to go too much further, because at that point, you’re putting yourself in fan box as opposed to collaborator box.

**John:** 100 percent. I had a meeting with Henry Cavill. He’s so charming and just so incredibly handsome, but if I were to acknowledge too much, like, oh, this famous person is two feet away from me, that’s not gonna be useful for the meeting. That’s just noise and buzz and it’s not on topic. Address it just the way Craig said. “Such a fan. It’s really good to meet you. I really liked this thing.” You can talk about other stuff. But don’t talk about, like, “What’s it like being famous?”

**Craig:** They don’t necessarily want to listen to that. Hopefully, if it’s a professional context, they’re also familiar with you and some of the things you’ve done. There may be a polite exchange of, “I really love this. I really like this.” The other thing that you don’t want to do in a professional context is try.

This is pretty common. For any human being, when you meet somebody famous, there’s gonna be a natural instinct to try. You’re gonna want to impress them. You’re gonna want to make them laugh. You’re gonna want to make them like you. You’re gonna want them to be your friend, because they’re famous and they have this distortion field around them that’s so fascinating. Don’t do that, because what will end up happening is either faceplanting or just inauthenticity. It’s a bit sweaty. The hardest advice and the most common advice is to just be yourself. Unfortunately, in this situation, you must just be yourself.

**John:** I would say don’t try to match their energy, their accent, because again, they have a gravitational pull sometimes, and it can be really natural to do that. No, you’re there to be yourself and to do your thing. Don’t try to get there.

I had an actor camp coming in. I was gonna come in to do a rewrite on a project, and he was just bouncing off the walls. I didn’t react to how hyper he was. I was just back to focus on, like, “This is what I want to do. This is how we can do this. I hear why that’s important to you, and here’s a way we can achieve that.” You can validate all you want, but don’t try to match them at their energy, because that’s not your job.

**Craig:** It’s not. Also, don’t give away your authority. You’re in the room for a reason. You know something. You do a job they don’t do. You have value. Don’t give it away. You don’t have to be a pompous jerk about it. You don’t have to be arrogant. But it’s all right for you to have opinions. It’s all right for you to say, “Yes. However, one of the things I’ve learned is blah.” You are allowed to be valuable. You’re not there simply to go, “Oh my god, that’s so great. Oh my god, you’re so awesome. Oh my god, everything you say is right.” It’s not. It’s not. They’re just people. They’re just people, especially in that context. You must people-ify these individuals that prior to that meeting were godlike to you because they were on screen.

**John:** Back in the time when you and me both used to do more emergency work or coming in to help out on troubled things, I really felt like a lot of times the reason I got hired is I could survive in those rooms, that I could actually do my job in the presence of just a lot of chaotic energy and big egos and things. I could navigate my way through that. You get better at that by just meeting more famous, powerful people and not being swept away by them.

**Craig:** Correct. There’s another skill involved in those situations where you need to make your way through a meeting with that person, giving them some kind of comfort, and then separately talking with the adults and saying, “Okay. Now, what do we need, and how much of that do you want?” Navigating that is a very difficult thing to do. But it is important, because ultimately, a lot of these famous people need to be happy. If it’s fixit stuff, it’s fair to say no one’s happy. Everyone is feeling wanting. How do you satisfy everybody somehow?

Look, you can piss off the head of a studio. They can stop talking to you for three weeks. But if you piss off – I don’t know, I’m just gonna pick somebody. You’ve come in to fix a Thor movie and you’ve pissed off Chris Hemsworth, you’re fired, because he’s the one who’s showing up on screen. You can’t lose that piece. That’s the additional political power that these folks have just by dint of the job they do.

**John:** Let’s talk a different context. It’s not a meeting, but you just saw their show, you saw their movie, or you’re backstage at their theater performance. How do you interact with that person in those moments?

**Craig:** Keep it short. Keep it simple. And keep your expectations to zero. Your expectations should simply be shake their hand, tell them how great they did, say one quick thing. If you want a photo, they’re so used to that. And always ask, “Is it okay if I take a picture with you?” They’ll be happy to take a picture with you, because most of the time, backstage is when that’s supposed to happen. That’s sort of the deal. And also, it means this interaction is about to end.

You and I have had these. We’re not famous-famous, but people know us from the things we do and from this podcast. When there is, either it’s at a live show or let’s say you’re just at a restaurant and somebody notices you and they are a big fan of you, when they say, “Can I get a photo?” in my mind I’m like, A, yes, and B, we have concluded this interaction and I can go back to whatever I’m doing. That’s a good thing. If you go too long, I don’t know, more than 15, 20 seconds, it becomes an imposition.

**John:** I would differentiate the backstage of the show versus out at a restaurant. If you can find a moment in a public space where you feel like you can grab the person without breaking their world, that’s great, but I’d say don’t – I don’t know, I don’t want to blanket recommendation to never come up to the table, but kind of never come up to the table.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say come up to the table. If they’re having dinner, leave them be. But when they’re leaving-

**John:** Waiting for the valet, waiting for [crosstalk 01:05:57].

**Craig:** … waiting for the valet, those are perfectly fine moments, because the other thing is, if you just imagine yourself in their shoes, if you’re in the middle of dinner, you’re in the middle. That means somebody comes up, talks to you, goes back and sits down, and now they’re over there, and now you’re aware that they’re there. Other people might take this as an opportunity for them to come up. Leave famous people alone when they’re clearly in the middle of conversations, dinner, etc., working. But when it is a little breather moment, like leaving, then sure. Just always be polite if you can.

**John:** This last week after seeing Civil War, I was walking back to the car, and a listener of the podcast stopped me to say, “Oh hey, I really liked the show.” That was great. It was lovely. It was a brief conversation. Completely 100 percent appropriate.

**Craig:** Oh, of course. Look, there are actors who are infamous for being super grouchy about this. I don’t begrudge them their grouchiness. It’s just like, hey, did no one tell you that being famous would mean you’d be famous? Most famous people I know are perfectly fine and gracious with those interactions. There are ways that they mitigate some of these things.

Every now and then, I’ll go catch a Dodger game with Jason Bateman. When it’s time to leave the game, nobody walks faster and with more purpose than Jason Bateman leaving Dodger Stadium. It’s because there are sometimes upwards of 50,000 people there. At least, I don’t know, 30 percent of them are like, “That’s Jason Bateman.” If you’re walking real fast, people will go like, “Oh, Jason.” He’s like, “Hey,” and then he keeps walking, and so there’s no chance to get stopped and mobbed. That’s reasonable. But if somebody were to walk over to him when he’s sitting there and say, “Hey, my son’s a big fan. Would you sign this?” yeah, of course.

**John:** Dodgers Stadium, the equivalent for us is Austin during the film festival, where I do need to walk pretty quickly and with laser-focused eyes, because otherwise I just won’t ever make it to my destination.

**Craig:** There was one year, I think it was the last time I was in Austin, I got off the plane. I landed in Austin, got off the plane, emerged from the jetway into the airport, and within three seconds, I heard someone say my name to another person. I was like, “Ah, shit.” The thing is, listen, of course, it’s a nice thing when people know you and like you. But if you feel like, uh-oh, it’s gonna be a lot of this, it does become a little bit like… I’m not built for it necessarily. I’m always nice. I’m never a jerk, ever, ever, ever. But if somebody could say, “Hey, here’s a potion you could drink when you’re at the Austin Film Festival and you’ll be invisible for the next three hours,” oh my god, I would pay a lot.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** I’d pay money.

**John:** Another context, a social event. Actually, there’s two different levels of this. There’s a social event which is the bigger social event, where there’s a lot of people mingling around, it’s a cocktail-y party kind of thing, or an after-screening kind of thing, where there’s a famous person there and you’re kind of introduced. Do you acknowledge how famous the other person is? A lot of it, you can do the – it’s like a meeting thing, where it’s just like, “I love doing this thing.” But other times, it can be weird. You’re folded into a conversation with somebody who’s much more famous. Do I acknowledge, like, “Oh my god, you’re Amy Poehler.”

**Craig:** This is an example of a moment like that that I had. Normally, when I walk away from moments like that, I think to myself, I screwed it up. In this one, I thought, “Nailed it,” because it was so honest. I was at the Golden Globes. It was before the show started. I was talking to Kevin Huvane, one of the guys that runs CAA, and we were by the bathrooms. And he said, “Oh, I’m waiting here for Meryl Streep.” I was like, “Oh my god.” He’s like, “You want to meet her?” I’m like, “Meryl Streep? I would love to meet her.” She came out. He’s like, “Oh, Meryl, this is Craig Mazin.” I shook her hand. This is what I did. I went, “You know.” And she said, “I know.” I was like, okay, well, there you go, because she’s heard it a billion times. I didn’t want to say it all to her, but also, I wanted her to know, like, “I love you and I love everything you’re in and you’re amazing. You’re the greatest actor of your generation. Here’s the whole thing.” I think I could boil it down to just, you are aware of what’s happening in my brain. She was so nice and gracious about it.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** It was the perfect length. It was a good old-fashioned 15-second chitchat, and that was the end of that.

**John:** What’s great about that example is Kevin Huvane could be the hinge that introduced the two of you, and that makes things much more natural. If she was 10 feet away, would you have gone up to say anything?

**Craig:** Oh my gosh. Now I’ll tell you when I blew it. This is so long ago. This was like 1992. I was with a friend. Is Johnny Rockets still there on La Cienega?

**John:** No, it’s not, alas.

**Craig:** It was an old burger joint across from the Beverly Center. We were there. It was, I don’t know, 8:00 p.m. or something sort of late. My friend – and we were sitting outside – he goes, “Look who’s over there. It’s Seinfeld.” It was Jerry Seinfeld. He was talking to someone else. They were having dinner. I was like, “Oh my god, oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld.” When we were done, we’re walking by, and I was like, “I’m not gonna do it. I’m not gonna say anything.” I had already passed him by two steps when I just was like, “No, I must.” I turned around and then went back towards him. I’m sure he thought, like, “Oh shit, I’m getting assassinated.” I was just like, “Oh, hi. Just a big fan.” He was like, “Oh, great.” Then I walked away. My friend was like, “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. He must’ve shit his pants, because you looked like you were coming back to throw a punch at him.” But I was so nervous and awkward about it.

That said, sometimes – and you’ve probably felt this, John, maybe at Austin, where people come up to you and you can see how nervous they are to talk to you. It’s adorable, actually. It’s kind of sweet.

**John:** You immediately do the thing to put them at ease and make you feel okay about the whole thing.

**Craig:** Exactly. Everybody has these moments with famous people where they just fall apart, forget themselves, regress to childhood, feel like an idiot. That’s also fine and normal. If you can see that they’re like eh, just thank them for meeting them and leave. Don’t push it. I’m sorry, Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve never met him since. I’ve never met him. We’ve talked to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on our show, and I know Jason Alexander. These are lovely people. I’m at a different time in my life. I’m very comfortable around these people. But I still feel like if I were to meet Jerry Seinfeld today, I would have to say, “I need to take you back to 1992 and apologize.”

**John:** Example just from this last week. We were at the WGA Awards. Craig, congratulations on your WGA Award-

**Craig:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** … for Best New Series, which is terrific. At the after-party thing, Quinta Brunson was like three feet away from me, talking with other people. And I was talking with other people. But I didn’t know whether to say hi to Quinta, because she came on the podcast, but it was just a one-time thing. I don’t know that she really remembers who I am out of this context. Of course, there’s a disparity, because she’s just much more famous. I know her because she’s a very successful creator and star of a thing. I did not end up saying hi, and I had an opportunity, because a friend of mine was talking with her, and I could’ve worked my way back in, but you don’t always have to take advantage of those opportunities.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nothing good would’ve happened.

**Craig:** If you have nothing to say… I had met Quinta before, through Natasha Lyonne. Then we had her on the show. Now we sort of know each other. Melissa and I were both just wiped out, so we just went home. But if I had gone to that party and I had seen Quinta there, my guess is I probably would’ve just waved and then just kept going, because I don’t have anything specifically to say other than, “Hey, we know each other.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes, and?

**John:** Yeah. There’s that. Craig, as a famous person I get to do a podcast with every week, always a pleasure.

**Craig:** Famous, quote unquote.

**John:** Quote unquote, famous.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [Do I Sound Gay? Documentary](https://www.doisoundgay.com/)
* [International Dialects of English Archive](https://www.dialectsarchive.com/)
* [Accent Tag on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=accent+tag)
* [Chilean beer ads in Star Wars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSgMWAi9YPA)
* [Letter Jam](https://czechgames.com/for-press/lj.html)
* [TacticalMap](https://tactical-map.com/)
* [Fallout](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0CN4HV16N/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r) on Prime Video
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* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nica Brooke ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/641standard.mp3).