Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-fandom-menace).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 628 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Craig and I will discuss how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. We’ll have listener questions and a ton of follow-up, including about secret projects and alternative screenplay formats, something that Craig is always into talking about.

**Craig:** I’m into it.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members, we will look at various fandoms and do our best to absolutely enrage them.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Oh, no. That’s why we put it behind the paywall. If you want to be angry with you, you gotta pay us some money.

**Craig:** Pay $5 to watch us get beat into a pulp. Fun.

**John:** Craig, we missed you last week. Aline was on, and we discussed How Would This Be a Movie. We had some new topics for How Would This Be a Movies. Also, this week, I was looking through the chapter on picking which movie to write, for the Scriptnotes book. I mentioned, oh, a bunch of our previous How Would This Be a Movies have become movies. I had Drew get on the case to figure out how many of those that we discussed actually did become movies. The number is shocking. Drew’s going to help us out, talking through the things that became movies, the things that became documentaries, and the things that are in development right now. Drew.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Talk us through how many of these projects have actually been made since we discussed them.

**Drew Marquardt:** Twelve of these have actually been made as narrative feature films.

**Craig:** Jeez. Wow.

**Drew:** Or series.

**John:** Also, Craig, you start to realize, man, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so some of them I knew, like The 15:17 to Paris, which is about those Americans who prevented the terrorist attack. That was a Clint Eastwood movie. I knew that happened. Zola we talked about at the Austin Film Festival. That became a movie. Do you remember The Hatton Garden Job, which was the old men-

**Craig:** The old guys, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, the heist. Two of those happened.

**Craig:** They made two of those?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that. You’re making the movie, and someone’s like, “We’ve gotta beat the other The Hatton Garden Job movie.” Oh, business.

**John:** Business, business. But Drew, talk us through some of the other things we had in How Would This Be a Movie.

**Drew:** There was also The Act, which was the Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.

**John:** She just got out of prison, right? I didn’t really follow that story closely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Apparently, our daughters’ generation is obsessed with Gypsy-Rose and her impending freedom, or freedom. She’s become a cult hero among the children, because she murdered someone or whatever.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** There’s also The Mandela Effect, which was just the idea that we had talked about, but they made into a feature. There’s Stolen By My Mother: the Kamiyah Mobley Story, which was the young woman who discovered she was kidnapped as a baby by the woman she thought was her mom.

**Craig:** I don’t even remember that one.

**John:** I don’t remember that one at all.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Drew:** There’s the Danish series The Investigation, which is about Kim Wall’s murder.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s a submarine murder. That’s right.

**Drew:** Six Triple Eight, which is in post-production right now, but Tyler Perry directed it. It’s about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the predominantly Black battalion of women during World War II in the Army Corps.

**John:** I do remember that. I remember thinking, “Is there enough of a story there?” It was a part of history I didn’t know existed. We’ll see if there’s a story there.

**Drew:** We have How to Murder Your Husband, which was about the woman who wrote the book How to Murder Your Husband and then murdered her husband.

**Craig:** Oh, murder lady. Come on.

**John:** It’s a great title, so that’s why it needed to happen.

**Craig:** How to murder your husband, step 1: don’t write a thing about how to murder your husband. Jeez.

**John:** It could actually go on endlessly, because if you make a movie called How to Murder Your Husband, everyone’s going to suspect you of murdering your husband. It’s perfect.

**Craig:** Now I’m rooting for that person to murder their husband. What else did we do?

**Drew:** Death Saved My Life they made into a Lifetime movie, which is the wife who showed up at her own funeral, because her husband had her killed but not well.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Death Saved My Life, I guess that’s a good title. It’s a good Lifetime title. It’s a good book title, so sure, I’ll get that.

**Craig:** I’m with them.

**Drew:** There’s Dumb Money, which came out last year.

**John:** We talked about that. It’s about the GameStop situation and story. Not at all surprised that happened.

**Craig:** No, considering that I personally received multiple calls from multiple companies about it.

**John:** As did I.

**Craig:** I was like, “Okay, apparently they’re making this thing.”

**John:** Craig, you and I should’ve both taken the job for different companies and just raced to see which one-

**Craig:** Wow. Just go head to head in the theaters.

**Drew:** Then finally, Holiday Road, which I think might’ve been a TV movie, but that was the 13 stranded strangers who all rent a van together when they can’t get a flight.

**Craig:** Here’s my question. Of all of these, how was our batting average on predicting whether or not they would be made?

**John:** That could be good follow-up for Drew, because I don’t think you went through and looked at that. Drew, maybe for next week, can you take a look at, of those movies, how many did we say, okay, that’s definitely going to happen?

**Drew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Similarly, were there any where we were like, “Never in a million years will anyone make this.”

**John:** That’s what I’m excited to see. We’ll put it on the blog so people can see which of these movies happened and which one didn’t. But you also found 10 things that are in development, including-

**Craig:** Jeez.

**John:** … one about Jim Obergefell, the Hulk Hogan Gawker lawsuit, Dr. James Barry, who was a gender-fluid Victorian doctor, which I remember we thought was really interesting, and apparently is Rachel Weisz. Feels like the perfect casting for that.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** There’s the PTA mom for drug dealing. You May Want to Marry My Husband. These Witchsy founders who formed a fake male co-founder.

**Drew:** Brie Larson got that one.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** McDonald’s Monopoly.

**Craig:** That one is a great one.

**John:** The Scottish hip-hop hoax. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. There’s a bunch of those things. That was also a thing that came to me a couple times. There probably will be a Sam Bankman-Fried movie. I think it’s tough. I think the relative lack of success of Dumb Money is going to very much hurt the Sam Bankman-Fried movie, but we’ll see.

**Craig:** They’re going to make it anyway.

**John:** George Santos, there’s at least one movie. That’s right, we talked about that, the George Santos movie, the one that Frank Rich is doing.

**Craig:** All I need to know is Frank Rich. I’m in. That’s great. This is pretty remarkable. Similarly, I’m interested to see if any of these we thought were not even worthy of development. The conceited question is, hey, are people listening to us and then just rushing out to get this done? But I suspect not. I suspect there is an industry of assistants that are doing nothing but Buzzfeed-style collating whatever buzzy news item of the day is and putting it in front of people, and then there’s just a general race to get rights and make a thing. It is amazing how many of these are getting made.

**John:** I was just surprised at the total numbers here. We’ll also include in the blog post the ones that were made as documentaries, because I think a thing we often talked about is, is the best version of this a fictionalized version, or do we just want to see the documentary series that tracks that, which in some cases may be more compelling.

**Craig:** That’s very interesting. Good to know that we’re not just wildly off, at least with the things we’re considering. I root for all movies.

**John:** Root for movies and TV series. Some more follow-up. We talked two episodes ago about accurate but distracting, so things that, if you put them in your script, they might be actually accurate to what happens in real life, but would be distracting to the viewer or to the reader. We have some follow-up from that.

**Drew:** Richard in Boston writes, “There’s an example of this that historical fiction writers have to deal with called the Tiffany Problem. It was coined by fantasy writer Joe Walton. The Tiffany Problem describes the tension between historical fact and the average, everyday person’s idea of history. If you’re reading a book that takes place in medieval times, you’ll have trouble believing that a character’s name could be Tiffany, even though Tiffany is actually a medieval name that goes back to the 12th century. But in our modern perception of the medieval world, Tiffany just doesn’t fit. Even though authors might research carefully and want to include historically accurate information in their book, like a medieval character named Tiffany, a popular audience likely won’t buy it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Totally tracks. I love that as a name for that phenomenon.

**Craig:** That really does track. I would absolutely be stopped in my tracks if there was a scene in a medieval story and Tiffany shows up. That would just seem anachronistic. That’s a great example. I guess in the end, it really doesn’t… There’s no victory in saying afterwards, “No no no, Tiffany was a name,” because people are like, “I guess now that I know, that’s interesting, but in the meantime, it screwed up my enjoyment of this story.” Tiffany. All right. I like that.

**John:** Now, I don’t want to get Drew’s mailbox overflowing with stuff, but if you are a listener who has another example of something that really does match the Tiffany Problem, which is basically something that is historically accurate or accurate to true life but is distracting if you were to encounter it, I’d love more examples of that, because it feels like Tiffany’s great, but I think we can find more ways that this manifests.

A thing I’ve talked about on the show a lot is that when I want a bedtime book, I love a book that is really interesting and completely forgettable, that you can read, and the minute you set the book down, you don’t think about it, so you can fall back asleep. I’ve been reading some books on counterfactual history, basically like, what if this thing happened in a certain way.

**Craig:** Alternative history, yeah.

**John:** Love it. One of the stories I wasn’t familiar with was Arminius, who’s also known as Hermann, who’s the German barbarian chief who drove back the Romans at a certain time. In reading this account of Arminius, “That’s a fascinating movie. I’m surprised no one has made a movie about that. Let me Google and see why no one has made a movie about it.” It turns out there’s two seasons of a Netflix show that is specifically about that. There’s just too much-

**Craig:** Netflix.

**John:** … Netflix.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** There’s just too much Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s almost like Netflix has become like Google, but instead of getting a search result, you get a series.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I looked at the trailer. It looked great. I’m like, “Great. Someone has already made the thing I was thinking about making.” Congratulations. I will say I’ve not watched a frame of the actual series. They shot it in Latin and in German, which feels great.

**Craig:** Whoa. That’s impressive.

**John:** Kudos to them. Kudos to everybody involved in making Barbarians, which I may watch at some point, I may not watch at some point. But I know it’s out there, and I know that I, John August, don’t have to write it. That sometimes is the greatest relief.

**Craig:** Apparently, we don’t have to write anything, because Netflix did it.

**John:** Another thing I don’t have to write is the Harry Potter series.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Episode 623, I talked about a project. This is when we were talking about bake-offs. I talked about a project that had come into my orbit, and they asked, “Hey, would you want to adapt this very popular piece of IP.” I’m sure, Craig, you were guessing it was Harry Potter. We can now reveal it was Harry Potter. They’re doing a Harry Potter series for HBO Max or Max. Deadline posted a story about who the finalists were who are going through the process. I wish them all well. They did find people who have good, proper credits. I do wish them well. I do think it’s just a very hard road ahead for them.

**Craig:** I have no inside information on this. I work at HBO, but no one has ever talked to me about Harry Potter. I don’t know what it is. It seems like it’s about adapting the books. That was what I initially thought. But then they’re saying in this article, “We’ve heard that the group of writers were commissioned by Max.” First of all, that’s cool that they’re paying them.

**John:** Yeah, they’re paying somebody.

**Craig:** “To create pitches for a series reflecting their take on the IP.” Now, I guess my question is – and this is my dum-dum question – what take? I thought that the idea was, we’re going to take each book and adapt it fully over a season, because those books are big. When they were adapted into movies, very successfully, of course they had to do quite a bit of compacting. I guess maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know. I’m fascinated by this.

I would be terrified to be one of these people. They’re way braver than I am. There’s something very scary about knowing that there’s somebody somewhere else doing what you were doing, to try and do what you’re doing, and maybe will do what you do instead of you. It’s scary. But I do think on the plus side, they’re being paid, so that’s actually quite good. On the downside, I could also see where this becomes this cottage industry, where you’re paying people to do these pitches, but you’re not paying that much. The thing about pitching a season is you have to do quite a bit of work.

**John:** Oh god, so much.

**Craig:** That’s definitely an imposing prospect. I guess for something that is as huge as Harry Potter is – and it is – it’s almost as close as you can get to a guaranteed success, as far as I can tell. I can see why it is like this, because I assume also that these people will have to meet with JK Rowling and get along with her, because she’s always part of it.

**John:** If you look at the attempts to expand the franchise beyond those books, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve succeeded in physical spaces. I feel like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, tremendous success, those things, but the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have had diminishing returns. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are not as enamored with those as with the original books, of course. It looks like, based on this article – and we don’t know the inside truth here – is that some of these takes may be moving outside of the books, some of them may be more faithful adaptations of the books.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Those movies, I guess they did well enough for them to make more. They ran into some trouble, because Johnny Depp suddenly was in a situation. They may have not been the size of the original Harry Potter films, but I think they were doing okay. The Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a phenomenon, our friend Jack Thorne being the primary playwright there. Well, the playwright. I guess, technically, Jack wrote the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an original story by him, JK Rowling, and John Tiffany. Tiffany. Then the Harry Potter video game was an enormous hit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In the world of video games, there are some enormous hits. When they are enormous, they dwarf what we do. That was one of them.

**John:** I guess I should restate that they’ve had a hard time expanding it out as a filmed franchise, but this is maybe possible, going to happen. For folks who are looking at, oh, what is a popular book series that did not get a good treatment, Percy Jackson. The movies were not a big success. The new series on Disney Plus is terrific. For folks who are curious about that, really worth watching. I thought it was just a very smart adaptation, much more faithful to the books. My daughter, who grew up reading those books, loved it. They really are quite enjoyable. It was well cast. So difficult to get great performances from young actors, and this succeeded in it.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’d recommend it for people.

**Craig:** Great. We wish those folks the best of luck. I don’t know if they’ll want to do this, but when it’s all done and the winner of, what is it, the tri-cup wizard, the tri-wizard tournament, whoever wins the big cup that actually turns out to be a Horcrux or, no, a Portkey, it would be great to have them on our show, just to talk about the process, if they’re willing.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating to me. I get it, but also, it makes me nervous.

**John:** It does. Also, I think you have to look at are you going with people who are familiar with the movie series or new folks. That’s a challenging [crosstalk 16:09].

**Craig:** I could be wildly off here, but I suspect that the Harry Potter books are transgenerational, that people who read them as children are now reading them to their children, that they aren’t going anywhere ever.

**John:** I don’t know that to be the case. I feel like there’s been such a backlash against JK Rowling that I wonder if that’s still the case.

**Craig:** There is a backlash against JK Rowling on Twitter and social media, no question. I don’t think that that has translated into the actual audience and how they interact with the stories and the characters. I will cite the video game again, because when the video game came out, that was thick in the middle-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … of JK Rowling and her controversies. People were really angry about the game and angry at the game, and yet it sold a gazillion copies. There is a disconnect, I think, between… There’s a topic. One day we should probably jump on the third rail, John, and discuss the notion of separating the art from the artist, because this comes up all the time.

**John:** For sure. Noted for future discussion is how we separate those things. We’ll find some other good examples of what do you do with problematic people who also make art.

**Craig:** Roald Dahl.

**John:** Roald Dahl, Joss Whedon. It’s tough. There’s that tendency to retroactively discount the thing that they were able to make and do, because we now believe that they’re terrible people.

**Craig:** There’s also this weird phenomenon of feeling guilty about enjoying something. Roald Dahl said a lot of really antisemitic stuff. Not mildly. Very. I love Roald Dahl books. I do. I love them. I really enjoy the Wes Anderson Henry Sugar adaptation. I feel like I’m a little like, “Should I?” Then I’m like, “I really like the stories.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some UK writing credits. In 625, I think we were answering a listener question about UK credits, and we said we know they work differently. Tom wrote in with some follow-up about that.

**Drew:** Tom is the chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Film Committee, which is the WGGB. He writes, “Per the question from the British writer, I thought that you and indeed he would be interested to know that the WGGB and the Producers Alliance of Cinema and Television, or PACT, negotiated the screenwriting credits agreement way back in 1974. This agreement is referenced in the 1992 basic screenwriting agreement between our two organizations. Both these agreements are in the process of being updated, as we seek to bake in some of the gains secured in last year’s WGA strike, so thank you for that. We operate under a different labor framework in the UK, so these agreements are only advisory. Specific clauses can be negotiated out, though obviously we discourage that. Most screen credits are agreed in consultation between the producers and the writers in question. However, the Writers Guild of Great Britain does arbitrate on small number of credit disputes every year, following similar guidance to that used by the WGA.”

**John:** That’s great. It’s good to have some answers there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not surprising. The Writers Guild of America has a very legalistic system to arbitrate and assign credits. It is contractually the sole arbiter and sole authority of credit assignation. Other places, there’s that big bus-sized loophole that you can drive through, which is advisory or in consultation between producers and writers. It is not as strong of a system, presuming one agrees that the Writers Guild has the best interest of writers at heart, which I think it does. It’s just that when you are deciding what credits should be, there are sometimes winners and losers, and people that don’t get the credit are upset. But it’s good to know that there’s something. But I’m not surprised to see that it is not the ironclad structure that we have here in the U.S.

**John:** Absolutely. All these things come down to power. In the U.S., the Writers Guild has the power to basically force this system upon the makers of film and television. But the Producers Guild, for example, does not have that degree of power. But they have been able to negotiate and cajole and get people to take their PGA credits seriously, so that now when you see a PGA after a producer’s name, you can recognize, oh, that’s the person who did really more of the producing job, and it’s just not a person whose name showed up for various contractual reasons.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I am a member of the PGA. I don’t put the PGA thing after my name, only because it just feels a little bit like a odd degree I earned in college or something.

**John:** But if you were producing a feature film, you might be more inclined to use it, I suspect.

**Craig:** Ultimately, I don’t think people at home care, but what the PGA does do is leverage its agreement with the Academies to determine who is eligible to win awards. That is actually quite a bit of interesting power that they’ve garnered for themselves. I think ultimately serves as their most relevant function. When the Oscars are coming, and Best Picture is announced, producers will go up to accept the Best Picture. Those producers have been vetted by the PGA. This works for the Emmys as well. We get a questionnaire, and they ask me, “What did these people do? Just tell us what they did.” And I do, and then they make their decisions.

**John:** More follow-up in Episode 626. We talked about the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize, which I knew was a thing, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Matt wrote in with some more specificity here.

**Drew:** Matt says, “The Ig Nobel Prize already exists, and they celebrated their 33rd First Annual Ceremony in 2023, based on offbeat yet real science. The prizes are often presented by true Nobel laureates.” Matt says, “I personally appreciate their method of preventing long acceptance speeches, where an eight-year-old girl marches on stage to tell the recipients to, ‘Please stop. I’m bored,’ while the audience throws paper airplanes at the stage.”

**Craig:** That is very reminiscent of what happened at this year’s Emmys, where Anthony Anderson, the host, brought his mom. When people talked too long, they put a camera on his mom with a mic, and she just told the people to stop. I gotta tell you, it only really happened once. After that one time, I think everybody was terrified of Anthony Anderson’s mom.

I think she should be at all of these award shows. There’s really no excuse for it. They tell you very clearly you have 45 seconds, which is actually a lot of time. Some people go up there and just don’t seem to… They think, “Oh, but not really.” No, really. We’re in show business. We all understand that there’s timing. It’s remarkable to me that people just don’t do that. In any case, Anthony Anderson’s mom or an eight-year-old girl marching on stage, either way, yes, genius. Much better than the playoff music.

**John:** Craig, I did not watch any of the award shows so far this year. You attended many of them.

**Craig:** You missed it.

**John:** Give us a quick review.

**Craig:** I lost.

**John:** How was it for you?

**Craig:** I lost. I lost.

**John:** You lost and you lost and lost and lost and lost.

**Craig:** I lost. I lost. And then I lost.

**John:** But your show won many awards that were not part of the main telecast, which is great.

**Craig:** Yes, we did. We won eight Emmy Awards, which is one shy, I believe, of the record for most for a first-season show. That was terrific. I would have probably felt a bit more glum about constantly losing all the big awards, had it not been that I was losing to Jesse Armstrong and Succession. He is such a lovely, wonderful guy. Have we not had him on the show?

**John:** No, we’ve never had him on the show. We should get him on the show.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Let’s fix that. He’s wonderful and so smart and so deserving. Also, there’s a nice thing about certainty going into these awards shows, where you don’t really have to worry. I didn’t write speeches, for instance. You go and enjoy that, and it’s actually quite nice. I have a few friends there that are also up for other awards. Quinta Brunson, who we love, won an Emmy, which was wonderful to see. You do get to see a lot of people that you’ve come to like and enjoy.

I made a shorter night of all those things, just because the strikes had that weird impact of jamming four awards things into the course of 10 days. Oh, god, man, I walked out of one of those things. I’m like, “This thing was 4 hours long, and I feel more tired than I do shooting for 12 hours.” I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It’s oddly exhausting.

**John:** Now, everything has got jammed up, tied together, but the alternative is it gets dragged out over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, which wouldn’t have been great either.

**Craig:** That would be worse. It was a way, at least, for people to go. Everybody’s schedules, once the strikes ended, everybody accelerated into work. Maybe not so much the actors, because there’s a bit of a lag time for them, but certainly writers and producers are working on things.

There will be awards shows coming up. We were very nicely nominated for the aforementioned PGA award. Going to be difficult for me to get down there and lose again, because I’m going to be shooting. I will have to lose in absentia. It was good to get it all done in this crazy pressure cooker 10 days, because it was Golden Globes, and then it was AFI, and then it was Critics Choice, and then it was Emmys, all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Oscars are right around the corner.

**John:** Yeah, crazy. Last bit of follow-up is another Arlo Finch. Karen Finch wrote in and said, “Would you believe my dog is Arlo Finch? He’s nine, so technically, I named him first.” This dog is gorgeous.

**Craig:** Look at this little boy.

**John:** Oh my god, such a good dog.

**Craig:** What a cutie. He’s got his little toy.

**John:** His toy.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. My younger dog, Bonnie, she loves toys. But my older dog, Cookie, no interest in toys. Bonnie, when you come home, she sees you, and then she immediately runs away from you, gets a toy, and runs and brings it over to you, like, look, I have a toy. It always looks like this, just ripped up and gummy and dirty. Aw, look at this little boy, Arlo Finch.

**John:** It makes sense. Karen Finch, obviously her last name was already Finch. Arlo does feel like one of those names that probably starts in dogs and then goes to kids. Basically, it’s a fun name for an animal, and then you hear that name a lot and you start applying it to kids. It makes sense. Cooper was probably the same situation. I know there are a lot of Cooper dogs, and then you started having Cooper kids.

**Craig:** Cooper kids. Maybe Craig. It’s possible. Used to be a Scottish dog name. Craig!

**John:** You know that dog names tend to be two syllables, so you can yell out for them and they come back. Craig doesn’t work well as a dog name. Arlo does.

**Craig:** There’s Spike, Butch. I’m always thinking of the cartoon dogs. You’re right. Fido. Who names their dog Fido anymore?

**John:** It’s a good name though.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, a thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, probably from the very start, is that the screenplay format is well established. We’ve been used to it since the days of Casablanca. It’s 12-point Courier. The margins are a certain place. The dialog works a certain way. Character names are above stuff. As the Oscar nominations came out, we always try to make sure that we have all of the Oscar-nominated screenplays available on Weekend Read. That’s Drew’s responsibility, so Drew has been a hero to getting this all to make sure they look fantastic in Weekend Read.

We’ve got all of them except for one, which is Anatomy of a Fall, which is a fantastic script, a fantastic movie. It is not going to be possible to format that in Weekend Read, because it is bizarre. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how it looks. But I also pulled out some screenshots here.

It looks to be maybe in Times Roman, I’m guessing. It’s some sort of serif font. There are scene headers. It’s “8 – Chalet, Extérieur,” “Interior plus exterior/day.” We see that kind of stuff. It’s all in French, but you can totally tell what’s happening there. There are letters for A in parentheses, talking through the scene description. It is in the present tense, like the way we’d expect this to be. There are photos. There are photos of what the chalet looks like. Dialog is blocked over to the right in a way, with the character name above it but not centered. It’s just different. Craig, how are you feeling as you look at this?

**Craig:** I love it. I love this. This is going to start happening more and more. For screenplays that are speculative – and I don’t mean just spec screenplays that people are writing without money being paid; I mean even things in development, that are not necessarily automatically going to be produced – perhaps this would be too much or unnecessary.

But if you are writing for production, what I love about this is how many questions it answers for people, because, look, I’m in prep right now. People that work on movies, to produce the movies, all the department heads, they don’t read these scripts the way people that are gatekeeping at festivals or development executives read them. They’re reading them as instruction sets for what they’re supposed to do. The more information they can have, the clearer it becomes, and the fewer questions the filmmakers have to answer, because answering questions becomes the bane of your existence in prep. You have to do it. That’s sort of the point. But the fewer questions that are floating out there, the happier your day is.

This is brilliant looking at this. It answers so many things. It makes so many things clear. You’re going to end up drawing these things anyway. You’re going to end up taking photos of these things anyway. For a movie like Anatomy of a Fall, which is so specific about a space and what occurred in the space and the relative position of the window to the attic to the downstairs to the outside, this makes complete sense. It’s very easy to read. I have no problem with this whatsoever. None.

**John:** It does French things too, where they tend not to put extra blank lines between paragraphs, which is something I would choose to do. Looking on page 15, for example, there’s a sketch of how this attic space works and which windows open and which ones don’t. Just super helpful for anyone reading the script to get a sense of what the actual plan is here. We’ll try to get Justine on the podcast to talk through this, because I’m really curious-

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** … how early in the process did she know this was the house, this is how it’s all going to work. The other thing, which we always talk about, are alt lines and how you handle that. For this tidbit here, Sandra, in parentheses, “taking time to reflect or think about it,” she answers, “Not always, but often, yes, because of the wood dust.” And then, in parentheses beneath it, “Alt: often, yes, because of the wood dust. Alt: I think so, yes, because of the wood dust.” Here, those alts are there, already in the script there as a plan. Great. It feels very useful for production to know this is the situation, this is what we’re getting into, this is how we’re going to be doing it.

**Craig:** It’s a perfectly good thing to do. At some point, very early on, when you enter production, or let’s say you’ve been green-lit and now you’re in prep, as a writer you are confronted with how unromantic everyone is about creating it. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The makeup people see makeup. The hair people see hair. The clothing people see clothing. The production designer sees spaces, materials, construction. They aren’t necessarily plugged into your grand, romantic, artistic dream. They’re just trying to make it happen. It’s so practical. This kind of work is incredibly practical, including listing the alts, because then your actors are aware. You can have that discussion. You can decide on the day, “Do we want that other line? Which of these do you prefer?” It’s all very practical.

I’m in complete support of it. I think the screenplay format that we use is a perfectly fine format for people to read and decide, “Would I want to invest in this? Would I want to see this happen?” It is not a useful document for, “How do we make this happen?” It’s just not. This is very clever, very well done.

**John:** Also, if we do get her on the show, I want to talk about decisions of when to be in French, when to be in English, because if you’re reading this document, you basically have to be able to speak both French and English to parse it and understand what’s happening there. It’s a French script with just really mostly English dialog in it. It’s just such a fascinating hybrid form.

**Craig:** Yeah, which reflects the reality of the film, where it’s taking place in France, and yet one character is often answering questions that are posed in French in English.

**John:** It’s delightful. Here’s the other thing is, we talked about the Tiffany Problem, like it’s realistic, but would you believe it. As an American, you’re watching these courtroom sequences, you’re like, “Wait, there’s no possible way you’re allowed to do that.” Of course, but no, it’s France, and you can do things that way. The way that the prosecutor behaves, it’s like, “How is that possible? Is she always on the witness stand, and she can just stand up and talk whenever?” It’s wild.

**Craig:** It is wild. I think a lot of people have that natural, like, “Did they just invent this to make the courtrooms seem more interesting?” The answer is no. Then following that, there was quite a discourse of, “What is wrong with France?” The way they conduct a trial just feels bad. It feels bad.

**John:** It feels incredibly unfair to the defendant.

**Craig:** It really does. In a country where there is a history of just chopping people’s heads off for political expressions, it does seem a little like, oh, I don’t like this feeling. But then we know in, for instance, the case in Italy with Amanda Knox, the way other countries investigate, prosecute, pursue, charge, and judge is not like we do. It’s interesting.

**John:** I would love to hear from international listeners, because they must see so much of the American courtroom process, because it’s in all our movies, it’s in all of our TV shows. How much does that color their expectation about how stuff should work in their own legal systems? They must have some expectation it’s going to work similarly, and it clearly doesn’t.

**Craig:** The other interesting thing about the constant presentation of the American justice system is that typically, for the purposes of drama, the stories that we tell are of falsely accused people or people who are guilty in the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law. That’s what’s exciting to us. But there are times where we do tell stories of people who are guilty. The question is are they guilty or not.

The aforementioned Jack Thorne wrote a terrific miniseries that was centered around an actor who was accused of sexually assaulting people. It became a courtroom drama where you were rooting for guilt. That’s an interesting concept we don’t often see. But even though a lot of American lawyers… If we had Ken White on, for instance, he would run down how inaccurate and stupid American courtroom dramas are. It does at least give you a sense of our process and form, which is way more rigorous than apparently France, which is like, this is a free-for-all. This is kind of exciting though.

**John:** For our main topic, I want to talk a little bit about fandom and the dynamics of fandom. The jumping-off point was a blog post I read, which turned out was all from 2015, so it’s a little dated there. But I really liked how he laid out how subcultures become fandoms become these bigger things and tend to ultimately implode or get warped. This is a post by David Chapman. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. He talks through that generally the dynamic you see is that there is a scene where you have some creators who are doing a new thing. It could be a musical new thing. It could be an artistic new thing. Some sort of cultural product that they’re making which feels new. That then attracts fanatics, who are people who are not making the things themselves, but are so into it and want to follow it and follow those creators. Both these creators and the fandoms are geeks, in the sense that they are deeply, deeply into it. This is more than just a weird hobby. It’s becoming an actual subculture.

Once that gets up to a certain critical mass, you have what he calls MOPs, members of the public, who are attracted to it and start to enjoy it, but they’re not on the inside. They get kind of geeky about it, but they’re not actual hardcore fans. They’re like tourists coming to the thing. Sometimes there’s in-grouping and out-grouping, where these new people you label as posers, because they’re not true believers, they’re not really part of it.

But what I found so fascinating is he also charts it through to generally you get a place where there are sociopaths who become attracted to this movement, this thing that’s more than a scene. It’s become a subculture. They adopt some aspects of it, and ultimately the drive either is for money or to do some other kind of nefarious purpose.

I thought it was just an interesting dynamic. It’s very easy to chart this to the rise of the hippie movement. It feels accurate to a lot of the ways we see things begin, blossom, grow, and fall apart.

**Craig:** This is an interesting dissection of the phenomenon of phenomena and how things catch fire and become a social exercise. There are certain presumptions baked into this that I think are worth questioning.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** For instance, is it better to be a fanatic than to be a casual enjoyer? One of the things I think about as a person that does create things is what do I want my audience to be. If I had a wish, how would I want them to be reacting and interacting with the work I make.

I don’t think I have a great desire for people to be fanatics, per se. What I want is for people to enjoy. I want them to take from it what I intended to give. The fandom itself is separate from what I want. I just want people to watch it and feel things that I hope they feel and think about things that I want them to consider. I am not doing this so that people tattoo it on themselves or go to every show and get signatures and autographs and things like that, but people do. I understand that, because I’ve tattooed myself, so I get that.

I do question the premise that one kind of fandom, there’s a pure, truer fandom than another. I wonder if most creators are really just trying to appeal to what this author refers to as MOPs, members of the public.

**John:** I think that’s a great distinction. Also, maybe we can talk about it both in the terms of the things we write and make, so Last of Us for you, or Chernobyl, versus what we’re doing right now, which is that we have fans of Scriptnotes, who are listening to this podcast that we’re making, and to what degree do we feel like we need to engage with that community that forms around, because we made a thing that the community is around it, or that we want to distance ourselves or not really think about and worry about that.

The answer is different for different things. I think with Scriptnotes, we do engage our community to a pretty significant degree, not a degree to which a YouTuber or a Vine star back in the day might’ve. But we’re answering their questions. We’re meeting them at live shows. Some of them are paying us $5 a month. There is a sense that we are attempting to service that community to some degree by also doing a thing that we want to do, which is different than what you’re doing with Last of Us, which is you’re trying to make the thing, and you recognize that there is a role to which you need to go out and promote the thing and go to Brazil to do a fan launch of the thing, and yet you’re still trying to maintain some boundaries around your exposure to that community.

**Craig:** Because the goal ultimately is the point. The goal of making things is hopefully for people to see it and appreciate it. When I say people, I mean as many as possible. I don’t think anyone makes a show or writes a book or writes a song so that very few people will listen to it.

There’s this thing that happens when something is new – this author refers to it as the new thing – where the first people to appreciate it feel a kind of ownership. They feel special, because they fought their way to it. They found it when it wasn’t promoted to them, when no one told them about it. They had a pure experience with it. Then other people don’t, in their minds. Other people are promoted to. Their friends tell them.

In reality, I’m not sure it matters, because let’s say I’ve never heard of a thing. I remember somebody… I think it was Shannon Woodward. Yeah, it was Shannon. I was having lunch with her or something. She’s like, “Have you seen Stranger Things?” I said, “No,” because you know me. I don’t watch stuff. She’s like, “There’s this girl who plays this little girl who’s just a phenomenal… She’s just doing this stuff that’s just mind-blowing to me as an actor.” I was like, “That’s a pretty good recommendation. I’ll check it out.” Then I watched it, and I was like, “Wow. Millie Bobby Brown is really good at this. The Duffer brothers are really good at this. This is great.” Is my appreciation less valuable because I was told, as opposed to somebody who’s just flipping through the 4,000 shows on Netflix, lands on something, and goes, “Yes, this. I have unearthed it.” I don’t know.

**John:** I think we often have the experience of being champions of a thing that we want other people to see. Our One Cool Things are like, “Hey, take a look at this thing that you may not have otherwise been aware of.” That signaling thing is important. We’re using some of our cache and our authority, to whatever degree we have it, to say this is a thing that is worth your attention. We sometimes seek out people who can recommend good things to us. A lot of the blogs I follow are basically like, I like that person’s taste, and so if they are recommending something to me, I will click through that link, because they don’t steer me wrong, which is absolutely great and true.

I think what’s different though is that the difference between a recommendation and something that becomes a fandom is a fandom requires some kind of organization. Interesting that a lot of times, fandom, it is self-organizing. It’s not the creator who’s going out there and creating that community and organizing that community. They’re just making their thing. That community is creating its own rules and its own structure around it. The relationship between that fan organization and that creator can be great. It can be toxic. It can be problematic. That’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. What this guy is describing is fandom protecting itself, which actually has nothing to do with the art. It’s only about the community that’s built around the art, which I understand. When you find a community, it’s important to you. As we all know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging is the most important of the non-fundamental needs like food, shelter. You find belonging, especially if you are someone who struggles with belonging. Let’s say you’re on the spectrum. You’re on the autism spectrum. It’s hard for you to find belonging in the real-world space, but you connect with other people who have a similar struggle, over your shared joy of this new thing. You get really deep into it. Then your community is now something different and important from the art itself.

What this is talking about is how to protect that, because what happens as things become more popular is a lot of people enter the community that maybe you don’t think have the same depth of connection to the work that you do, or some people – and in this article they’re described just fully on as sociopaths – enter the community for purely exploitative reasons, to sell things, to get attention for themselves. And then they can, quote unquote, ruin the culture, the subculture.

The truth is all of this analysis does matter to a lot of people, because most people are fans, not creators. But for those of us who make things, I think it’s important to appreciate fans, to appreciate early fans, rabid fans, passionate fans, and the community they build up, while also maintaining that what we do is meant for anyone who enjoys it. Anyone. There is nothing exclusive about what we do. There is, however, apparently something exclusive about the people that begin that first community.

**John:** This is a thing I was holding back for maybe a future How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually good to bring up right now. There’s an article by Sarah Viren which ran in the New York Times this past week. It’s looking at this woman whose sister was murdered when she was a kid. Fifty years have passed. It’s a cold case. But this woman said, “Listen, I feel a calling from God. I need to figure out who killed my sister in this brutal way 50 years ago.” She goes to a true-crime con thing and meets these podcasters who had done similar kinds of things, and starts working with them about, “How are we going to try to solve this? How are we going to group-source this?” The podcasters have a plan. They’re going to build up a Facebook group. They’re going to get people involved in working through this. They start putting together episodes. They’re making some progress. The police agree to reopen the case. Things are proceeding.

But ultimately, this woman starts to have frustrations with these podcasters, feeling like they violated some confidences that she had shared with them, and doesn’t go on this one Zoom. And essentially, this whole community turns against her, the actual person who is the instigator of all this, the one whose sister actually died. I found that to be fascinating too, because who’s the creator in this situation? Is it the podcasters who did organize this group, or is it her? And who is the victim in this situation?

True crime fandom is a thing. In this case, it’s a community that was formed around this one murder, and the only thing they have in common is that there’s a curiosity about this, but they’re not making the thing. They’re just contributing. The sense of online communities in particular can be incredibly toxic, because you’re not doing it to someone’s face.

**Craig:** It’s also a question of what is it that you are obsessed with. Here’s a woman who’s obsessed with who killed her sister. That is a fact, and that is a crime. That’s somebody that she loved and cared for. The fandom is obsessed with a podcast, so now they are interested in what is an act of creation. It’s a show.

If you care mostly about the show, I always think of this as the Skyler problem. Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Anna Gunn is an incredible actor and portrayed Walter White’s wife beautifully and had to carry the burden of a very difficult part. There was this thing where the Breaking Bad fandom just started to hate her, hate both Anna Gunn and Skyler White. Why? Because Skyler’s character was in direct opposite to Walter and his stuff. If she finds out what he is doing, she’s going to be angry and make him stop. When she does find out what he’s doing, she is upset. She becomes sort of a co-conspirator, and then eventually just no more. But her character was a threat to the existence of the show. If Skyler wins, Walter White stops making meth, and there’s no more show. What the audience cared about was that the show would keep going, and so they started to hate a character. I find that fascinating.

I think in this case, I could definitely see where if the woman whose sister was a victim became uncomfortable with the show and was threatening the continuation of the show, the community gets angry at her, because they don’t care about her and her justice. They care about the show. And that is where fandom gets a little squiggly, when you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t purely fictional, but rather a presentation of truth.

**John:** Absolutely. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to continue this conversation and talk about different fandoms and the degree to which it feels like the creators have some control over that and the degree to which the creators are being held captive to their fandoms, which I think is a challenging situation, which happens far too often. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, what you got for us?

**Drew:** Brent writes, “My understanding is that if a stage musical is adapted into a film, the songwriter retains copyright, and the songs are licensed to the film. But how does ownership and authorship work with original songs written for an original musical film? Are they considered separate from the screenplay? Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA? And how is that songwriter typically contracted?

**John:** Here’s a question I could actually answer, because I have-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … much experience with this. First, Brett’s assumption that a stage musical adapted into a film, yes, and so that the lyricist composer of the original Broadway or stage production, they own the copyright on those songs, and so those are licensed as part of the package to make the movie. The Mean Girls movie, Jeff Richmond, who wrote the songs for that – and I don’t remember who the lyricist was – those songs were licensed for the movie, pretty straightforward.

When you write an original song for a movie, and so if you’re Billie Eilish to do for Barbie, they come to you and they say, “Hey, would you write this song for this movie?” You write it. It’s phenomenal. There’s a separate contract for that. It is licensed to be in the movie. It’s relatively clean. It’s similar to how it would’ve worked the other way around, like if the song had previously existed.

What gets to be complicated is when you are writing stuff that is fundamentally integrated into the movie. For Corpse Bride or for Frankenweenie and for Big Fish, I wrote songs into the script that became part of the movie. Those, I was not contracted separately. They were just part of the script. They were folded into my writing fee for writing the movie. But those songs, which also Danny Elfman then did the music for, also exist separately, and so I am paid separately for those, for royalties and for all the other music-y things that songwriters get paid for. I get separate checks for each of those things. When it plays in Norway, I get 13 cents, and those checks accumulate separately, by different accounting systems, so ASCAP or BMI.

**Craig:** Yep, I’ve done the same. That’s how it works. You do retain authorship of those songs. I have the distinct honor of receiving checks from ASCAP every now and then for a song called Douchebag of the Year in Superhero Movie, which how many people can boast that, John? Very few.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** I wrote a rap song for Scary Movie 3, and I get royalties for writing the lyrics. Your outline is exactly correct. Authorship of lyrics and authorship of music will always generate royalties through ASCAP and BMI, and not only if they’re played just on their own, but also if they’re played in the movie. It is an interesting hybrid there, but generally speaking, you do retain more rights and more financial interest with songs than you do with, say, a work for hire as a script, because in that case, you’re really relying on the WGA formula for residuals and nothing else.

**John:** One other question embedded in here. Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Generally, no. It’s a thing we’ve talked about with Rachel Bloom a couple times is that writing the songs for things like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s often writing actual story material. She’s writing everything that happens in the song. It’s like she’s not just writing dialog, but she’s writing a whole sequence. You could imagine there could be scenarios in which the songs are so much of what the actual story is that it crosses into situations where it really should be considered literary material that goes into WGA arbitrations. Maybe that’s happened in the past, but classically, no, it’s not considered literary material in that same way.

**Craig:** Generally, no. If you’re dealing with something that is a recitative, where everything is sung, for instance, Les Mis, then certainly, I think the Writers Guild has the ability, through its pre-arbitration structure and participating writer investigations, to say, “Hey, look, even though this is in a lyric format, it is dialog. It is screenplay material. It is literary material.” We have the ability to be flexible on that front and to pose the questions and ask them. It’s another reason why the WGA’s sole authority is important, because it can, as an institution, allow for some flexibility and exclusions and exceptions. There are ways for it to actually account for unique properties like that.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Kaylan in Alaska writes, “Are there best practices to follow as to not break up scenes or dialog in an annoying way? I specifically mean when a scene begins at the bottom of a page, and only one line of scene description fits, or when dialog gets broken between two pages in a way that feels like it might break up the reading of the line. My brain really wants that soothing feeling of a scene starting at the top of a page.”

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what my brain wants, Kaylan. My brain is trying to anagram and Kaylan and Alaska together. There’s so many overlapping letters. I love it. Best practices are what you feel good with, what makes you happy. Most people reading, my opinion, don’t care. For me as a writer, I care so much. I don’t like splitting up dialog across pages. If I can mitigate that, I do, because, I don’t know, I don’t like it. It just feels bad. If you can avoid ending a scene with a single line of action that’s on the subsequent page and then start a new scene, yeah, do it. Avoid it. It’s actually not that hard to do. As long as you don’t get into a situation where you’re actually hurting things to make it look better on the page, you’re fine. My brain wants that soothing feeling as well, and there’s nothing wrong with a little self-soothing there as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Here’s one situation where screenwriting software, from Final Draft to Fade In to Highland, all the legitimate applications, are going to be doing some of this work for you. What they will all do is they will not let you start a scene at the very bottom of a page. They’ll push that scene header to the next page. If there’s a single line on the next page, they’ll pull stuff across, so that you don’t have a little orphan or a widow there happening. Some of that stuff happens automatically.

What Craig is describing is generally the last looks before you’re printing or turning in a script to somebody, is just going through it one last time and seeing are there any really weird breaks that I want to fix here, and seeing if there’s way you could pull stuff, push it down or pull it across, so you don’t get those weirdos there. I used to be much more of a freak about it. I just don’t let it stress me out too much. I will look for situations where that’s actually confusing because it broke that way.

The other thing you don’t appreciate until you actually have to build the software to do it, most of these apps will also break at the sentence, rather than breaking at the end of the line. If dialog has to break across a page, they will create the break, add a period, rather than just having the line taper off, which is just helpful. It just makes it much easier to read.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Drew:** Not Too Happy writes, “I wrote a script in 2014 that became my calling card for many years. It performed well on The Black List site, found producers, went to all the agencies, got offered to a bunch of different actresses and directors, and spent years almost getting made. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a Deadline announcement that a very famous actor is set to produce and star in a movie with the exact same plot. Normally, that would be an oh well, what are you going to do? But in this case, that actor was sent my script in 2015, along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead. This all went through their reps at the time, from reputable producers on my end, above board, blah blah blah. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of knowingly stealing anything, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m being ripped off. My manager offered a, ‘That sucks,’ and my lawyer advises a wait-and-see approach. I’d rather not. Do I have any recourse, and what would you do?”

**John:** Not Too Happy provided some context here which Craig and I can take a look at, but we’re not going to discuss on the show.

**Craig:** It is quite the context. It is certainly relevant. Not Too Happy, I get why you’re not too happy. Your manager actually here is giving you the proper answer, which is that sucks. Your lawyer advising a wait-and-see approach, that’s the lawyer’s version of, “We’re not doing anything.” Here’s why.

Unfortunately – and we’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show – premises, plots, these are not really intellectual property. They fall under the general heading of ideas. Let’s say I write a script, and it’s about two guys who discover that they’ve grown up separately, but actually, turns out that they’re brothers, and in fact, they’re weirdly twins. They’re fraternal twins. But one of them is really short, and one of them is tall and super strong. They don’t look anything alike. Okay. That’s Twins. That’s cool. What I just described, anyone can write a movie like that.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:58:50].

**Craig:** I could sit down, I could write another movie today with a different title that is the exact same plot, and it is not legally actionable, because unless you get into unique expression in fixed form, there’s no infringement there. If you get a copy of the script that this star is going to be making, and they have taken chunks of your action description or runs of dialog that are non-generic, okay, that’s just straight up copyright infringement. They won’t.

**John:** They won’t.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, this is one of those things where we can’t even say that the person went, “Oh, you know what? I love this idea, but I just don’t like the script. Can somebody else do this idea?” Maybe that’s what happened, which by the way, that’s not stealing either. Is it ethical? No. But is it criminal? No. You can’t steal something that isn’t property. And unfortunately, concepts and ideas and general plot lines, not property.

**John:** We don’t know the backstory on how this actor came to do this project, which is apparently moving forward. My hunch though is someone else had basically the same idea and wrote it up, and the actor said, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something that’s in that space,” and said yes to that thing. I suspect that the second writer really did come up with that idea on their own, because it’s a good idea, but it’s also an idea that a lot of people could have, honestly. They wrote their own thing. This star attached themselves to it. If you cannot show that there is a connection between that second writer having exposure to your script and having decided, “I’m going to do this thing that’s basically the same premise,” there’s no case to be made here.

Your manager and your lawyer are saying the right thing. The lawyer saying, “Let’s wait and see,” is also saying you don’t know this thing’s ever even going to happen. If this thing actually goes in production and it clearly looks like there is an infringement case to be made here, that’s the time when she would raise her hand and do something.

**Craig:** There almost certainly won’t be. Let’s also dig in a little bit on Not Too Happy here. When you said, “That actor,” the one that’s now said to produce and star in the movie, “was sent my script in 2015,” so almost a decade ago, “along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead,” now, that sounds impressive. But the fact is, actors of a certain level are constantly getting stuff submitted with an official offer of whatever their quote is, or maybe their quote is less than that. They might not have even read it.

Listen. I get offered things where someone says, “Here’s something. We’ve bought a book, and we want you to write this,” and blah blah blah. I’m like, “No, I’m not interested.” I just tell my agent, “It doesn’t sound for me. No, thank you.” Then four years later, someone that I’m really fascinated by starts talking to me about that book or a different book on the same topic, and now suddenly I am interested, because there’s just a different context to it. Did I do something wrong? No. I changed my mind, or I wasn’t in the same place, or something was more attractive to me about this other version of it.

The point being, what I think you need to do is let yourself off the hook of feeling like you’ve been screwed, because that’s a terrible feeling to walk around with. I don’t think you’ve been legally screwed. If you were somewhat ethically screwed with, let’s look at the bright side. You had an idea that other people thought was worth making. Now, what you need to do for the next step, Not Too Happy, is to write a script of an idea that people like, that is so good they want to make that script. That’s ultimately what separates the steadily working writers from folks who are trying to be steadily working writers. Good idea and undeniable execution, as opposed to good idea, decent execution.

It’s not fun to hear. By the way, your script may have been amazing. But in this case, it sounds like, by your own admission, it went to all the agencies, lots of different actresses and directors, and it just ultimately wasn’t compelling in and of itself to get that next level going.

As John says, in this case, I’m looking at this article that talks about this. There are articles like this every five minutes. “So-and-so is attached to produce some blah da blah such and such,” and then it never happens. Who knows?

**John:** Who knows? Let’s try one more question, Drew. Let’s do Will here.

**Drew:** Will writes, “Before Christmas, I reached out to the representation of a character actor I had in mind for my script. Today they got back to me asking about financing. How do I answer them saying I don’t have financing without scaring them off?”

**John:** That’s going to be the first question you’re going to get back. It’s good we bring this up, because any time you’re reaching out to a specific actor, who’d be the character actor who’s exactly perfect for this, the reps are doing their job. They’re saying, “Okay, is there any money here?” The answer is, “There’s no money here. These are the producers that I want to approach. This is my plan going forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Look. Character actors really should be asking about this. Basically, what the reps are saying is, are you offering us a job, or are you asking us to attach a name? Will, you’re referring to an independent film. There’s a long, glorious tradition of independent films trying to get financing using the actor’s name to help them get financing. The financing is like, “Do you have an actor attached?” Everybody’s basically in a catch-22.

But attaching yourself to a script ultimately isn’t much of a commitment. No actor’s going to say, “Yes, I’m attaching myself to your unfinanced project, and also I’m clearing the decks for these months, and I will take no other jobs for those months.” That’s not a thing.

How do I answer them? Honestly. You answer them honestly. You say, “We are looking for financing. We honestly feel that we will have a much better chance of getting financing if we can say that this actor is attached and happy to play this part, should all of the other things that need to happen line up, like schedule, payment, etc.” If they’re like, “Yeah, no, we don’t actually want to attach ourselves to this without financing,” what you just heard is “no.” And that’s just life.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a future situation where somehow you’re able to find financing, and you come back to that actor, and suddenly they’re interested? Yes, that could happen too. Don’t bank on it, but that’s possible too. You’ve burned nothing to do this. Being honest is the right approach.

Whoever the reps are for this character actor, this is a chance for them to be more in a lead role. That’s exciting for them. There may be ways that you can spin this as helpful. They may also know people who are, relationships that that actor has with producers or something. There may be some way that it could be helpful. So be honest and open to what they’re saying next.

**Craig:** These reps, we don’t know, they may have been yelled at by their client two weeks earlier, saying, “Stop sending me stuff that isn’t financed and isn’t, quote unquote, ‘real.'” Because here’s the thing. They gotta read all this stuff. They gotta read all of it. They gotta get excited by it. And then they do, and someone’s like, “Great. We actually have no money. We’ll talk to you in a year.” Then they’re like, “Why did I go through all that?”

**John:** The same thing happens for writers, of course, is that you get approached, like, “There’s this book,” blah blah blah. It’s like, that’s fantastic. Some cases I’m willing to engage, and I’ll at least try to set this up someplace. Other places, no. If there’s actually a home for this, then I’ll talk about this, but I’m not going to spend three months of my life trying to get this thing set up.

**Craig:** Or, god forbid, help you get the rights, by saying, “I’ll adapt it.” Hell no.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Get your own rights. Otherwise, what do I need you for? Do you know what I mean? I’ll just go get the rights then.

**John:** Yoink. Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, I plow through books during the holidays. I had three this time. One of them I really enjoyed was Going Zero by Anthony McCarten.

So the premise of this is – it’s fiction – there is a joint program between the CIA and a Facebook kind of organization. What they’re trying to do is to be able to track people who fall off the grid, who disappear, and to see how quickly we can find those people, prevent terrorist attacks and other nefarious things. To test this system, they are going to recruit, I believe it’s 10 people, and basically say, “We’re going to tell you one day that you have to go zero. You have to disappear, fall off the grid. If you can stay hidden for 30 days, we’ll give you $3 million.” It’s a good premise. The story’s alternating between the people who are trying to hide and the people who are looking for them. So that’s that cat-and-mouse game.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** Naturally, there are complications that ensue. I read this as a pure, clean, looking for a good read, and of course, as a person who makes film and television, I’m like, “I know how to adapt this.” But I deliberately did not look up the credits of the person who wrote the book until I was finished. I looked him up. Anthony McCarten is actually a very successful, very produced screenwriter, who I ended up emailing him, and he has his own plans for the book. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen next to it. But if you are into a fun, breezy thriller to read, I recommend Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. If you read it now, then you can also see what becomes of it. It’s sort of a how would this become a property down the road.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good recommendation. My One Cool Thing is full-on nepo baby.

**John:** This is your incredibly successful father who gave you your career. That’s what you’re talking about. You are the nepo baby.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the nepo baby. My father was an incredibly successful social studies teacher in the New York City public school system.

**John:** Without him, you would not have been able to find Chernobyl.

**Craig:** He taught American history, so actually, I didn’t even have that. No. I speak of my youngest child, Jessica Mazin, who is currently attending school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. John’s daughter is also there in school in Boston. She is a budding songwriter and has written some really good songs. She’s written stuff that actually got…

There’s a song she wrote – talk about fandom – that was based on a book series on Wattpad, which I know you’re familiar with, because you also have a daughter. Wattpad’s basically a fanfiction conglomeration site, as far as I can tell. There was this incredibly popular series there. She wrote a song based on characters and things from the series, and it actually got, I don’t know, millions of listens on Spotify. It’s pretty remarkable. She got paid money. She got over a million listens to that. In a nepo daddy way, I also had her sing a cover of a Depeche Mode song for The Last of Us. But I did so because I think she’s awesome.

**John:** She’s really good.

**Craig:** I actually think she’s great. It’s an interesting thing of creating a person who creates things, and then I listen to the things they’ve created, and it’s like this weird echo of creation. She’s written a song called The Devil. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and she performs it, and then her friend Henry Dearborn, who’s an also very talented young guy, produced it and helped add instrumentation and mix and all that. I think it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. I listened to it.

**Craig:** That is a really good song. It’s super catchy. I think the lyrics are really intriguing. I’m making Jessica and her song The Devil my One Cool Thing. It is on Spotify. I think you’ll enjoy it. I actually think you’ll like it. It goes down easy, and it’s got a good chorus. She’s just very good. I actually think she’s really, really good.

**John:** We’ll start playing the song now. It’ll become our outro for this episode. One thing I think is so interesting about Spotify is there’s obviously so many criticisms with Spotify, but the fact that Jessica is on Spotify the same way that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are on Spotify, or Girl in Red, it equals things out in ways that are really fascinating and unprecedented, so that’s nice. The fact that people could discover her – my daughter discovers music all the time on Spotify – is exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. I’m very proud of her. I’m proud of how independent she is from me. She doesn’t do what I do. She doesn’t ask me for help. She doesn’t ask my opinion. What happens is it just appears, and then I listen to it like anyone else. I think maybe that’s what I’m most proud of is that she doesn’t give a sweet damn what I think. I like it. I love it, actually, honestly, anyway.

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

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jessica Mazin. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Our list of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so we’d love some more outros coming in here. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and 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 creators and fandom. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. Continuing our conversation about fans and creators, I have a list here in the Workflowy of different kinds of fandoms. I want to think about what is the relationship between them and their creators and the people who own the underlying material behind this.

I’ll start with Formula One, because last year I went to my first Formula One race. I just didn’t realize what a giant community that is, just the money they mint doing that. It’s interesting, because I feel like with Formula One, they’d already had fans, but then the Netflix show really drew up a whole bunch of new fans, including my daughter, to it. Where’s the center of fandom for it? Is it the individual teams? Is it the organization that puts on the races? Is it the Netflix show? It feels like it’s one of those in-between things, and it’s hard to say who’s in control of it.

**Craig:** It’s a bit scary, actually, how fandom as a business can get larger than the core business. This satellite business that grows around it. It is remarkable. One thing that I think really big artists have become very good at is getting ahead of it. BTS, for instance, that group is also its own fandom industry. They got ahead of it. They control it. They run it. Yes, there are obviously a lot of independents that grow up around it, but they’ve created so much of it. It was baked in from the jump, whereas some of the boy bands that we remember from the ’90s, for instance, were just selling records and selling tour tickets and merch, which we used to call merchandise. Merch, it’s like IP. That was like backstage talk that was slightly cynical, and now it’s front stage talk for everyone.

The business now, I think, is such that creators are starting to get more of a handle on it. I would imagine Taylor Swift at some point woke up one day and said, “Why are other people making more money off of me than me?” Because that actually probably doesn’t feel great. It feels a little exploitative, and yet it’s all about the energy of people that are in love with what you do.

**John:** I’d be curious what Jessica’s relationship is like with her fans at this point, because she has enough people who are listening to her music, who are curious about her next thing that’s going to be happening, that they feel some investment in her. They’re rooting for her. They discovered her early on. Maybe Berklee School of Music is the perfect place for her to learn some of this. How should she be thinking about that? To what degree does she need to start thinking about her mailing list, how she’s communicating with the people who are her truest fans?

**Craig:** I think in a healthy way, like any young artist, she’s mostly concerned about getting better, about creating work, getting better, learning. She’s got some gigs now. Berklee’s amazing about how they facilitate this. She’s going to start getting paid to perform live. But she definitely does have the Generation Z TikTok conversation with people who like what she does.

I have a feeling that fandom is a hockey stick chart, where there’s a little bit, there’s a little bit, and then something happens, and then boom, it just explodes. Even in the article we were discussing where the guy was talking about the fanatics, the fanatics aren’t the first people in. There’s always other people that are in first, and then there’s that moment that happens where there’s a big upswing, and then it becomes a real thing. I think she’s got her head on in the right place. There are obviously a lot of people for whom the fandom is the point. Those people tend to head more off into the influencer zone as opposed to trying to create things.

Taylor Swift is a wonderful example of somebody that clearly was about creating art, and it became enormously popular, and now there is an industry. But she didn’t start for that. I’ve never read an interview with her or seen her talk and thought to myself, oh, this was all calculated. No, she’s just a really good artist that people love.

**John:** Yes. I will note Taylor Swift has her challenges with her community as well, like the Gaylor Swift, the people who are obsessed that she’s actually lesbian and that all these songs have coded meanings in them.

**Craig:** Gaylor Swift.

**John:** How does she both refute that without driving those people away in a way that makes them feel unseen and unheard? It’s so challenging, because she’s an artist trying to tell stories, and people, false stories, they’re going to derive their own meaning from them, which is exactly the point. And yet when there’s a community that is obsessed with picking everything apart to discover a secret, hidden meaning behind things, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It would be fascinating to talk with her about this, although we never will, because she now exists on Mount Olympus. But when we start out as artists, we are looking for the outliers, the people who will love what we do, because most people are going to ignore new things. We’re looking for somebody – ideally somebody with some influence –to love what we do. That one special person, even if they’re just 1% of the people that have been listening, helped spread the word, and now lots of people listen. But then, once it gets really big – and Taylor Swift operates on a massive scale – then what you’re dealing with are outlier problems.

Let’s say 99.9% of your fans are healthy people who just love your music, which I think is probably the case for Taylor. That .1% is the problem. They’re the people who are driving an enormous amount of discourse online, who are agitated, aggressive, angry, possessive, parasocial. Those are also the people that are showing up at your house, trying to climb over the wall, sending you weird messages, stalking. The outlier becomes the problem. I think sometimes in our culture, we mistake the outlier discussion for the mainstream discussion when it’s not.

Gaylor Swift is a fascinating concept. I suspect the great majority of Taylor Swift fans are just enjoying the music and are not at that level of, “I need you to like who I want you to like,” which is just I think part of an outlier behavior.

**John:** One of the other books I read over the holidays was Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online, which tracks creators and fandoms and the rise of internet creator culture. It goes back from vloggers and mommy bloggers and the rise and fall of those. But one of the most fascinating sections is on Vine, because Vine was never meant to be what Vine became. You had these young men, some women, but mostly young men, who became extremely famous for doing little Vines, but also just became famous for being famous, in the way that Paris Hilton’s famously famous for being famous. People need to figure out, how do we monetize that? How do we exploit that? They would have these mall tours where they’d put together these Vine stars to perform, kind of. There was teenage girls who were their fans. They really weren’t part of the community.

It was a strange fit, particularly because the platform that they were on, Vine, did not like them. It did not want them around. That tension between the space you’re in and what you’re trying to do can be a real factor as well. It’s a thing we see again and again with studios and their stars and filmmakers and the need to do press and publicity but also feel constrained by it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It is. It is an interesting concept, the notion of a platform that you intend the platform to be used one way, it ends up being used another way. OnlyFans comes to mind.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know, but I assume that OnlyFans began as a thing of like, hey, this is where people can talk to their fans, because they’re songwriters or they’re visual artists or whatever it is, and this is a way for them to get paid for what they do by the people that love them. From what I understand, John…

**John:** That’s not really where it is right now. I think OnlyFans may have known that sex work was going to be part of it from the start. But there’s wholesome versions of that as well that are just not as successful.

**Craig:** OnlyFans I guess was uncomfortable enough with the fact that it had become a platform for sex work that they said no more sex on OnlyFans, and everyone went, then what the hell are you for? It’s like if McDonald’s was like, “We didn’t mean to sell chicken nuggets. We were hamburgers. No more chicken nuggets,” and everyone lost their minds. Then OnlyFans was like, “Okay, I guess this is what we are now.”

**John:** Credit card processing with anything involving sex work is also incredibly complicated. Let’s wind back to Star Trek. We think of Star Trek was designed to be a delightful show about space travel, wagon to the stars. It did sell toys. It had its own stuff that it was doing, its own merch. But fan culture around Star Trek became its own industry. Suddenly, there’s actors who appeared on one episode now being booked for fan conventions. It’s self-sustained in a way that was important and made it possible ultimately for the renaissance of Star Trek and for the movies and for everything else to have happened after the fact. It was necessary for those fans to exist, and yet they’ve always been in a bit of a strange relationship with the owners and creators of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a pretty famous sketch on Saturday Night Live. William Shatner was the guest host. The sketch was him at a Star Trek convention where people are asking him questions, and he finally just broke down and told them all to get a life. This was very funny to the people in the audience there in the studio, whatever it is, 8A. But a lot of people in the fan community were upset. They were hurt.

Listen. A lot of people – and we’ve mentioned this before – who join these communities struggle to find other communities. Here was somebody basically making fun of them for that specific struggle. They weren’t just there as part of the Trekker community because of how much they love Star Trek. It’s because of also how much they loved and were loved by people who loved Star Trek, as opposed to everywhere else in their lives, where maybe they were being discounted or put down. For the objects, the center of the wheel to behave towards them the way that the jocks at high school behaved had to have been pretty hurtful.

There are certain genres that do tend to appeal more to people who do struggle with, we’ll call non-virtual communities. I think it’s important for people to be aware of that and to be kind, because I have another daughter, who’s on the autism spectrum, and we talk all the time about her special interests and the things that she’s super into and how she finds community with other people that love it, and it’s important to her.

**John:** A community that’s growing very quickly – I’d really be curious what the subculture’s like two or three years from now – is pickleball.

**Craig:** Pickleball.

**John:** The number of people who tried to recruit me to play pickleball is somewhat astonishing. It’s also interesting to watch the fights that are happening in communities about the conversion of normal tennis courts to pickleball courts and, of course, the noise that pickleball creates.

**Craig:** Fricking noise. Yeah, pickleball really came out of nowhere there. Wow. You’re absolutely right. Now, pickleball is an interesting one, because unlike most fandoms we discuss, which are driven by the young, pickleball is driven by the old. Old people – and I don’t say that with any stink on it, because I’m getting there, man. Let’s call them older people. Older people are tough. They’re organized. They have money. They know how systems work.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Fans of a new rap star who comes on the scene, fans of that rap star generally aren’t going to be also serving on city councils or know how hearings work, but the pickleball fans do. They’re lawyers. They’re doctors. They’re heads of the PTAs. Now it becomes interesting. Watch out for the pickleball people. They’ll get you.

**John:** It’s good stuff. The last thing I want to distinguish between is there’s fandom, and there’s also collectors. Watching what’s happening right now with Stanley cups. Have you been tracking that at all?

**Craig:** I sure have. I live in Canada now.

**John:** Just the obsession with these collectible cups. It’s great that you love them, but no one needs 30 of them. That’s the difference between, are you entering into it because you want to be part of a community that collects these novelty cups, or are you doing it because you see a market for it, and that sense of really what is the angle. Are you seeing this in a capitalist sense, like the crypto bros were? Crypto bros saw this as a way to make a bunch of money, but also they had that missionary zeal, like we’re going to convert the world over to this thing. We all know how Stanley cup collecting will end up. It’s going to end up with a bunch of these things in landfills.

**Craig:** This is the bust and boom of these things. When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I would go down to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, which is on the shore, and it had a big boardwalk. The boardwalk had rides and restaurants and lots of little stands that would sell things. Every summer, there was a stand that was selling the new hot ticket toy. It was different every summer. The rabidity was consistent. It was just the thing that people were obsessed with that changed.

When I was really young, my sister, like many young girls, was pulled into the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I have the distinct memory of being in a Toys R Us in Brooklyn, watching adults fighting, almost physically, as Toys R Us employees pulled out a large shipping box of Cabbage Patch dolls, because of the insanity of it.

Humans are not good at valuing things. We’re notoriously irrational about it. Forced scarcity or this belief that something is valuable will drive our behavior. I think Bill Maher once famously said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in LA, people will start lining up. There’s just something wrong with our brains.

I will say – and I’m not boasting here, this is just dumb luck of my brain – I don’t understand collecting. I’ve never collected anything. I don’t see the point of it. It just seems like a pointless accruing. I don’t quite know what it means. But I do recognize I’m alone, or, not alone; I’m rare, I guess.

**John:** I have some cool vintage typewriters, but I have them because they’re individually cool. But I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know anything about the community. It’s not part of anything. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s people who collect and enter into a community about those collections, and it does enter into a fandom situation, and then there’s people who are just there to make a buck and don’t actually care about it, which I guess does tie into the whole poser issue of fandom is who are the true believers and who are the follow-ons who are trying to exploit it. It is a good moment for me to remind everybody to buy your Scriptnotes T-shirts on Cotton Bureau, especially the limited editions, which will only be sold for periods of time, because-

**Craig:** So rare.

**John:** When those drop, sometimes it’s only 100 of them that were done.

**Craig:** When they drop. If you’re a real Scriptnotes fan, not a poser, if you’re real. The ultimate posers are the people that sell stuff. Those are the posers. Hasbro.

**John:** There were times out on the picket line where I’d see a Scriptnotes shirt that I’d never seen out in the wild. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to photograph that, because that is a true fan who has that,” or has the Courier Prime shirt, which we only made for a short period of time.

**Craig:** Or maybe that was the brother of a true fan who stopped being a true fan and just left that T-shirt behind when they moved.

**John:** No, I don’t believe it.

**Craig:** I’m so much more cynical.

**John:** When I asked that person who was wearing that very distinct shirt, also, “How’d you get that so crisp?” he’s like, “Oh, I never put it in the dryer. I always hand-dry it.”

**Craig:** Wow. It gives me a little bit of anxiety.

**John:** It’s true fandom for me. Craig, I’ll always be a fan of yours.

**Craig:** Aw, John. I’m a fan of yours too. You know what? Let’s just do this podcast until one of us just drops dead on our desk.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** And hopefully during a podcast. It’ll make a great bonus segment.

**John:** You have to hear that thump.

**Craig:** Yeah, just a thump. And then like, “Oh, okay. That’s Scriptnotes for you.”

**John:** That’s why we turn the Zoom off, so you can’t see when one of us drops. You have to listen for it. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Tiffany Problem](https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/the-tiffany-problem/)
* [‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Zeroes In On Premise As Selected Writers Pitch Their Ideas To Max](https://deadline.com/2024/01/harry-potter-tv-series-premise-writers-set-max-1235798159/)
* [WGGB Screenwriting Credits Agreement](https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenwriting_credits_agreement.pdf)
* [Ig Nobel Prize – “Please stop, I’m Bored”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA)
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Screenplay](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Anatomy-Of-A-Fall-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html) by Sarah Viren for the New York Times
* [Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) by David Chapman
* [Going Zero by Anthony McCarten](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/going-zero-anthony-mccarten?variant=40641169686562)
* [The Devil by Jessica Mazin](https://open.spotify.com/track/6mgwrkmCQMfxRj810BOlvB?si=ed91e62ef4cc43e4) on Spotify
* [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 Jessica Mazin ([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/628standardV2.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 627 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back the OG Scriptnotes guest host, writer, director, showrunner, producer, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome back, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m so excited to be here. There are so many people I need to thank. Oh, wait. That’s not the right place to do it.

**John:** You have to comment on how surprisingly heavy the award is.

**Aline:** Oh, it’s so heavy. I’m going to put it down. I’m just going to put it down.

**John:** You put it down and then pull out your notes of people you need to thank.

**Aline:** It’s going to mess up the line of my dress.

**John:** Yeah, 100%. Today, I would like to talk about agency in the sense of characters and what characters are doing in our stories, but also in real-life people, about making choices about what they want to do next. Then you’ve seen in the Workflowy, we have another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we discuss stories in the news and thing about how we would adapt that into quality filmed entertainment. Aline, have you stretched? Are you ready for this?

**Aline:** I’m really ready. I’m ready for a word I’ve never heard before.

**John:** Yes, which is… How are you going to pronounce it?

**Aline:** Agentic?

**John:** Yeah, agentic. It’s a word I saw a ton that week, and so I thought we’d talk about that. It’s agency as applied to real people, kind of. It’s a word.

**Aline:** I plan to use and misuse this word liberally.

**John:** Yes. At the end of the day, it’s how you use catchphrases to fill things in. Do you remember “at the end of the day”? Do you remember when you first heard that? Because it was during our careers that that became a thing.

**Aline:** “At the end of the day” is an industry term?

**John:** I think it’s an industry term.

**Aline:** Interesting. There’s so many circling backs and touching of bases. I feel like the lingo and the jargon has gotten so much worse as the business has gotten more corporatized, because you used to go to meetings, and there could be a guy smoking a doobie, with his feet up on the couch, just talking about whatever and maybe telling you about his marriage. And now when you go in, everyone is so official. They have all of these bits of jargon that clearly came from a retreat. We once sat down with someone who, I was asking him about what they were looking for, and he said, “Regionality is something that we take into consideration when we look at our buckets.”

**John:** Oh, buckets is a thing, yeah.

**Aline:** Buckets.

**John:** Buckets is a big thing too.

**Aline:** Buckets is a big thing.

**John:** We’ll get into all of those choices that we make. Coming out of COVID, a lot of times where you’re meeting with executives, you’re still meeting with them on Zoom. The small talk is also different on Zoom, because there’s less of that getting in a room and getting comfortable. You’re still asking about what people did over the weekend or where they are, but you’re also in their homes, which is a different thing too.

**Aline:** It’s really weird. I try not to scan the background too extensively. At the beginning of the pandemic, how many bedrooms did you see?

**John:** So many.

**Aline:** So many. I was like, guys, just turn it around. Sit on the bed would be my thought, so I’m not looking at the bed. I saw a lot of beds, basements, guestrooms, pets.

**John:** Vacation homes.

**Aline:** Vacation homes, yeah.

**John:** A lot of people who moved to Colorado, never moved back, all those. In our bonus segment for premium members, Aline and I are going to talk about the experience of being empty nesters, because we have both sent our kids off to college, and so what we’re looking forward to, how we’re adjusting, how many more dogs we’re going to get, the process of becoming empty nesters.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, Aline, we’re recording this on the day that Oscar nominations are due. Have you submitted your Oscar nominations already?

**Aline:** I have. I have, indeed.

**John:** For folks who are not voting in this, I thought we might just talk through what the process is, because it’s not what you would think. It’s no longer a form. It’s a website you go to. You and I are both members of the writers’ branch. Tell us about what you went through as you picked your entries.

**Aline:** It’s interesting. You vote for your branch and Best Picture. Then in the second round, you vote for everything. When you’re nominated, it really is your peers, because it’s your branch that’s choosing. I’ve heard people advocate for the technique of really listing all five or six. I think it’s five. But then some people will say that if you really love a movie and you think it doesn’t have a lot of chances of being nominated, that you just vote for one.

**John:** I would say that having filled it out earlier this afternoon, because you’re ranking them, I think that there’s much less of a problem with filling out the rest of the card. I don’t think it’s going to be as big of an issue. Fill out the rest of the card.

**Aline:** This was an extraordinarily good year.

**John:** I want to say the same thing too.

**Aline:** So many good movies. I don’t know what is the trend that resulted in this, but sometimes the awards movies can have a spinachy, homework vibe to them, and I felt like this year there were so many that were wildly enjoyable, like Holdovers and Poor Things, that were just packed with entertainment and fun. We stayed home over the break, and I really enjoyed watching all the movies that were out.

**John:** Yeah, I did too. There have been years where I feel like I’m scrounging to get those last, the fourth and fifth filled in there. No, I had multiple choices I could’ve put in as other really good movies to nominate. I’m really curious. By the time this episode comes out, people will have seen what the nominees are. There’s really good movies out there. I would just encourage people, if there’s movies that are nominated that you haven’t heard of yet, they really are good, and they really are worth seeking out.

**Aline:** I always vote for a straight-up comedy-

**John:** Same.

**Aline:** … because it’s such an under-represented genre, and as discussed many times on this show, it’s just as hard, if not harder, to write. I always find a couple of straight-up comedies that I like and throw them in there.

**John:** Comedies and also animation for me. It’s making sure that we’re recognizing the writing that goes into animation, because a lot of times, those animated films aren’t written under Guild contracts, so they’re not eligible for WGA awards, but they are eligible for other Oscars and stuff.

**Aline:** We are righting wrongs with our votes. We are really-

**John:** That’s what we’re doing.

**Aline:** … administering justice.

**John:** Another thing that happened this past week is I got an announcement for Final Draft 13. I make Highland, so of course, I don’t really use Final Draft. But you write in Final Draft, don’t you?

**Aline:** I do. I tried another program, but the people that I collaborate with revolted. It was like everybody had to get it or nobody. Nobody wanted to change. It’s the devil you know. I don’t know that I’m super up on every update. I got to say, I don’t know that I update until it becomes impossible-

**John:** Exactly.

**Aline:** … not to update. My general feeling about updates – and I’m not alone here – is I approach them with dread, as I almost always find it’s a worsening. Like this new iPhone update, where to get a GIF going, you got to go through several… I’m tapping a lot of stuff to get to my kittens with a ball of yarn.

**John:** Give Aline her kittens.

**Aline:** That’s right. I’m wondering, what does Final Draft have at this… The way I use it is so simple that-

**John:** You’re using it probably the same way you’ve used it for the last 15 years. You have a very set workflow way to do it. To the degree I sympathize with Final Draft is they are selling a product where they sell it once and then they have to convince you to keep buying the new version of it, so they have to keep adding new features to it. But the features, to my eyes, are not particularly rewarding. I would be curious if listeners write in and say, “Oh, I actually do use these new features.” Tell us about it. There are these ribbons and these cards and all these other things. Aline, you’re a person who uses this every day, but I suspect you’re not touching any of those things.

**Aline:** Ribbons, I don’t know what that is. Cards are those slug lines or slugs?

**John:** No. They actually look like little index cards. It takes your whole script and it breaks it down into little index cards.

**Aline:** Oh, right. Here’s the thing. I’ll mess that up. Whatever that is, I will change it to a point where I will then have to text my son and ask him how to undo things. You want a simple… Unless it could do stuff like tell you to get up and go for a walk or make your lunch for you, which would be amazing, because just the constant drumbeat of what’s your lunch… If Final Draft could assemble a turkey sandwich on focaccia, that is a-

**John:** Game changer.

**Aline:** … update I would pay for.

**John:** Absolutely. So many of the features that apps and Final Draft and other ones add, they feel like productive procrastination. It’s like, oh, it’s a different way to look at your thing, or it’s, oh, I’m filling out all this stuff. I’m just here to tell you that you and me and no other professional writers we know of really use all those things.

**Aline:** Are you still doing longhand?

**John:** I still write longhand for scenes, starting out, yeah.

**Aline:** You do? I know other people who do that. That’s so interesting. It’s the same if you’re doing it with a rock and a chisel. You just got to get stuff on paper, although I don’t mind things that get you in the mood. As you and I have discussed, the project of writing is a lot like getting into cold water, where you’re splashing little bits of it on your arm to acclimate yourself. What’s interesting to me is some people really, really use those features to really, really outline. For me – and I think you and I are the same – it will kind of kill my fun. I think it’s probably better for people who really love to have it all completely worked out.

**John:** Writing is one of those weird things where it’s the overall imagination to figure out what the shape of the story is, but it’s also what is literally at the cursor, what is the next letter in this word, what is the next word in this sentence. It’s that kind of work. I don’t see these tools helping you very much in doing that real, actual, granular writing work.

**Aline:** You can spend a lot of time without pages.

**John:** I guess my sympathy for Final Draft and these apps is that they’re not making any money unless they can convince you, Aline Brosh McKenna, to spend another $199 or whatever the upgrade fee is for Final Draft to buy it again. That’s a tough thing for them.

**Aline:** Don’t they do that by making the old versions unusable?

**John:** Eventually, they’ll stop updating them, so they won’t work with the new versions of Mac OS. Then you have folks who don’t upgrade their machines for forever. That’s also a challenge. It’s bad.

The main topic I wanted to get into today is actually kind of related, because it’s about taking control of your circumstances. We’ve talked before about main character energy. I think you actually had some follow-up conversations about main character energy, what protagonists in general want and what they’re doing. But usually, when you hear about agency, it’s usually about lacking agency. Aline, when someone says, “This character lacks agency,” or, “We need to see more agency out of this character,” what do they mean? What is the note behind that note?

**Aline:** An expression that I like is pulling levers, because I think that’s a very nice visual, where sometimes you’ll have a character who’s not affecting the outcome of the story enough, and so they’re serving more spice or frosting, as opposed to being the main course or being something which really moves the story forward.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot with female characters, especially in big, bombastic genre movies. You’ll sometimes find the woman who is the, quote unquote, scientist. All she does is sort of spit out a bunch of lingo. The poor lady was trying to memorize in her chair. But that’s not actually pulling the levers in the story. It’s really important.

It doesn’t mean you have to do it all the same way. Some characters can be moving a story forward by being absent or being passive in some way, although that’s probably higher degree of difficulty. But making sure that your characters are involved in every turn, so that the turns don’t happen without them, and if there is a coincidence or if there is a dropping into their lap of something, that it’s justified by what you set up before.

I don’t mind a happenstance. A lot of times when you tell your friend a great story, it’s like, “And then I turned the corner in Cost Plus and there was John August looking for a throw pillow.” Sometimes coincidences are fine, but if you find that your character is not the one controlling the puppet strings, then it’s something to look at. I’m really an advocate of making writers’ lives easier. The more active your character is in pushing things forward, the easier it’ll be.

**John:** Yeah. I think when I hear that note about, oh, it feels like the character lacks agency, it seems like they’re reacting rather than acting. They’re responding to things that other people are doing, rather than doing the things themselves. They feel like they’re corks floating along in the water and just being moved by the waves. We want to see them having the ability to make choices, and actually making those choices. We’re going to talk about the term “agentic” in just a second. Agency, I think to me, is the ability to make choices, and agentic is making those choices. You’re actually seeing the characters take that initiative, take those actions and do those things.

Before we dive into it, I do wonder whether our notions of agency tend to be a little bit gendered and culturally loaded. We have a sense of agency as the hero with the sword who runs and does the thing, whereas having agency in a story may look different for a female character in another cultural situation.

**Aline:** I think good storytelling requires protagonists who you’re engaged with, and you’re engaged with their decision tree. What’s interesting to me is sometimes we rename these things as main character energy or agentic or whatever. They’re all kind of the same thing. It goes back to our Final Draft discussion. These are elemental. You’re making bread; you need flour, water. There’s a few things you need. I think giving it another name… I’m looking forward to the first time I’m in a meeting and someone says “agentic.”

**John:** It’s going to happen.

**Aline:** I will text you instantly. I think that the reason that people will grab at certain bits of jargon like that is that you can have a shared conversation about what’s important in storytelling. The thing about main character energy is just our idea of what a main character is or does.

In Poor Things, for instance, she’s got diminished capabilities in certain ways, but she’s, I’m going to say, wildly agentic. She’s constantly going, “Oh, I want to go over there,” and it’s very disruptive to everyone around her, making big choices and big swings.

I think that’s part of what makes, to me, a story entertaining. I tend to be less entertained by movies where people are being buoyed by fate. But that’s a genre also. That’s a certain type of storytelling too. It just feels very different from what I do. I really like things that grab you with putting you on a story towrope right away.

**John:** Absolutely. This term “agentic,” I found it in a bunch of… I fell down a rabbit hole looking at these blog posts which were using this term and linking to each other talking about the term. It relates to grind and hustle culture and that sense of doing all the things to put yourself ahead and put yourself first, about taking risks professionally and socially. It also ties into that sense of seeing yourself as the protagonists in this story and not being afraid to take up space and demand attention.

**Aline:** Now, you’re talking about stories or life?

**John:** Both. As I was reading these blog posts, I was seeing people writing about themselves as characters, basically taking a look outside themselves and saying, “What should this person, who is me, do in this situation in order to achieve those goals?” Just like heroes have their “I want” songs. They’re basically giving themselves permission to sing their “I want” songs and actually pursue those things and not stop earlier in the process, not settle for mediocre or okay, but push themselves. I guess mostly, I want to talk for a little bit about real-life people, because I think our listeners are also heroes in their own stories. There’s pros and cons to acting more agentic themselves.

**Aline:** That’s where I think you do get into different sort of people feeling entitled to be more agentic than others. Something I think I’m quite annoying about when I work with women is reminding them that they just asked for permission to do something or they just apologized before they did something or they just apologized before they pitched something.

I’ll often find that men will use humor to cover very aggressive behavior. They’ll say, “I fired that agent.” They did something very aggressive, and they’re proud of it, and they think it’s funny. With women, not always, but it can be a very tortured path just toward saying what you want and going to get it. Obviously, it’s because there are social repercussions to that. It can be not a cute look.

I think you’ll find that women put a lot more exclamation points in their emails. I’m not the first person to say that. We were talking the other day about the devastatingness of when you’re texting someone and then they throw in an “xo.” I don’t know what that means to men, but for women that means I’m done now talking to you. This conversation is done. It’s an “xo.” It’s a firm hug and a kiss of farewell.

**John:** As you’re saying this, I’m thinking back to our text conversations, and how do you and I decide when that thread is done. It can be tough to know asynchronously. I don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what I’m doing, whether we have the moments to really engage in that. Finding a nice way to close a text conversation can be challenging. But I agree with you that it is often, there’s a gender and a power level aspect of that. You just don’t know, not even permission, but you don’t even know how it’s going to be received if you clearly state what it is you would like.

**Aline:** You have to be, I don’t know if aggressive is the right word, but you have to be forthright to get anything. You wouldn’t go up to the counter of In-N-Out and be like, “I was thinking, I don’t have to have it. It would be nice. I don’t totally have to have it. I could have something else. I do have a car, so I could go somewhere else, but it would be nice to have a burger. I would love cheese on that. If you don’t have cheese, we don’t need to do… ” That is something that women are taught, not directly take a class in that, but we’re definitely taught to lubricate our asks.

I do think that I modeled myself in certain respects on my father, my brother, and my mom is French. She does not need to lubricate her asks, for sure. I think I modeled myself on a lot more forthrightness. The combination of French and Israeli is two of the most forthright folks. But I do find that women, I’m often saying to them, you don’t need to ask for permission to specifically take up space.

**John:** A classic tenet of this, being agentic, is asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Basically, assume a yes, and also don’t be afraid of hearing no. If you hear no, welcome the rejections, basically. One of the guys here talks about having a Google Doc basically, like, “Here’s all the people who’ve said no to me,” and here’s the rejections you’ve gotten, and taking those as a mark of like, then you actually asked. You actually did. You went up, put yourself out there to ask those questions.

**Aline:** There’s something I’m fascinated with, which is, I think, a spin on agentic, which is I know several people – and they’re men – who are powerful by virtue of not engaging, so they won’t answer the text or they won’t answer the email or they’ll let it slide. I think one time somebody said to me, “Aline, you don’t have to hit every tennis ball back over the net. You’re making yourself very tired doing that.”

I do think if you’re following up with everything, if you’re answering every email, there is a low status to that in a funny way. If you’re just saying, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I’m not interested in that,” I feel like you can be too forthright and add an extra level of communication. I’ve been working on letting things slide a little bit more and not responding to absolutely everything and being a little less scrupulous about that. I think there’s a funny way where that is agentic in a way.

**John:** It is.

**Aline:** You don’t have to. I shared an office with a male writer who was really helpful with me. One time I called somebody, and I thought maybe I hadn’t said the right thing. Then I was like, “I’m going to call him back and say, ‘I didn’t mean this, but I could mean that. I’m sorry I said this, but really,'” da da da blah and da da da. He was like, “Just stop. There’s a lot of power in just stopping.” It’s interesting. I think it’s more about knowing what your goal is and what the steps are to get it, as opposed to resolving to just talk all the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about strategy here. You and I both have assistants. Part of the reason why we’re not responding to every email is because we have assistants who filter stuff down to us. As something becomes important, Drew will tell me, “Oh, this is a thing we actually need to pay attention to.” But I’m not worried about every bit of schedule and the 19 times to reset a meeting. The time when Drew was off on his honeymoon, and I suddenly had to do a bunch of that stuff, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is actually really annoying.” I’m glad to have Drew there.

What I do see some of these people who are pitching agentic talking about is, really think about how to be a good assistant to yourself. If you had a great assistant, what would that assistant be doing for you? How would they be filtering stuff down? Amy, my daughter, was just home over the Christmas holiday, and she needed to call and cancel this appointment she had, and she’s like, “Daddy, can you just do it?”

**Aline:** Yeah, it stresses her out.

**John:** It stresses her out. She doesn’t want to do that. She’s like, “It’s weird. I could totally do it for a friend, but I can’t do it for myself.” That’s I think the skill you have to learn is just pretend you are your own assistant and just do the thing.

**Aline:** Man, my assistant, the wonderful Kari O’Hara, happens to be here with me, sitting next to Drew. Big plug for Kari. What’s up? High five. One thing I do is, when I tell assistants that I may not be flowery in my responses, because I do think they’re accustomed to women who are like… If she’s saying, “Do you want to do coffee or lunch?” I think they’re accustomed to women saying, “Oh, thank you so much for asking. Coffee would be great,” blah blah blah. Sometimes I’ll just text back, “No lunch?” or, “Lunch?” or, “No coffee?” One time we ordered lunch in the writers’ room and someone’s lunch was missing. I was in the middle of running the room and talking, so the only words I managed to squeak out were, “Phoebe no lunch.” Then we called the group text Phoebe No Lunch.

One of the things is to try not to lard up all your communications with… Again, I’m back to lubricant. I don’t know what’s happening this morning. Just to be able to find people that you can communicate with directly and simply and that they don’t need everything to be sprayed with cologne before they receive it. I think for women, that’s…

As you get older as a woman and you start to drift towards battleax, which is a wonderful place that I hope to be eventually, where you feel like after a certain age… This is where women, I think, beat men. A really old woman. My mom’s 93. She can say and do whatever she wants. She can ask however she wants. We’re all drifting past that, whereas I think men are going to fall into cranky old man waving a cane.

But I think one of the things about growing up as a lady is learning to get what you want and using softer tactics if you need to, but then also finding people to work with who are comfortable with your directness, so that you’re not always apologizing to the furniture.

**John:** Absolutely. I cherry-picked a bunch of little strategies, different blog posts I’ve listed here. Evie Cottrell has a bunch of them. We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. One of them is, put a big premium on doing something now rather than later, so don’t leave enough time for motivation to fade, which seems like smart advice for writers, but also for anybody who just needs to get some stuff done. My One Cool Thing actually has a little bit more about that. That sense of, “Oh, there’s going to be a better place or time. I’m not ready for it yet.” Waiting is generally not helpful for almost anybody.

**Aline:** My husband has a thing, and I’m sure he got it from a business book or something. But there’s a principle called now, soon, later. It’s things you need to do right away, things you can do soon, and things you can do later. It sounds so simple. But sometimes, breaking that into like, “Hey, if I want to make a hair appointment for Thursday, I got to do that now. Then I need to call the upholsterer. I could do that later.” Just really breaking those down in your brain.

I do think there’s a value sometimes in taking a second and making sure. I’m the king of the random text, of the random reach-out. If anything, I’ve tried to take a breath before I do that and make sure it’s an important communication, especially if I’m reaching out to someone really busy. Then my other thing is, I really used to send people a lot of TikToks, and I’ve lately decided that I’m just sending them homework, unless I write below it. Can’t send a naked TikTok anymore. You have to say, “John, I’m sending you this because it’s about the word agentic.” Don’t just send me a cold TikTok.

**John:** Context.

**Aline:** I’m the worst offender with those, but I’ve just realized that you’re going to… If you’re going to send me a reel, which is obviously a TikTok that was from four weeks ago, you got to tell me why you’re sending it to me.

**John:** That’s fair, because you’ve been on the receiving end of those reels/TikToks. You got pulled out of whatever thought train you were in, because Aline’s texting me, there must be something important. And no. It’s a very cute chihuahua, but it’s not relevant.

Reaching out to people is actually part of the set of advice, which is figuring out what you need and figuring out who can help you get it and then asking for it. Those are things that are challenging to do, that you feel like there’s power imbalances. These agentic people will tell you, just get over your fear of doing that, because you can get no answer, you can get a no, but you’re actually not going to be burning things as much as you suspect you will.

**Aline:** I would say, because we’re almost all communicating now electronically – a lot of people are still in letter-writing age – I think it’s okay to send an email that goes, “Hey John, so-and-so is in town and wants to know if you want to have dinner,” bloop. People still send things with lots and lots of words in it. I always think of Craig’s thing of like, the return key is your friend. Also, I think because of texts, when people get to emails, they really roll out the folderol.

**John:** Short emails are fine. Love them.

**Aline:** Delightful.

**John:** Delightful.

**Aline:** Don’t need a greeting.

**John:** “Hey.”

**Aline:** “Yo.”

**John:** Cut the first two paragraphs. Go right into the heart of it. As I said before about thriving on rejection, so writing down those rejections. Apply for jobs you don’t think you’ll get, because at least you’ll actually have experience of what it is like to interview for those places. Rejections are evidence that you’re actually exploring and trying things.

We’ve talked a lot on the show about luck. The way this blog post was phrasing it was to, “increase your surface area for serendipity,” which is putting more places out there where people can find you and recognize, like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. This is a smart writer.” We talk about how you’ve written that script that’s fantastic. No one is going to read that script unless you put that out there in the world for people to read. The same applies for any other profession you’re doing. If you’re a coder, an artist, whatever, you have to put stuff out there so people can see, and see, oh, this is a person who knows what they’re doing.

**Aline:** For certain. You have to eat some embarrassment. My older son is in the workplace. I think sending a cold email or a cold call or reaching out to someone you don’t know that well, that might be a help. I think that’s really hard when you’re young, because it feels like you don’t have the portfolio. You’re not standing in the right shoes. I remember that being the hardest thing. When you get more experienced and people are like, “I know who John August is, so if he’s emailing me about this thing… ” You’re going to be treated with certain respect. It’s eating the embarrassment of someone going, “Who is this?” or, “Don’t send this to me.”

One time early on in my career, really early on, my agent was someone that I had been friends with, and I didn’t really understand the lines between friend and work friend. Those can be hard to figure out. I had found a piece of material that I thought was really interesting, and I called him on the weekend. Again, it was someone that I was friends with, so I thought that was okay. I called him on the weekend, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?” He was really angry. He was really angry. He said, “How dare you call me on the weekend when I’m home with my family and talk to me about work?”

You know when something embarrassing happens, your body floods with adrenaline, your brain starts printing Polaroids? I can remember where I was sitting in my kitchen, at the table that I had bought at the flea market, the Pasadena City College Flea Market, and painted myself. I can remember where I was sitting. I was so deeply humiliated that I had disrupted him and that I didn’t know what rule.

What I did and what I do a lot with uncomfortable work things is I convert it into something funny. I tend to save those things up as little stories to then tell other people. That is the way that I pop the pimple on my embarrassment.

You’re going to do that when you’re young. You’re going to go somewhere. That’s why every time, when you’re a young person, it’s like, “We’re going to be networking,” then you just have a clenching of the sphincter, because it just sounds like it’s going to be awful. You will have awful interactions, but you might meet your best friend after something where you tried to pitch yourself to someone.

I had, when I was young, a couple things where someone thought I was someone else. I just recently told her this story. I once met with a producer. We were walking in, and the executive said, “Are you ready for this meeting?” The gentleman said, “I’m always ready for a meeting with my favorite writer, Jenny Bicks.” Then we all stood there, frozen. Then the poor executive had to say, “This is actually not Jenny Bicks.” I then had to have a meeting with someone who very clearly didn’t really know who I was, probably hadn’t read my stuff. Again, got to eat embarrassment and just go. It’s like, “You know what? This is still an opportunity. This is still a great producer. Maybe something will come from it.” My second meeting with that gentleman, by the way, he was wearing a wet bathing suit. Continue.

**John:** Oh, good lord. Talk about lines being transgressed. He felt no shame.

**Aline:** None.

**John:** You felt shame about your moment there. Going back to your story of you called the executive on the weekend and realized, oh, I crossed a boundary there that I shouldn’t have crossed, yes, you hold onto those moments, not because you want to fixate and ruminate them, because as a writer, you actually can use them. While it did not directly lead to any scene in Devil Wears Prada-

**Aline:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** … that experience is something that carries through to her character.

**Aline:** Prada was so resonant for me, because I had completely failed as a magazine writer. I remember calling New York Woman with my then-partner. I was trying to leave a message, a query message, but it kept beeping and beeping and cutting us off. It was like, “Hi, we’re so-and-so and so-and-so, and we’re really excited to write for New York Woman, because we think,” beep.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Aline:** It’s like, do you call back? Do you call back? And if you call back, are you starting from scratch? What do you do? Are you starting from scratch, or are you saying, “Sorry, I think I got cut off. I’m Aline, and I wanted to,” and then I got cut off again.

**John:** You’re in the swinger state at this point.

**Aline:** I then wanted to abandon ship, but I thought that’s worse.

**John:** She changed her name so they could never track her down again.

**Aline:** This editor from New York Woman, wherever you are, I’m really sorry for the six half-tries that I left on your machine. But again, trying to laugh about the rejections. I think even if you’re taking a more serious tact to it, yeah, it’s at bats, man. The best baseball player… What’s a great baseball average? 380. Oh, wow, John’s even worse than I am. You guys? What’s good? Oh, wow. We’re in a show biz room. There’s not a person in here.

**John:** As established in last episode, baseball is not my thing. I will guess basketball.

**Aline:** I think high 300s is a good baseball, which is you failed over 70% of the time.

**John:** We’ll wrap up this topic with-

**Aline:** 60%. Keep going.

**John:** Wrap up on a… I love a good metaphor. This was called the moat of low status. Cate Hall has a blog post about it. She says when learning a new skillset, it requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time in which you are actually bad at a thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people. It’s a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side, but also because it gives anybody who can cross it a real advantage. Sometimes, these really awkward moments, it’s recognizing, this is the moat, I’m in the moat. It’s going to suck, and you’re going to be floundering and half drowning. When you get to the other side, you’re like, oh, you actually did cross over. In some ways, I feel like we always talk about the wall around Hollywood or breaking in, but really it’s swimming across that moat is really I think a better way of thinking about what it’s like to enter into this industry.

**Aline:** That’s where relationships really are helpful. When you and I met, I think I was pregnant or I just had a baby. It was 20 years ago. You are definitely ahead of me in terms of getting rewrites and talking to people about those things. I can remember conversations. That was not that long before the strike. I can remember I was having conversations where I would say to you, “How do you do this?” or, “How do you initiate that?” I do that for people too. I always encourage them to call me, because sometimes it’s learning how to make that approach or how to dig yourself out of whatever hole. That’s why I think it’s still important to live here, honestly, more than anything else, is just not to meet…

Young people often think they’re here to meet the important folks. You’re not. You’re there to meet your peers, Drew and Kari sitting on a couch later when we ask them for jobs. It’s important to create those things, so that you can call people who are on and about your level. A step below, a step above are the most helpful people, because they’ll also remember what that was like, getting an agent, taking meetings with agents, what was a good meeting, what wasn’t, is this person good or not. To me, the little floats across the moat are these relationships. I treasure those peer relationships that I had when I was a young person so much.

**John:** It’s also important to remember that we swam across the moat in a different era, and the moat has changed. That’s why it’s important to have people who are in the same struggle that you’re in.

**Aline:** That’s right. What I do now when young people come to town, they want to talk to me, is I get the assistants together in my office and their friends to talk to them, because if you want to know how to break in in 1991, I can really help you if you got a time travel machine, but it’s so, so different now. It’s much more useful for young people to find other young people than to talk to me, because I just have different moats. The moats never end. I think it’s also important to say that the moats never end.

I was talking to someone who has a movie in contention in the awards season. What always happens is it coalesces around a couple things. It’s like the Oppenheimer bulldozer is coming, and so for other movies, even though they’re in this amazing conversation and they’re doing panels and events, walking through those things knowing you’re not going to win anything is dispiriting. I was trying to say to this person, “You’re doing great,” but they were feeling bad. They were feeling like they were in a moat, because they were now going to go to 20 events where they were going to watch the same people win over and over. Not all moats are the same, but we all have them.

**John:** Let’s go on to our other marquee topic, How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite things we’ve added over the years. This first article comes from Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris writing for Slate. It’s called Never Use Alone. It’s about Jessie Blanchard. She’s an operator and education director for Never Use Alone. It’s this hotline designed to reduce the risk of overdose for drug users who are alone. Basically, you call this hotline when you’re about to use drugs, heroin or whatever. She stays on the line with you. Before you actually use, she’s like, “Unlock the door. Tell me where your address is.” Then if she hears you overdosing, she will call for emergency services.

The story follows one specific call with Kimber King, who’s recently out of rehab, and highlighting post-rehab life there, and also gets in a bit of Blanchard’s personal journey there into harm reduction. Aline, what did you make of this article? Is there a movie there? Is there a character there? What do you think is the story here?

**Aline:** I don’t know if that’s a whole thing, but it’s a really good kick-off, I thought, for a thriller or a murder mystery or something. Again, I don’t want to minimize the important life-or-death work that these folks are doing. It’s a great idea. I’m really always in favor of things that treat people as they are and not as we hope they should be. But I do think it’s because it’s over the phone, because there’s someone silently listening, it almost made me think of Blow Out, the De Palma movie with Travolta on the bridge. It seems like you could stumble into some sort of mystery, criminal conspiracy by listening through on the phone. I don’t know if it’s about drugs and people who traffic drugs.

PJ Vogt has a new podcast. Have you listened to Search Engine? He has an episode about why fentanyl is in everything. It seems like it could be a good jumping-off point for a story about that world of drugs and availability, but also could kick you into maybe a genre piece that had a mystery or a thriller.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s always that issue of, if it’s a two-hour movie, it’s a one-time story, there has to be something remarkable about this out of all the things. This is the happenstance that kicks into this specific story, that’s not a thing that happens all the time. I think she’s potentially a really interesting character, because her background is a nurse, her own family lost to addiction, and trying to walk this line of wanting to help people, but realizing that in helping people, she may be prolonging their addiction. That is really interesting. But I agree that there has to be some inciting incidence beyond just what’s usual.

**Aline:** For sure. The other thing is it could be someone’s job inside of a thing, where let’s say you have an emergency response team and they do suicide intervention, if you wanted to do something with several people. It could be a job that someone has, because there’s this aspect of silent witness and overhearing. Those are good Hitchcocky-feeling things.

**John:** Another possibility would be to actually just do the origin story of how she came to do this, so it’s the first time she’s doing this thing. Basically, after a loss in the family, she’s doing this for the first time, because she doesn’t want this thing to happen.

**Aline:** It’s going to have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to go someplace.

**Aline:** It would have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to be. Who are the obstacles? Who are the people who are telling her no? What is she overcoming? What is the journey that she’s going through?

**Aline:** She somehow gets connected to her cheating ex-husband and doesn’t call 911 when she should.

**John:** Maybe.

**Aline:** That’s not this exact woman, but that could be a different character.

**John:** Second up, we have an article by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times. This one is looking at cases of silicosis, which is an incurable lung disease that’s happening among California workers, particularly those who are cutting and polishing engineered stone, silicon kitchen countertops. It’s affecting workers at much younger ages. People in their 20s and 30s are getting a fatal, incurable lung condition. The story follows particularly Leobardo Segura Meza, a 27-year-old father diagnosed with silicosis. This is a California story for this one, mostly Los Angeles County, and the questions of what controls or safeties things we’re going to put here.

**Aline:** Man, that was distressing.

**John:** Yeah, it was distressing. My first thought is it’s an Erin Brockovichy thing. Whenever bad things are happening to people and no one’s paying attention, that it’s an Erin Brockovichy kind of story, where you have somebody coming in to recognize the situation and fight for them and to help them. That’s one option. But I’m also wondering if there’s a way to have the people that are being affected be more the drivers of the story.

**Aline:** It’s so funny, I had the exact same thought, which is those “someone from the outside is the savior” stories apart from occasionally feeling inauthentic, I think have been done so much. Could it be a story about people who have to organize, who have never organized before? I was really distressed to hear that there are interventions with water and other equipment that they could use to make it better, but they won’t.

I don’t know that this one jumped out at me as anything other than a background piece. It feels like there’s a lot of businesses which can be shady, based on how they’re implemented, not inherently shady, but how they’re implemented. To me, this just made me think of how really venally consumerist and bottom-line-based our economy has become, that the idea that you would protect workers and that you would have those things in place to protect them is just not a first thought. I just think we’ve gotten increasingly like, if you make a buck, then that’s all that matters. Getting the water probably costs money, and getting the right equipment probably costs money.

I would see it more as like, if you were doing a movie like The Big Short or something, and one of the businesses that you stumble across is someone who’s just rampantly killing people when he could be doing something else. But it didn’t jump out at me as its own piece.

**John:** I didn’t get the sense that the countertop manufacturers were… They could be negligent, but they weren’t evil. Sometimes it was just the ignorance, that they didn’t know what was happening there, and sometimes it was people who were just not trained to do this thing or that weren’t aware of what the actual problems and dangers are, because apparently, it’s different than cutting other stone. If you’re cutting granite, you’re not going to have the same issues as you are these special things.

**Aline:** Yeah, it’s those composites. A friend of mine’s mother called her and said, “I’m thinking of having my counters replaced, because we have this stuff that’s harmful.” We were saying, “It’s already in there.”

**John:** It’s the cut.

**Aline:** When you cut it up to get it out, you might be creating the very thing that you’re protesting.

**John:** It’s not a problem existing there in a space. Like you, I’m not sure there’s a full movie here. It felt like this is the context background for a Law and Order episode. It’s a thing that’s happening, and we’re meeting a bunch of people because of that situation, but it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily driving the whole thing.

The other way you could get into this is that it’s a story about this family, and the patriarch of the family, the young father of the family is going to be dying at a young age because of this thing. That’s an interesting story that I haven’t seen before.

**Aline:** He learns how to represent himself as a lawyer, and he takes the case.

**John:** Even if the court case is in foreground or the sense of what is it like to be a young father who knows he’s going to die of an incurable thing, like an old man’s disease, that could be an interesting story, whether he’s the central character or he’s the father of the protagonist.

**Aline:** One of the things that’s happened – this happens also when people send me books – is that Hollywood swings back and forth between doing things that require special handling in the sausage factory. It has swung back and forth many times since you and I have been doing this. TV and movies like to take turns doing this. In the word of Super Mario Bros being the most successful movie, I don’t know that this is commercial. Again, that’s why I tend towards genrefying these, because if there’s a murder or an extortion or a way to make it Night Agent, because otherwise, we’re not really engaging with how commercial things are. But right now, there’s such an emphasis on things that are super commercial. I look back on things like Erin Brockovich, just wondering who would make that.

**John:** I still think you can make Erin Brockovich, but it has to be a more seasoned movie.

**Aline:** With a big star.

**John:** With a big star. You wouldn’t put it out in the summer. You’d put it out in December, to get a bunch of awards. That would be driving it.

This might be more commercial. This is called Loyalty Testers. It is Gina Cherelus writing for the New York Times. It looks at this service called Loyalty Test, where they hire these, quote unquote, “Testers” to flirt with people’s partners online and assess their loyalty. It tracks Caden Redmond, who’s a college student who charges $100 per test, which involves starting a conversation on TikTok or Instagram and gauging their response to those romantic advances and then reporting back to the person who hired them whether they got something out of it. There’s people who do it freelance, but this service has recruited a bunch of Testers and about 1,000 customers, and they’re going on through it. Aline, this feels like it’s in a relationship space. I can see a rom-com version of this. What are your instincts with Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** There’s always some rom-com version of this floating around, whether you go on dates and you try and do this. Now, it’s sort of catfishingy online things. This is a TikTok genre. There’s a couple people who do this on TikTok, and they’ll show you the texts. It has an unpleasantness to it that I think as a romantic comedy, I think if it was sharper, more edgy, more like Bottoms or something, where it was a little bit more irreverent and anarchic, because you’re dealing with shitty behavior from both the person who’s fishing and the person who’s been fished, although I don’t know that this always means that people want to cheat or if people are excited to have been flirted with. It is kind of shocking in those TikToks how fast particularly men go to, “Yeah, I’m going to be in Phoenix next week, so what are you doing? I’d love to get a drink.” I don’t know. It depressed me.

**John:** I wonder if it’s the jumping-off place. You have a person who is a Tester, who has become so jaded and cynical about love, and they’re the person who has to be finally won over that there are actually goodhearted people that cannot be tempted or pulled away. That’s probably the best way in there. There’s a non-rom-com version of this as well, of course, which is that you think you’re doing one thing, but it actually spirals way out of control, and someone’s life is put in danger because of this flirting.

**Aline:** Or it’s Bill Clinton, or somebody says, “I want you to test this person,” but what you don’t realize is it’s Putin. I guess you could play with that a little bit. No Hard Feelings, which I really enjoy, had an aspect of somebody’s hired to do… Somebody’s hired to do a something is a genre on its own. I wrote one of those. That’s Three to Tango. Someone hires someone to do a something, and it leads to unintended consequences is a genre of which I thought Bottoms did a fun job of. It turned into about four different movies along the way. I thought that that contributed to the fun, anarchic spirit of it, that they have a very tiny germ of an idea, and then it leads them hither and thither. If you’re going to do something with a satirical edge in the way that this has a satirical edge… Pain Hustlers is the movie I think of recently. It’s scammy people. Then it feels like it’s got a satiric aspect to it.

**John:** Don’t sleep on No Hard Feelings. If you’ve missed it in theaters, it’s worth a watch. It’s really well done.

**Aline:** The funniest scene of the year.

**John:** The fight on the beach?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. I love it. It’s so good. Next up, we have Zachary Crockett writing for The Hustle. This is about a man who won the lottery 14 times. Stefan Mandel, who is a Romanian mathematician, exploited loopholes in various lotto systems to buy every possible combination. If you have to guess six numbers, there’s only a certain number of variations, and you can actually just buy them all up. The formula basically works out. If it’s worth it, if it’s three times the amount of money you’re going to spend, you should absolutely do it, because it can pay off. The challenge, of course, is that logistically, it’s absolutely a nightmare to buy all those tickets. But you can do it. He won the Virginia Lottery and some other ones, got quite rich off the Virginia Lottery. Ultimately, the story continues, went through bankruptcy. There were lawsuits and other things. He’s now living a quiet life in Vanuatu. A lottery movie, is there a thing to do here?

**Aline:** The one thing that jumped out at me was, you know when you’re watching a heist and they’re putting together a group of guys? It felt like one of the group of guys has retired to Vanuatu, and this is his claim to fame, and so they’re putting together… They need someone who crunches the numbers, and it’s this guy. I would pitch the guy from this season of Fargo who plays the hitman. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

**John:** I haven’t seen it.

**Aline:** I will find out what the name of that actor is. But someone really enigmatic and interesting, with a foreign accent, who made a killing doing something abstrusely mathy like this, and then retired to an island, but they have to bring him back for this heist on a casino. That’s what I pictured. That’s not a whole movie, but it’s a really fun backstory for somebody.

**John:** It’s good you bring up heists, because this thing has a heist feeling, because they’re not breaking the law, but logistically, it’s just so challenging to do what they’re doing. They have to convince so many people. The social engineering of it all was a huge factor as well. There’s just mechanics of doing this thing, but there needs to be a larger purpose. That’s why I think you going to they’re pulling somebody in to do this one extra job makes more sense, because if it’s just like, “We want to make a bunch of money,” nobody cares. That’s not actual real stakes. You have to do it for… There’s something that he’s actually really going for here. Originally, he’s doing it so he can escape from Romania. That feels a very great purpose.

**Aline:** Did you see BlackBerry?

**John:** I loved BlackBerry, yeah.

**Aline:** It kills. What I loved about it is everyone is there for a different reason. Glenn’s character really does not care about what they’re doing or why.

**John:** He just wants a hockey team.

**Aline:** He just wants a hockey team. What I loved about that character piece was that he was such a jerk, but then he was so good at being the exact guy they needed in that exact moment, and then somehow it’s a version of the Peter principle. It itched some part of his brain which caused him to completely take his eye off the ball and just grind on the hockey thing, which was so funny. That single-mindedness, the character who’s single-minded to the point of being socially inept, it feels like one of these. I bet Noah Hawley could do something with… I could see a season of Fargo where they do something like this.

**John:** Glenn’s character in BlackBerry is agentic.

**Aline:** He’s the most agentic.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Aline:** He and Emma Stone in Poor Things, quite agentic. I would say that Barbie’s pretty agentic.

**John:** Barbie’s agentic too, yeah. None of them are afraid to make fools of themselves. They’re happy to pick up the phone to get an answer. They know what they don’t know, and they’re not letting that get in their way. Let’s look back through these things and see which of these might actually be movies. Also, we should talk about which of these things do we need to get those specific rights, or is it just the general story space. Never Use Alone, is there anything here?

**Aline:** I don’t know how widespread that is. If it’s just this one lady, then it’s different from if that’s been adopted as a widespread practice. There are many movies about suicide hotlines, and this is a zhuzh on this. It’s very topical, and it’s a thing people are interested in. What do you think?

**John:** I think it’s an interesting space. I could see the indie film version. I could see the Sundance movie that’s in this space.

**Aline:** You would then get her life rights?

**John:** Maybe, because then it’s nice to be able to have her as a person, as not just a resource, but also as part of the, you want to say market of the movie.

**Aline:** The narrative around a movie. That’s a really good point, John, in that for the smaller movies, the narrative around the movies is sometimes just as important.

**John:** I think that could be helpful. Her goals, in terms of keeping people from dying alone of overdoses, would be served by this movie existing.

**Aline:** That too.

**John:** Countertop cancer? We don’t think there’s a movie here.

**Aline:** No, not really. It seems like it’s an element of something.

**John:** Absolutely. The article’s interesting. You don’t need to buy that article. I think it’s a backdrop for something, but there’s nothing here specifically you want to hold on to. The Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** It’s been around for a long time. Those ideas of “I test your spouse’s fidelity” twas ever thus. Just finding a new spin on it, I-

**John:** I feel like there’s probably a Cary Grant movie.

**Aline:** Here’s the issue though. Some of the funniest things that happen in your life now happen with your hand out, and you looking like you’re telling people a hilarious story. The visual is you lying in bed just looking at your phone. We have so many virtual interactions now, and this type of thing is quite a virtual experience.

Romantic comedies are one of the genres where using electronics… I’m not sure, but I feel like one of the reasons Holdovers was set in 1971 was so that… It’s an awfully short movie if someone can just call an Uber. I think sometimes technology can make these things a little dry. There’s literally not much to look at.

I would rather do a movie about somebody who hires themselves out to go to Rome and find out if the King of Denmark will cheat on the Queen before they get… The Queen of Denmark hires you to go and flirt with him and see if he will… That idea of testing fidelity is a better, almost Shakespearean idea than the specifics of how you’re doing it now.

**John:** I think if you are going to try to do something like this, you have to look at Zola or other movies that are-

**Aline:** Oh, god, I love Zola. Yes, you’re right.

**John:** Really good at-

**Aline:** Great.

**John:** … finding ways to manifest what that online conversation looks like.

**Aline:** Great call. Great call. They did that really well there. But the other thing is people get in trouble a lot with Instagram messages. People are messaging people they’re not supposed to on Instagram after a stranger reaches out to them. It just goes to show that human desire for connection or lust or whatever it is really overrides the logic button.

**John:** I have friends who are absolute strangers who met on Instagram and are dating for years.

**Aline:** Through the DMs.

**John:** Through the DMs.

**Aline:** Slid into the-

**John:** Slid in the DMs.

**Aline:** I don’t like the expression “slid into the DMs.”

**John:** It does feel filthy.

**Aline:** Back to our lubricant conversation.

**John:** Finally, the lottery winner. Is there a lottery winner movie?

**Aline:** Not per se, I don’t think.

**John:** Yeah. I like your notion of taking a piece of that, an idea of that character and bringing it into something else. I think if you’re going to do the story, I think you’re going to probably want something to back this up on. If there’s really good original reporting on this stuff and somebody who has the real scoop on all this stuff, great, but I’m not sure that you necessarily need it. Obviously, if Craig were here, he would say, if it’s all true facts, nobody owns history.

**Aline:** If it’s reported, for sure, if that’s been reported. That’s different from whether you’re going to do a first-person story about what it feels like to live in Romania and how you find these things, as opposed to using that and that math and those statistical things for a different character.

**John:** Do any of these movies get made?

**Aline:** I don’t see you following up on this batch, but really interesting to think about. One of the reasons I really like that you do this is because people struggle to find ideas. I remember one of my early writing teachers was like, “Take the New York Times and put it in front of you, and there’s 100 movies in there.” That really is true. I think what’s harder to do, and which you do your whole career, is figure out why does this speak to me, and what do I really want to talk about here.

It’s interesting how much an idea or a book or something will resonate with you, and you don’t really know why. An example is my most memed of movies, We Bought A Zoo. I really wanted to write that. I really resonated to it. I really had to have it. I really had a clear vision of it. It wasn’t until well into writing it that I realized my dad, who’s an Israeli guy, an engineer, we moved to a house in New Jersey that had nine horses and a bunch of ducks and chickens, and so here’s this guy who’s an engineer and really just works with his brain all of a sudden having to muck out stalls. But I didn’t even think of that when I grabbed that story.

Similarly, sometimes people submit me things, and they’re perfectly great, but they don’t light up the little light board in the brain that you need to follow your interest through the project.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Aline, what do you have for us this week?

**Aline:** Sometimes I just do really not useful ditties, but this time… I have a thing that many, many women have, called melasma, which is when… Look at John’s [crosstalk 00:56:54]. You get discolorations on your face. They’re hormonal. I used to have it really bad after I had babies. It’s just subject to hormones. Your face will have these brown patches. They’re usually on your cheeks or over your lip. They’re also enhanced by sun.

I’ve tried to treat it for a really long time. I’ve done lasers and various creams. Then I was influenced by Instagram. Was it Instagram or TikTok? One of those. But there’s a company called Musely, M-U-S-E-L-Y. You get on the website, and you describe what your skin looks like, and then you send them a picture, and you show them where it is on your face. They concoct a thing for you that has bleaching agents and tretinoins and different things. I’m sure that none of what I said was right, but something like that. They put a cocktail of skin stuff. First, they send you a peel, depending on what you need. They sent me this thing called the Spot Peel. You walk around for 12 hours with what looks like toothpaste on your face. Then you wash that off, and then you follow it up with a cream. I was highly skeptical, but it really worked.

**John:** That’s good.

**Aline:** My right side of my face is really almost totally cleared up. My left side, which is the driving side, which is where the sun damage always is, still has a patch here. You know what? They have really good customer service. It comes right away. They tell you when it’s coming. They make the refill process really good. Sometimes people have a good idea for a business, but the interface is not… I’m not breaking any news here, but the interface is not good. The interface of Musely is really good. You get communications from them, and they explain to you why they’re sending you this thing. The instructions are good. Is it a scam? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it except that it worked for me.

**John:** Good. You had a good customer experience there.

**Aline:** I had a good customer experience and good results.

**John:** Love it. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Adam Mastroianni called “So you wanna de-bog yourself.” It kind of ties into some of the things we talked about in terms of being agentic. He’s talking about those situations where you just feel like you’re stuck in a bog, and you just never can get out. You’re just trapped in the mud. I always love a good metaphor for things. He has a lot of really good metaphors for the stories you tell yourself about why you can’t get out or the frustrations you feel. Gutterballing, which is basically you’re moving the right direction, but you’re already in the gutter.

**Aline:** I thought that was really funny.

**John:** No matter what you do, you’re still not going to strike. Waiting for the jackpot, when someone says, “Here’s a solution.” It’s like, yes, but that doesn’t solve all of my problems. It’s not magical. The mediocrity trap, stroking the problem. Some really good-

**Aline:** Stroking the problem felt NSFW [unintelligible 00:59:37].

**John:** It does. It does. That’s basically where you’re acknowledging the problem and you’re talking about the problem and you’re poring into the problem without actually trying to solve the problem.

**Aline:** John, I’m going to pitch an alt to agentic.

**John:** Please.

**Aline:** Pageantic. I’m just going to act like I’m in a beauty pageant all the time.

**John:** You’re going to do that elbow, elbow, wave, wave?

**Aline:** The elbow, elbow, wave, wave. I’m going to divide every meeting into a swimsuit, interview, talent. Pageantic.

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** What do you guys think of pageantic? They love it. No, I’m just telling you.

**John:** Applause all around.

**Aline:** It’s just a different way of doing-

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** Big hair and a sash.

**John:** 2024, my word is pageantic. 100%.

**Aline:** I would love John coming in with a sash, just a sash that says Mr. Hancock Park.

**John:** One of your One Cool Things originally was a sling for your iPhone. If that was a sash rather than a sling, two things killed at once.

**Aline:** Can you still believe they didn’t send me one free bandolier?

**John:** Come on.

**Aline:** Come on, guys.

**John:** You started that whole trend. We all know it started here.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** I love it all. The last bit of this blog post I thought was really smart was the difference between diploma problems and toothbrushing problems.

**Aline:** Oh god, yes.

**John:** A diploma is something you get once, and then you’re done. A toothbrushing is basically, you got to do it every day. Some people confuse the two things.

**Aline:** I hate that. I hate the eating and the sleeping and the thing that you have to do all… Especially, you know what’s the worst is working out. Let me just work out for an entire day once a month, instead of the… It’s the constant drumbeat. Anything that’s a constant drumbeat. I’m not a routinized person. My husband really is, and I’m really not. The constant drumbeat of the feeding the dog, the brushing the teeth, things that have to be done every day, don’t like it.

**John:** You have three dogs now. Are you brushing your dogs’ teeth?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, of course. That was a 100% honest yes. Everyone will know that she of course-

**Aline:** Everyone who knows me knows that Jimmy the dog, you can’t even put a leash on him, so the idea that you’re brushing his teeth… I’ve got one of those little adorable snarl balls, a little chihuahua. There’s many popular ones on TikTok. He’s just basically a little dust of snarl most of the time, interrupted with some kisses and cuddles.

We put some stuff in their water, and then we have a treat that we give them, but I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good… Then every once in a while, we have a lady come over and wrestle them to the ground. Swear to god, because I don’t want to anesthetize them, because I know someone whose dog died being anesthetized for dental. I would really feel bad. We found somebody who will just wrestle your dog to the ground with a bunch of towels and non-consensually brush their teeth.

**John:** Lambert luckily is a very happy tooth-brusher. You just open up his mouth and just go to it.

**Aline:** That’s a really August thing to be, like a very, “Yeah, I got to do this. It needs to get done.” I’m still laughing about the day that Mike broke all his habits, because he had like 60 things, where he was on Duolingo and his running app. He had like 50 things where he was competing for these fake electronic rings of success. I feel like having a dog that… Your dog probably has an app where after you brush its teeth, it logs it.

**John:** It doesn’t yet. I’ve definitely wanted to get those little buttons that dogs can push.

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** “Toothbrush.” But then I feel like-

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** … they’re just training me to do stuff, so no. “Treat. Treat. Play.”

**Aline:** “Get another dog.”

**John:** No. No more dogs. That’s our show for this week.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Very exciting. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech.

**Aline:** Woohoo.

**John:** If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can 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. Inneresting exists because of Aline Brosh McKenna making fun of how I don’t put the T in “interesting.”

**Aline:** Me, make fun of someone? I would never.

**John:** Never, ever. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Aline keeps pitching-

**Aline:** Guys, I want to make a workout set. If we make a Scriptnotes workout set, it doesn’t even need to be a Lycra one. It can be a T-shirt and leggings. Something for the ladies. Something specifically for the ladies.

**John:** The legs is basically an overlooked thing. The challenge is Cotton Bureau doesn’t make sweatpants or leggings. We’re looking for a vendor. We have pretty high standards.

**Aline:** I know. Your stuff is good. I know. I looked into it, and I couldn’t find anything, but I feel like a viewer will have-

**John:** Maybe our incredible listeners-

**Aline:** Also, I’d wear a Scriptnotes onesie.

**John:** Sure, 100%. Love it. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like me and Aline talking about being empty nesters. Aline, it’s never an empty nest when you’re here with me.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. It’s just so nice chatting with you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This is our bonus segment for our premium members. We love our premium members. Aline, you’re a premium member.

**Aline:** I am. Of course I’m a premium member. I love having all the episodes at my fingertips. I recommend them to people frequently.

**John:** Thank you very much. I just put my daughter on a plane back to school. She was here on Christmas break. I’m once again an empty nester. You’ve had this experience for a little bit longer. How are you feeling about your life without children in your house?

**Aline:** It’s been a really interesting transition. My first guy left, and then I had another kid at home. They’re three years apart. When Charlie went to college, Leo was 15, 16, so we still had a lot to do with college and a ton of friends. Then during the pandemic, I was incarcerated with them, which was wonderful and every parent’s dream, despite the horribleness of it. But you’re raising them to send them into the world, to be independent, happy people. That’s what you’re doing. I comfort myself with that. But man, I really miss them. We really miss them. This weekend, Will wanted to go see Beekeeper, which I’m obviously not the biggest audience for.

**John:** You’re not a Jason Statham completist?

**Aline:** He’s a Statham completist, as are my kids. He really turned to me and said, “Man, I wish Charlie could go see Beekeeper with me this weekend.” Then Leo, my younger son, is a Scrabble player. When he’s home, we play Scrabble every day. Do I want them to be at home with their mother playing Scrabble and going to Beekeeper? No. They need to be out in the world.

When Leo left, he went to college in September, and two months later I was shooting a movie. I was so busy during that time that I actually felt relief, because I would’ve been letting him down. I wouldn’t have been very available, so I’m glad it didn’t happen in his senior year.

Then when that wore off, we’ve had to become more entertaining to each other. When you notice that’s happening, you start to look at your partner and say, “We should make a list of shows and things.” Will’s gotten really into cooking, and so that’s been really nice. There’s a freedom there to be able to go and pop off and do whatever you want and go take a trip. I try and value that.

There’s this oft cited statistic that you see your kids for 18 years, and then the rest of your life you’ll see them for a year cumulatively. That’s a scary thing. But we talk to them all the time. The really lucky thing for our generation is texting, because nobody really wants to call their parents. I remember really avoiding that myself, just because it’s a big energy shift to be on the phone with your parents. But texting, the ability to send the TikTok or send the funny article or fam chat. Our text thread was ablaze with what happened with Sweet Lady Jane. It’s fun to have those conversations keep going as a whole family or individually. You learn to have the relationship evolve in the next phase.

That said, I have many sad moments. I remember once, one of our mutual friends said that somebody was complaining about taking their kid to a birthday party in kindergarten, and she said, “I would run someone over with my car to be at a kindergarten birthday party with my son just one more time.”

There’s definitely a lot of things that I miss, but I try and think like, they’re where they should be. You don’t want them to be dependent on you. You want them to be independent in the world. But John, they’ll never really appreciate how much you love them until they have their own kids. I didn’t appreciate how much my parents loved me until I had my own kids. It’s their job to live in a blissful feeling that you’re there for them but you don’t have excessive needs.

**John:** I’m going to stop you there, because there are so many things stacked up for me to respond to. For listeners outside of Los Angeles, or listeners in Los Angeles who aren’t aware of it, Sweet Lady Jane is a fantastic bakery you always got your fancy cakes from. It was default, like, “Oh, we need a fancy cake. We’ll get one from Sweet Lady Jane.” They spontaneously closed. It looked like they were going to expand, and they suddenly closed. I don’t think we know why they closed.

**Aline:** It turns out they were being sued for wage exploitation.

**John:** That’s not good. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, Sweet Lady Jane, the secret story of Sweet Lady Jane. Your earlier point about you’re trying to raise them to be successful adults, Mike will often say, “You’re not trying to raise a child. You’re trying to raise an adult.” The fact that they’re off in college now, doing their own thing, it’s like you successfully raised an adult. Congratulations. They’re out there.

But it also just means that all the time that you spent hands-on parenting them is now free, and you have to figure out other ways to do that. A productive way to do that is to really think about, what is it that you used to do as a couple or you’d want to do as a couple that you couldn’t before. I mentioned on the podcast last time, Mike and I have our 24 for ’24, 24 things we want to get done in 2024, which means seeing the shows and committing to game nights and bar trivia and just making sure we’re getting out there doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing. You’re heading to New York to see four shows.

**Aline:** Yes, I’m seeing a bunch of plays.

**John:** That’s a thing you do.

**Aline:** It was a spur of the moment thing. Charlie’s actually going to come down from Boston and meet me for a couple of those. Also, I think they don’t owe you. They didn’t ask to be born. They don’t owe you. I think people get into a thing of… It’s so funny, because moms will say to me, “How often does your son call you?” I call them. They’re incoming. They’re in the incoming. When I’m elderly, I’ll be in the incoming. But right now, they’re building their lives, so I don’t wait for them to reach out to me. I reach out to them. I try not to guilt them.

Also, I’m always marketing Will and I. “We got sushi. We can pay for sushi. We might be able to take you skiing.” We try and make it appealing and attractive and interesting to spend time with your parents, as opposed to it feeling like homework and obligation. I always said when they were little, you’re not there to be their friend, but when they’re out of the house, you are.

There’s this study that shows the only thing you can really control about kids is how much they like you. If Amy’s coming home to fun game nights and dinners and, in my case, a dog and a half – as soon as anyone leaves, I get another dog and a half – it sounds fun, as opposed to coming home to people who are staring at you and trying to suck your blood, trying to vampire your life.

**John:** What was interesting over this Christmas break was recognizing and figuring out the boundaries between, okay, you’re a college student doing college student things, but you’re also under our roof now, and what that balance is and what is a fair expectation of you being home.

**Aline:** That means we have dinner with the dads, and then we take the car, and we’re out until 1:00 seeing our other friends. That’s what that means.

**John:** That is what it means. Are we going to bed not knowing where they are, which in college-

**Aline:** You don’t know where she is.

**John:** In college, you don’t know.

**Aline:** I know. I know. Isn’t that a funny thing?

**John:** It’s a strange thing. I definitely appreciated that growing up with my mom. I was like, “It’s so frustrating that you have these concerns when I’m thousands of miles away.”

**Aline:** My god, in college, your poor mother had to call you on a phone that was like beep, boop, beep, boop, ring, ring, ring. When would she get you? She was not sending you a little text that said, “Hey, our neighbors got divorced.” We’re lucky because we can communicate with them.

**John:** We are both very lucky. Aline, I’m always lucky to have you come back on the podcast.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Thank you.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [How to be More Agentic](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic) by Cate Hall
* [What’s Stopping You?](https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/44-agency) by Neel Nanda
* [Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tnpp3cyEHMGthjGAf/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic) by Evie Cottrell
* [“Agency” needs nuance](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acyfmFTN3cNgwnYw6/agency-needs-nuance) by Evie Cottrell
* [The Woman on the Line](https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/overdose-drugs-fentanyl-opioid-never-use-alone.html) by Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris for Slate
* [California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosis-countertop-workers-engineered-stone) by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times
* [Would Your Partner Cheat? These ‘Testers’ Will Give You an Answer](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/style/loyalty-test-infidelity-cheating.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) by Gina Cherelus for the New York Times
* [The man who won the lottery 14 times](https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times/) by Zachary Crockett for The Hustle
* [Musely](https://www.musely.com/)
* [So you wanna de-bog yourself](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/so-you-wanna-de-bog-yourself?publication_id=656797&post_id=140270094&isFreemail=true&r=3dw6x) by Adam Mastroianni
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aline_Brosh_McKenna)
* [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 Larry Douziech ([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/627standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/realistic-but-distracting).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 626 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what do you do when reality is distracting? As writers, we aim for accuracy and specificity, which generally help stories feel authentic, but those very qualities can sometimes paradoxically pull viewers out of the story while trying to find the middle ground. We’ll also answer some listener questions about writing during production, period details, and whether or not to read the script before watching the movie.

**Craig:** Oh, there’s an answer to that one.

**John:** Give us a spoiler. What’s your answer?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think you often should. We’ll discuss and debate this.

**Craig:** Before you watch the movie?

**John:** Yeah. As a person who wants to learn about writing, the craft.

**Craig:** Oh, that.

**John:** That.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought you meant just as a person that was watching a movie, the way we would hope that they would watch it, without knowing what’s happening.

**John:** We’ll dig into that. In our bonus segment for premium members, how can you tell when someone is just being nice? We’ll discuss techniques for differentiating actual interest when it comes to scripts and in real life.

**Craig:** Give away all my secrets.

**John:** This show is about revealing Craig Mazin’s secrets. That’s really what it’s all-

**Craig:** Going to have to get new secrets.

**John:** Get some new secrets. We have some follow-up. Drew, help us out with some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** Robert writes, “I thought this might be of some interest to John. The first baby born in Ireland in 2024 was named Arlo.”

**Craig:** Is that a fairly popular name in Ireland?

**John:** It is not a very popular name in Ireland or even here. My book series, Arlo Finch, I picked the name Arlo Finch in 2016. Back then, it wasn’t even in the top 500 names in the U.S., but it has grown quite a lot. It’s now around 150 in the U.S. It’s nice. Nice to see Arlo catching on.

**Craig:** The only Arlo I’ve ever heard of prior to your books was Arlo Guthrie, of course.

**John:** I think I have a pretty good handle on picking names before they become popular, because in my TV series D.C., the brother and sister characters were Mason and Finley, and those were not in the top thousands of names, and they’re now common names.

**Craig:** Finley.

**John:** Finley.

**Craig:** Finley.

**John:** Could be a boy’s name or a girl’s name.

**Craig:** I know there’s been a billion Masons. When I play MLB The Show-

**John:** MLB The Show is a basketball game for PlayStation?

**Craig:** MLB The Show is a baseball-

**John:** Major League Baseball.

**Craig:** As opposed to, say, the NBA, which is basketball. You were close.

**John:** I was close. It was a sports game.

**Craig:** It was a sports game. I wish you could see John’s face.

**John:** The Show could’ve been a rap battle, so you were playing a rap battle.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. MLB The Show, which is a baseball video game, they have this thing where you can customize. You build a player, and then you can customize their name. They have a billion first names and also a billion last names. But of course they don’t have Mazin. Nobody ever has Mazin. But they do have Mason, which is close enough.

**John:** That’s pretty close.

**Craig:** I can make a character named Craig Mason, with the exception, also, I guess the name is slightly different, and also, my baseball player can play baseball very well, but I cannot.

**John:** Small differences.

**Craig:** Yeah, those are the only-

**John:** The simulation is almost completely appropriate.

**Craig:** Dude is huge.

**John:** Speaking of names that are similar to your own name, you cast somebody in The Last of Us, and their last name was so similar to yours. Who is this?

**Craig:** We announced all sorts of casting this week. We announced Kaitlyn Dever, who’s going to be playing Abby. We announced Isabela Merced, who is playing Dina. And we announced Young Mazino, who is playing Jesse. Young Mazino, for those of you who have seen Beef, he plays the younger brother of Steven Yeun’s character. The first time I met Young, I said, “You’ve stolen my rap name.” That was it. I was going to be Young Mazino.

**John:** Now you can’t be.

**Craig:** He took it, by being named Young Mazino. I’m still puzzled over it.

**John:** I guess there are Mazin variations you could go, because sometimes there’ll be a URL that we really want, and we can’t get that URL, and so we go for something that’s close to it or something.

**Craig:** Right, but there was only one name I was ever going to be. I’m out of the rap game now. I can’t drop my next cut.

**John:** Yeah, for MLB The Show, which is an amazing rap battle simulator, and everyone loves it. It’s really popular.

**Craig:** I like that you were just like, “I’m going to wing it here. Basketball.”

**John:** Basketball.

**Craig:** “Screw it.”

**John:** I made a guess, and I just stuck with it.

**Craig:** That was great.

**John:** More follow-up from Iceland now.

**Drew:** Rut in Iceland writes, “It made me a tiny bit sad to hear that Craig is certain he would never be able to pronounce Icelandic words properly, because I’m sure he can. Both of you. Being Icelandic myself, and given the topic on lab meat in the episode, I thought of the Icelandic word for a cannibal, which is mannæta.”

**Craig:** Mannæta.

**Drew:** Mannæta.

**Craig:** Mannæta.

**Drew:** “Icelandic is a very literal language, and mannæta literally means an eater of man, or a man-eater-ish. The thing is, all those weird noises, it’s a trick. Act like you’re always freezing a bit due to the harsh weather in Iceland and like you’re always a tiny bit in a hurry because you’re running away from the volcanoes. Try saying mannæta like you’re freezing and in a bit of a hurry. You never know if you’ll end up in Iceland, in some meat lab in the future, trying to opt out of the human experience.”

**Craig:** I’m going to try it. Here we go. Mannæta.

**John:** Yeah, a little bit. It also had a little bit of a little Japanese quality to it.

**Craig:** Mannæta.

**John:** One of the things in the dialect lessons I’ve been doing about IPA, it’s a helpful thing with dialects is by where they’re putting the “uh” sound, the resting “uh” sound in the mouth. It’s how far forward it is and how far back it is. That’s an easy way to get you closer to where the vowels are and where the accent would fall.

**Craig:** “Ah” as opposed to “ah.”

**John:** Our American English, our “uh” is here, but in British English, it moves a little bit further, like “eh” or “eh.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** Drew had to do a bunch of that in acting school, I’m sure.

**Craig:** You did a bunch of just pronouncing the word “yeah?”

**Drew:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** Yah.

**Drew:** Yah.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** We have more Mazin follow-up here. This is going back to the Christmas episode about our favorite childhood gifts.

**Drew:** That’s right, because you had mentioned that you got the Mazinga toy.

**Craig:** I knew somebody was going to write in about the Mazinga toy.

**Drew:** We had a few people.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Drew:** Lamar writes, “I’m basically the same age as Craig, and those giant toys were also my favorite childhood gifts. I remember there being seven of them.”

**Craig:** Whoa.

**Drew:** “Five robots I stared at longingly in the Sears catalog as they stood side by side in a classic heroes shot, and then two kaijus, Godzilla and Rodan. I remember Mazinga being marketed as the one to have. And as Craig was describing him, I was thinking, ‘Mazinga, Mazinga!’ even before he said that name.”

Then, Richard in Boston wrote in to say, “The origins of Mazinga are in a 1972 manga and 1973 anime called Mazinger Z, with the design of the helmet, thus in fact predating Darth Vader by a few years. Shogun Warriors was Mattel’s American release of an assortment of different anime-related characters, including Mazinger Z. It was trying to ride on the wave of popularity of other Japanese giant robot properties that got rebranded and released for the American market, such as Transformers and Voltron.”

**Craig:** I am so glad that nobody wrote in in the comic book guy persona, like, “Actually, it’s pronounced muh-ZAIN-guh, and you were incorrect.” I at least had that little bit right. I did not know that there were five of them and then two monsters. I only thought there were three. I was lied to.

**John:** You were lied to, or maybe you didn’t get the full wish book catalog to see what those options were for you.

**Craig:** Yeah, Sears catalog.

**John:** Which catalogs did you have? We had Sears, Montgomery Ward’s, and J.C. Penney’s were the ones I remember.

**Craig:** I don’t recall us getting any catalogs. Our family apparently was not catalog-worthy. We never ordered anything. We would go to Sears, where my mom would buy the horrible winter coat. You know the horrible winter coat.

**John:** 100%, yeah.

**Craig:** Orange on the inside, blue on the outside, fake fur.

**John:** I have a cranberry-colored one of those that I see in some photos, and I look at it longingly.

**Drew:** Those are fashion now.

**Craig:** Oh, god. There’s probably some good vintage ones out there from the ’70s.

**John:** Yeah, but vintage is all being scooped up by people like my daughter, who just only thrifts.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of thrifting amongst the children.

**John:** They really are.

**Craig:** It’s ironic to them. “Ha ha ha.”

**John:** “Ha ha ha.”

**Craig:** “Ha ha, look, idiots wore this. Lol.”

**John:** But now you’re wearing it, so who’s the idiot now?

**Craig:** Yeah. Also, we probably had lice in that thing, so lolol.

**John:** We did wear it. We also got rid of it. And now you’re picking it up.

**Craig:** Exactly. Stupids.

**John:** Stupids. Our main topic this week, I’ve been watching a lot of screeners, going to see movies, but also seeing some screeners. This past week I watched Maestro, which I really liked. It tells the story of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet.

**Craig:** I have.

**John:** I was so distracted by the kazoos, because this is a period film about a musician, but man, there were so many kazoos in this movie.

**Craig:** Where is this going?

**John:** Listen. For folks who haven’t seen the movie, I thought I’d play a clip. This is a clip from Maestro. This scene we’re about to hear is Carey Mulligan and Sarah Silverman, who’s great in the movie. I loved seeing Sarah Silverman in a serious role. They’re just having a conversation, but even in an audio medium, I think you can figure out why I found this distracting.

[Maestro clip]

**Carey Mulligan:** Seems I’m attracted to a certain type.

**Sarah Silverman:** Listen. You know Lenny loves you. He really does. He’s just a man, a horribly aging man, who cannot just be wholly one thing. He’s lost.

**Carey:** I’ve always known who he is. He called me, you know.

**Craig:** What is this?

**Sarah:** And?

**Carey:** He wants us all to go to Fairfield together for two weeks. He sounded different.

**Sarah:** Felicia.

**Carey:** No, let’s not make excuses. He didn’t fail me.

**Sarah:** Felicia.

**Carey:** No, it’s my own arrogance, to think I could survive on what he could give.

**Craig:** What is this?

**John:** There weren’t literal kazoos. But what was pulling me out is they smoke in every scene in this movie, and it pulled me out of some scenes in this.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** The kazoos are moments in which the cigarettes are appearing in the frame.

**Craig:** Okay, I see what you’re doing. You’re making a point.

**John:** I’m making a small little point here.

**Craig:** I see your point. Yes, it’s true. Melissa and I watched it together. When it was over and we were discussing it, she said, “Oh my god, they were smoking so much.” I was like, “I haven’t seen that many people smoking since Chernobyl,” in which everyone was smoking.

**John:** There are moments in which it’s acknowledged, and where she was like, “Oh, you have some ash on you.” She’s pulling ash off. But the cigarettes are so close to each other’s faces through a lot of it. It’s a deliberate choice. Bradley Cooper can make the choices he wants to make. But for me as a modern audience watching that film, I’m like, “They’re just smoking all the time.”

**Craig:** It is part of the period charm, I guess. Leonard Bernstein did die of a smoking-related cancer, esophageal or something like that. He had emphysema. His wife, as depicted in the movie, died fairly young from breast cancer, which oftentimes correlates to smoking. It was thematic. What I remembered when I was watching it, because when I do see people smoking in a movie a lot of times, I note it, but it reminded me of how much smoking was going on around me as a kid. My parents and my grandparents who lived with us all smoked all the time, inside. That’s kind of actually correct.

**John:** It’s why I want to get into this topic, because it is correct, it is accurate, but it’s also distracting. Sometimes as writers and as filmmakers, we’re making choices that are the accurate choice, yet to an audience looking at it, it may pull away from story that you want them to pay attention to, because that accuracy gets in the way of people being able to relate to what’s actually happening here.

Smoking is one of those things. We’ll spend a few minutes on smoking, because I think the reason why smoking seems so weird to us now is that we actually, as an industry, made choices about not showing smoking, and people stopped smoking so much. We banned smoking indoors. The number of people who smoke has just dropped tremendously in the United States and Europe. We’re just not seeing smoking so much in real life. Also, we deliberately don’t see stuff in films and television, because we made choices not to portray it.

**Craig:** I don’t know if we can necessarily say there’s a correlation between our artistic restraint and what’s going on out there. Obviously, during the time that Maestro takes place, so the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, we were just catching up to the health impacts of smoking in the ’70s and ’80s. The ’80s was when it really started to take off. There was the National Smokeout Day and all the rest of it.

**John:** Absolutely. 1970 was the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned advertising for cigarettes and tobacco.

**Craig:** It banned advertising for cigarettes, I think, on television.

**John:** On television, yes, and then eventually-

**Craig:** But they were in every magazine-

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** … and at sporting events, and billboards.

**John:** Then it was 2007, which is pretty recently, that the MPAA said studios should eliminate smoking from all youth-rated films, and then Netflix said it was going to not have any cigarette smoking in anything aimed for TV-14 or younger.

**Craig:** I believe Universal has a thing where they just won’t show smoking at all, I think, or maybe if it’s rated R, they let you do it. But otherwise, any movie that’s not rated R, they don’t do cigarettes, I believe.

**John:** I get that. A weird thing that’s happened is you said it reminds you of back then people used to smoke cigarettes. Also, when I see cigarettes being smoked on screen, I assume, oh, that must be period. It automatically evokes period, because that’s not right now. Watching Saltburn, it’s interesting, because it’s the UK, and I’m not quite sure what year we were in, but there’s smoking in it. It’s only at the end you realize that was actually 2006, because we jump forward to present day. Smoking was appropriate for when it was there.

**Craig:** I guess post-apocalyptic things are sort of a period. They’re like a future-looking period. We made a choice in The Last of Us to show some people smoking. It’s not a lot, because it’s just harder. They’re all homespun, home-rolled cigarettes, and they’re probably not very good. But they’re still there. They’re still kind of currency, the way that they are in prison and things like that. Chernobyl was crazy. They were constantly… It’s part of it, I guess. It’s an interesting thing.

Bradley Cooper makes Maestro, and he has to make a choice. I don’t know how you make a biopic – or as many people would say, a bai-AH-pik – about Leonard Bernstein without showing constant cigarettes. He was infamous for having a cigarette in his hand all the time. Now, the fact that everybody else is constantly smoking, I suppose, is part of the choice. I didn’t notice it after a while. It just sort of became part of it.

**John:** Going back to Chernobyl, the cigarettes that are smoked in Chernobyl, how many of them are on the page versus in the actual staging of it, and you’re like, “Oh, this character will be smoking in the scene.”

**Craig:** I believe they were all on the page. I call it out specifically. If you don’t, the problem is you start getting into a lot of production meeting questions: “Are they smoking? Where are they smoking? Is there an ashtray? Is there a lighter?” Then the prop people are like, “Which cigarettes, this or this?” I do specify it. I certainly specify it in The Last of Us, and I specified it in Chernobyl. I made a choice that in Chernobyl, for instance, Khomyuk would not smoke; Legasov would smoke a lot. Not everybody smokes, but some people definitely do.

**John:** Related to smoking, drug use in films. When I see a film that has characters using cocaine, I don’t know how much cocaine that is. I don’t know how to even process that sometimes. Those characters who would be using a drug, and it was either historically accurate or it would be accurate to the period or accurate to the kind of movie it is, it can be distracting if I’m thinking about that drug use and not understanding what that is in the context of the film.

**Craig:** Drug use on camera has always had these extremes. People that are snorting stuff on camera are either immediately overdosing and dying or just wild and crazy. My guess is it’s probably somewhere in the middle. Actually, there’s a moment with cocaine in Maestro. I noticed something really interesting about it. Leonard Bernstein and a few other guys are snorting coke. I’ve never used cocaine. I don’t know. But here’s my impression of everybody in every movie ever snorting coke. You ready? (Aggressively snorts.) It’s super fast. These guys were like (calmly snorts), but just a nice, casual-

**John:** Casual.

**Craig:** To me, I was like, “I bet that’s how it really works.”

**John:** My stereotypical doing a line of cocaine in a movie is you do it fast and then you tip your head back and shake once or twice, because you’re feeling that rush. Notably, I think one of the interesting things about the cocaine scene in Maestro is that Bradley Cooper does a line, and then he holds up the tray to this other guy. He’s trying to pass it off, but then the guy just does a line on it, and so then he does it to the next guy over. It’s just like, “I guess I’m just the person who holds up the tray now.” It ended up having a little character moment, which was nice.

**Craig:** I thought it was cool. It seemed more realistic. It seemed. I don’t know for sure.

**John:** Thinking back to if there is drugs being portrayed in a movie, either it’s a cautionary tale, like this is going to end badly, or that this person is wild and crazy, one thing I enjoyed about Fire Island – and we had Joel Kim Booster on to talk about Fire Island – is there’s drug use in that movie, and it’s not a crisis. It’s not like the world is going to end because of characters using drugs.

**Craig:** Which is hard for people, because nobody necessarily wants to put out a message that drugs are fine. But here’s a difficult, weird fact. Most people who are recreationally using drugs – I’ll leave injectables out of this – don’t die of an overdose and just are functional. There’s a lot of functional recreational drug users out there, and alcohol is one of them. There are a lot of functional alcoholics. There are a lot of people that aren’t alcoholics; they just are able to recreationally use alcohol as a drug and then just be fine. That’s not a very dramatic proposition, is it?

**John:** It’s not. They did a thing, and nothing happened.

**Craig:** Bad story.

**John:** Bad story. Not a substance seen on screen, but the N-word in historical things. You have characters. Drew, I think you’re bringing up Meek’s Cutoff.

**Drew:** Meek’s Cutoff, which is a Kelly Reichardt movie. You ever seen that?

**Craig:** I have not.

**John:** It’s set in what period of time?

**Drew:** It’s pioneer women moving across the Great Plains in an Oregon Trail thing. They use the N-word in a very casual way, in a very conversational way, not directed towards a Black character, but just as a-

**Craig:** As a reference term?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the word they were taught.

**Drew:** Yeah. “I’m slaving away over this cooking,” or something like that. It pulls you out.

**Craig:** I could see that. We certainly have greater sensitivities to that. There are obviously movies about race where… Tarantino is infamous for this, either movies about race, like, say, Django Unchained, or movies that have nothing to do whatsoever with race, like Pulp Fiction, but the idea is that this is just how people talk in the world, which is often true. It’s not always true. But our sensitivities have increased dramatically.

To me, it’s a little bit like nudity. It’s a thing. You can say it shouldn’t be a thing. I always love it when filmmakers are like, “Why is it a thing that the woman is nude? It’s natural. It’s just a human body.” I’m like, “You know why.”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know. Go ahead and take your dick out at a press conference and see how natural it is. It’s not. Or leave the door open when you go to the bathroom. You don’t. I’m not saying that there should never be nudity on film, but we shouldn’t act like it’s not a thing. It is. We do notice it. It can distract. You have to be aware of that, for sure.

**John:** I think what we’re leading up to is, the fact that it is accurate that nudity exists or that they would use the word in that context doesn’t mean that it’s the right choice to use that in the film and television that you’re doing, because you have to recognize that it’s going to be interpreted a certain way. That may not be the interpretation that you want.

**Craig:** Even if it’s interpreted exactly as you want, it’s still going to jolt people. Violence used to do that. We became so saturated in it that now it doesn’t. It’s a rare thing. I remember as a kid being horrified by blood on screen. My kids have never been horrified by blood on screen. They just didn’t care. They just bought in that it was fake. But I remember being very, very scared of it.

**John:** Along the lines of needing to be aware of how the audience is going to take a thing, we said the N-word, but there’s other words that just have shifted in meanings from when it was put out there. When you say prejudice, like in Pride and Prejudice, that doesn’t mean racial prejudice. But prejudice now just means racial prejudice. It’s very hard to use that word without that secondary meaning.

“Discrete” and “discreet”, homonyms are a thing you have to just be really aware of how a person’s likely to hear that word. Even if it was the word the person actually said in real life in that moment, it may not be the word to say on screen.

**Craig:** You’re gauging your audience’s knowledge, depending on what you’re making. If you’re making a movie for a family, for children, you probably don’t want to use a word like “discrete,” because they’re not going to know either version of it. For adults, sometimes it’s interesting to hear people say words that you don’t know, and to go run back to the dictionary.

I remember “sedulous.” Was that a word that was used in The Matrix 2? Something like that. There was a series of words that the architect delivered that were like, wait, what? The point was, this guy is incredibly smart and didn’t even care that you didn’t know the word. The only thing that bothered me about that was that Keanu Reeves didn’t go, “Wait. Stop. I don’t know that word,” because he definitely didn’t, because nobody did.

**John:** Maybe he had a program downloaded into him that actually gave him a full dictionary.

**Craig:** “Tank, I need the Oxford English dictionary.”

**John:** “Unload it. Put it in there.”

**Craig:** “Find out what sedulous means.”

**John:** I am looking forward to… I don’t want the internet implanted into my head, but if I can have a little thing that I could immediately know those kind of facts – and I think that may happen during our lifetime – I would take that.

**Craig:** Look who’s reporting to Elon Musk’s research center.

**John:** After it’s been tested on many, many other people, I will consider that. This is, to some degree, outside of the writer’s control, but I want to talk about accurate but distracting accents, because that can be a big-

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Everyone who attempts an Italian accent will be raked over the coals for the Italian accent.

**Craig:** Except for Mario. Oh wait, actually, no, I don’t even think he tried to do… I didn’t see the Super Mario… Did Chris Pratt do a Mario accent or no?

**John:** I think in my opinion, it was actually a pretty successful version of what it is.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It felt like a lighter version of a Mario accent.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, so a little, “It’s me.”

**John:** But then you look at Lady Gaga and being raked over the coals for House of Gucci. I don’t know how that character actually spoke. Maybe she really spoke exactly that way. It was bizarre to watch on screen.

**Craig:** Accents are tough, and they can be distracting. Sometimes the best you can hope for is that people buy in quickly and forget about it. That was the Chernobyl method. That’s for sure. The only thing you really want to try and avoid is demanding that your actors perform an accent that they can’t do. That is the equivalent of bad hair. It’s always there. It’s ruining everything all the time.

My wife is from the Boston area. Oh my god. 98% of portrayals of the Boston accent on film or television have been dreadful. If you’re not looking at any of the Afflecks or Matt Damon, odds are it’s going to be bad, or a Wahlberg. But most people actually don’t specifically know how that accent works, and so they let it go.

But there are accents we all know. And then there are accents where, like, “Okay, I’ve never heard that accent before, but it just sounds wrong.” It sounds comical or goofy, and you’re stuck with it. It’s one of those terrifying choices you make when you’re making something, and there’s no way that… What are you going to do? Dub the whole movie? You can’t. You’re screwed.

**John:** Again, going back to realistic but distracting, an actor might come in with, like, “Oh, you’ve actually nailed the accent for that exact real-life person, and yet if we put this in the movie, it is going to be so incredibly distracting that you’re doing this thing. You may need to scale back from that.” That’s the choice you make. Or that you’re doing this incredibly realistic accent, no one else in the rest of the movie is approaching that, and then you need to find some sort of common ground where you’re all in the same film.

**Craig:** Yes, that would be very bad. I have this strange fear response to thinking about these things, because any time, you can do something and then go, “You know what? Good theory. Didn’t work out. Let’s switch it up. Wear this shirt instead. Stand over here instead. Say the line like this instead. Hold this in the other hand.” But when you’re dealing with accents, and you’re 20 days into production, and someone rings you up and goes, “I’m sorry, none of this sounds good,” you’re like, “That’s what we’re doing.” Can’t change in the middle.

The other thing about accents is they’re a little bit like actor bait. It’s a trap for actors. They love them, because they have some control. “Finally, I can study and prepare and really get something that’s exactly right.” But the problem is now that’s where their mind is, and it’s not on the stuff that ultimately matters, which isn’t that at all.

**John:** Yes, which is the emotional essence of this moment.

**Craig:** Am I connecting with you? Do I believe you? Are you moving me? It’s tricky.

**John:** Probably last big area for realistic but distracting would be everything related to technology. There’s how stuff really works in the real world and the speed at which things could connect and how quickly we can track that thing down, which if we do it in movies, may not feel real. It may not feel accurate. A counterexample, watching Past Lives, one of the things I really loved about it is they are talking by Skype, and suddenly I heard all the sounds of Skype. We used to do this podcast over Skype. (Sings Skype sounds) as you connect, those moments are delightful.

**Craig:** It’s great nostalgia. (Makes Skype sound effects with mouth.)

**John:** But you want to pick those moments carefully, because otherwise, the audience may not know you’re doing, and you may be eating up screen time. It may not feel real.

**Craig:** On the other hand, there’s the oversimplification of technology, which also makes us laugh, and stinks. Any time somebody is hacking into anything, it’s just wrong. It’s just like-

**John:** “I’m in.”

**Craig:** … a graphical interface of a Pac-Man chewing its way through firewalls. Whoever taught the first studio executive the term “firewall” should get the opposite of the Nobel Prize. We should have an anti-Nobel Prize. Boo.

**John:** The Ignoble Prize.

**Craig:** The Ignoble Prize.

**John:** It actually exists, for some sort of bad scientific discovery.

**Craig:** I like that. The Ig-Nobel Prize.

**John:** Ig-Nobel Prize.

**Craig:** Ig-Nobel. I remember in the ’80s there was this rash of movies where people were always dealing with computer viruses or hacking, except it was always portrayed as a graphical battle between a laughing skull and a target.

**John:** “Ha ha ha. Aha, I’ve got you now.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like, what is [unintelligible 00:28:16]. We know that. We all know that now. Definitely, enhance, enlarge, track, trace. No, none of it.

**John:** Some takeaways here. I think we’re wanting to find a balance between what is fully accurate and realistic versus what is believable, because they’re not necessarily the same things. You have to err towards believability for the audience, because if you lose believability in the audience, it doesn’t matter that you were right. That has to be the first connection.

**Craig:** You have varying degrees of latitude depending on your tone. The broader your tone, the more latitude you have, the more grounded you are. You can get down to almost no latitude. You have to gauge that. You have to know, basically. Depending on how accurate you are to anything in the world, that should spill over to these things as well, but I do think we need to be extra careful about the things you’ve listed.

**John:** Also just be aware of distractions. Be aware of things that are pulling focus from what you actually want the audience to be focusing on. Craig, you’re on set, and you see background players moving in the background. You will have to do another take, because that background player, maybe it was realistic for them to cross the street that way, but it doesn’t actually work for what you need.

**Craig:** Nine times out of 10, or maybe more, that distracting background performer is either eliminated in the edit anyway or no one ever notices. There are these compilations on YouTube of background actors doing dumb crap, except they’re in the movie or the show. There are movies I have seen a million times and never noticed it. People that are pretending to answer a phone but not picking up the phone, people who are doing the most bizarre stuff, and I’ve never noticed, because no one’s actually paying attention to the background people. But when I’m directing and I see somebody in the background doing something dumb, yeah, I go again. I go again.

**John:** Back to realistic but distracting, if two characters are walking towards camera on a sidewalk, and there’s other pedestrians around, they’re going to have to move around other pedestrians. There’s going to be crosses in there that are just not going to be cinematic. Everything’s optimized for their passageway to us, and hopefully, if the scene’s working, you’re not going to notice that. But there was a lot of choreography that happened behind the scenes to get that thing to look natural, even though it’s not how things would really work.

**Craig:** The classic shot of you’re pulling as two people are walking down a busy New York street, talking, so you’re leading them. Often, the camera is on a dolly track, and nobody can be behind a camera, because they’re going to get run over. You have people moving mostly on one side, kind of, as opposed to the other side, because that’s where they probably have a little bit of an offset with the camera. There are things that we just have to deal with. There’s nothing we can do about it, and that’s fine. I think everyone is incredibly forgiving of this.

I have to remind myself, as we head into production again, not to get too caught up over the silly extra. In the old days, when our monitors were terrible, we literally couldn’t even see it that well. Then you would cut the movie together, and sometimes you still wouldn’t be able to see it that well until the very end, because even your edit was this low-res thing.

**John:** You’re not going to see it on the Moviola.

**Craig:** Right. Then you’d get to the premier, and you’d be like, “Wait, what? What is that back there?” Nobody cared.

**John:** The other thing you recognize when you’re actually on set is that what the lens sees and what is reality is not the same at all. Actors who had seemed like they’re moving in a straight line or actually walking, they’re taking a curve in order to get to a place, that they’re not behaving to the actual geography of the space itself, but the camera doesn’t see it that well.

**Craig:** That’s part of the dream of compressing time and space.

**John:** We love it all. Some questions, Drew.

**Drew:** I have a question that’s kind of related to what we were just talking about. Taylor S. writes, “I’m working on a comedy-drama pilot set in 2007, where some technology and trends of the time are important to the plot and themes. Almost immediately, the hilarious Bojack episode set in 2007 came to mind, where the entire joke is that they crammed as many random 2007 references in as possible. But my question is, how can I avoid doing the bad version of that, while still being fun and entertaining, without devolving into 22 minutes of, ‘Hey, remember this?'”

**Craig:** This was not what I expected from Taylor Swift for her first question to our podcast.

**John:** She’s had highs; she’s had lows.

**Craig:** This is a low.

**John:** This is a low.

**Craig:** This is a low. She’s writing into a screenplay podcast to get a tip on writing.

**John:** She’s working on a movie. She’s directing a movie now. She wants to do it right. Apparently, her movie’s set in 2007, or her pilot. She’s actually shooting a pilot in 2007.

**Craig:** We got a scoop. We got a scoop.

**John:** We got a scoop.

**Craig:** It’s a good question.

**John:** It is a good question. I think, Taylor, you are doing the right thing to think of and list all the stuff that you can possibly know from that era, partly because you don’t want to get anything wrong. You want to include anything that was too late for that, and then just be very judicious about what actual things you’re going to bring into the story, because yes, the Bojack Horseman episode is really funny, because-

**Craig:** Makes a point.

**John:** It’s over-crushed, and it can get away with that, but you and your pilot probably can’t.

**Craig:** They certainly wouldn’t have done that in the pilot for Bojack Horseman, for instance. Practical advice for you, Taylor, is feel free to put as much 2007 stuff you want in, while it’s in the background. While it’s in the background, it’s like background actors. There’s color, and there’s light and movement, but our focus isn’t there. When anyone is picking something up, when your key cast is interacting with something, if they’re picking up a cellphone, then we’ll notice it. You don’t have too many of those. But one of the things that the Duffer brothers did so well with Stranger Things is put it in the ’80s, but just not ’80s, ’80s, ’80s all the… It was just things that were there, that they didn’t have to make a point of, that were just sort of there.

Also, the other thing about period stuff that’s really important is, if you’re making something that takes place in 2007, most of the items will be from 1995 or 1999. We go through this all the time in our show with cars. The world ends in 2003 in our show. I’m like, “Most of the models are going to be from the ’80s and ’90s. Not everything should be 2003.” That’s the other thing. Back up from where you are, because most stuff is not new.

**John:** 100%. There was a project I was considering doing that was set in the ’10s, based on a true story set in the ’10s. It was actually really hard to think about what were the 2010s like, just what are the highlight moments. They don’t feel that different from 2024 in most ways. The phones couldn’t do quite as many things, but people still had phones, and so figuring out what that balance is. Also, if I were to do this project, how do you teach people what was different about then than now, because there’s some important different things there.

**Craig:** What’ll happen is craftspeople will get very excited about anything, any period piece. They get super excited. They’re like, “This was the hot fashion at the time.” Not everybody will be [OH kur-AHN 35:30]. Most people will be, again, behind. But there’s varying levels. The other question is, which one of my characters would be interested in being new or fresh or modern, and which one would not change things, and which one would be trying too hard. Think about it that way. But more than anything, just don’t make any of that stuff try too hard.

**John:** I went to a screening of The Holdovers, and the actress in the film, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, was talking about how the art director and set decorators on that movie would be so thorough that if she just opened a random drawer, everything in there would be historically accurate, and that it was great for her. She felt like when she was on set, she was completely in that time and place, which is fun.

**Craig:** Yes. To the extent that you can do that, do it. That’s really advice more for filmmakers, as opposed to writers who are not directing, because they will not be picking those things or filling the drawers. But I love that stuff, personally. I like filling the space in as much as possible for the actors. Obviously, if you’re calling out a shot of something in a drawer, you’d have to prepare it. But for the actors, give them as much as you can.

**John:** Taylor, the last bit of advice I have for you is, there may be reasons why you want, at times, to teach the audience about 2007 or what was different, but be really mindful that you’re not creating a scene that you just do that, because that’s never going to make it into your final thing. If it’s not helping to tell the story, it’s not going to stay in the script. It may stay in the script, but it won’t be in the movie.

**Craig:** Exactly. “There’s a lot of discussion of the upcoming election next year. I wonder what will happen now that George W. Bush won’t be president anymore, because it’s 2007, everyone.”

**John:** We just finished The Crown. The Crown ended. I loved The Crown. That’s obviously a show that went through a tremendous number of time periods but never felt obsessed about, like, this is the newest, latest thing. They do have a TV at a certain point. They do have some things that come up along the way. They are eventually using cellphones. But it never felt like it was hitting you over the head with like, this is the year that we’re in.

**Craig:** Sometimes the lack of change is indicative of itself. The Queen, I imagine, probably was very set in being the Queen, and it’s all about tradition and longevity and connection to the past, and so she wouldn’t be running out to get the new top-loading VCR device in 1977, so that makes sense.

**John:** Another question.

**Drew:** Greg writes, “I’m trying to expand my film knowledge and watch more stuff, but also, as a writer, I realize I should probably be reading scripts of movies as well. Do you have a suggestive strategy for reading and watching the same movie? Should I read it first and then watch it, the reverse, or both at the same time?”

**John:** Greg is a listener, but he’s also a friend. He’s writing to me specifically for advice I’m putting on the podcast, because I think it’s good general advice. He’s a writer who was wondering, “Should I be reading these For Your Consideration scripts first or watching the movie?” My advice to him was to do both. Sometimes watch them and then read them afterwards; sometimes read them first and see what the choices on a page, how they’re reflected on the screen.

**Craig:** Certainly, if you have the opportunity to do both, that can’t hurt. If you have to choose, I would probably still choose to watch the movie first, then read the script.

**John:** Why is that?

**Craig:** I think that it’s easier for you to see what the writer was intending with the words, because you’ve seen it, and you can say, “Ah, I see how they painted this, and that’s what it became,” or sometimes you could see, “Oh, that’s incredibly vague, and then a lot of this other stuff happened.” It’s an interesting thing to connect the two things together. It’s also interesting to see what was deleted, knowing it was deleted. It’s marginally more instructive. But I agree with you; going back and forth in both directions would probably be useful.

**John:** There have been times where – I’ve done this very rarely – but watch the movie while I have the script open and see what they’re doing scene by scene, as stuff’s happening. You get a sense of what that play is back and forth. When you watch the movie first, and then you read the script, obviously, the pictures you’re seeing in your head are going to be the movie you just saw. You can see, “Oh, do these words match that?” The scene description can be very minimal, and you say like, “Oh, that still got us there, I guess.” When you read the script first, you’re having to build the whole movie in your head first, and then you watch the final movie, and you’re like, “Oh, that was what I was seeing. It wasn’t what I was seeing. Did the script do a great job of building out this world for me?” I think that’s useful.

**Craig:** I guess it depends on the movie and it depends on the writer and how thorough the screenplay is, because there are writers that are much more, I guess, minimalist. Also, writers that are writing for themselves to direct sometimes are doing things in a way that… Was it a Bigelow script we read that was… Was it Near Dark?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was super spare. It’s really cool. But that’s one where if you read the script first, I’m not sure you would even know what to think, without having seen the movie. But there are a lot of scripts where, yes, reading it first probably would be great.

**John:** Drew, you’ve been preparing a lot of the scripts for Weekend Read. Of the scripts you’ve been going through, which ones of them do you feel like, “Oh, I can completely see the movie on the page.” Are there examples of that you can think of?

**Drew:** The horrible truth is I probably read about the first 10 pages-

**John:** To make sure it’s formatted properly?

**Drew:** … to make sure it’s formatted properly, and then I walk. Definitely in film school we would read first and then watch. There would be the heartbreak where you would fall in love with a specific moment, and then it would just be completely either cut or you would just visually see it and it’d be gone. You’re like, “That was the turning point.”

**John:** The exercise that Greg wants to do I think is good no matter which way you get to it; is recognizing that the screenplay was what got you to the film, but the film is not the screenplay, and that things changed along the way. You can get a sense of what those changes were. Obviously, with the For Your Consideration scripts, as we talked about in this episode, a lot of times those are cleaned-up, perfected versions of things, so they’re really reflected in the final, what’s on the screen, rather than what was the shooting script when it went into production.

**Craig:** There have been times where I’ve done a credit arbitration as an arbiter, so I had to read lots of the scripts, and then I saw the movie, and I was just bummed in general. The thing is, it’s inevitable. Maybe it is because you make your own movie in your head. But that’s the movie your brain wants to see. If you don’t have that, then somebody else’s movie is the one that you do see. I think to myself sometimes, a movie that I love, what if I had read the script first, made my own movie of it? Would I still love the movie the way I do? I bet not. I bet not.

**John:** I remember reading Natural Born Killers as a script well before the movie was in production and just loving it. I saw a sort of movie, and then I got to work on that movie, and it was just not at all the movie that was on the page. I had to deal with, not the grief – I didn’t care that much – but acknowledge that the thing that I saw in my head was never going to exist.

**Craig:** Exactly. Better to have nothing in your head.

**John:** Greg, the advice is, don’t become a screenwriter. Just stop. Just enjoy movies, because reading scripts will break you.

**Craig:** Empty your mind.

**John:** Empty your mind.

**Drew:** Make It Australia writes, “Recently, my wife asked a colleague what she was doing on the weekend, and the colleague answered, ‘I’m going to see the Wonka biopic.’ Hilarity and mirth ensued. On a reflection though, and in light of your recent discussions about the pronunciation of biopic and the fluidity of language generally – you know, preponing – I wondered, is it possible that the term biopic might reasonably be applied to a film about a fictional character?”

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Yes, I think it absolutely can be, but you might even say a fictional biopic. Basically, it’s doing the things that biopics do about centering a character and seeing the journey of their life, but in a fictional context.

**Craig:** No. First of all, Wonka is not a biopic. I don’t care. No biopic is a musical. Let’s start with that.

**John:** Oh. Huh.

**Craig:** Name one.

**John:** I’m thinking. But keep going.

**Drew:** Rocket Man.

**Craig:** Is that a musical?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. All the singing happens… No, that’s not true.

**Drew:** [Crosstalk 00:43:47].

**Craig:** It’s not a musical.

**Drew:** Yeah, it is, because it starts with him as a child singing The Bitch is Back.

**Craig:** But a musical is where lots of people join in and sing the songs.

**Drew:** Yeah, there’s definitely full choreographed numbers.

**Craig:** Oh, there is? I didn’t see it.

**Drew:** Clearly.

**Craig:** Other than Rocket Man-

**John:** Other than Rocket Man.

**Craig:** I don’t think that we should be doing this to our precious language. I don’t think so. I think a biography is of a living person, because at that point, is Star Wars a biopic? Isn’t every movie about someone a biopic, because it’s about them and their life and stuff?

**John:** I get that, Craig. You make a good point. I would just say that we have a sense of what a biopic does and what the shape of a biopic is. It’s not hard to imagine a fictional biopic that is doing biopic-y stuff deliberately, the tropes of a biopic, and apply it to a fictional character.

**Craig:** That’s different. That would be a mockumentary, so a biopic style, but being intentional. By the way, there’s a thousand people who are going to send a thousand, like, “Here’s musical biopics.” Please don’t.

**John:** Citizen Kane is a fictional biopic.

**Craig:** Right, except it’s not. It’s a movie about a guy.

**John:** Yes, but all the biopics we’ve seen after that, they’re Citizen Kane about a real person.

**Craig:** I guess. I don’t know. Was there not biopics before Citizen Kane? You think biopics are modeled after Citizen Kane? So much stuff is. I suppose it’s possible. I think it’s just the term. It’s not a good idea. No one wants to see the Luke Skywalker biopic. I don’t want to see the Bruce Wayne biopics. There have been so many Bruce Wayne biopics.

**John:** The Bruce Wayne biopic.

**Craig:** So many.

**Drew:** We have a question from Kat, who sent in an audio question.

**Kat:** My apologies if this particular word has been discussed on the podcast before, but I’ve been hearing this new word, “comfortability,” more frequently. It doesn’t surprise me that people find their way to this word. If something’s durable, it has durability. If someone’s able, they have the ability. But those words don’t break down into a prefix and suffix in English, unlike “comfortable,” which expands upon “comfort.”

The context I’ve heard it in makes comfortability a synonym of familiarity or facility, as in, “I have a comfortability with the subject matter.” Do you think people seek to use “comfortability” because they feel “comfortable” has a different connotation than “comfort?” You would say, “I’m comfortable with the subject matter,” but that doesn’t mean the same thing as, “The subject matter gives me comfort.” Maybe something along those lines. I’m just curious if this word has crossed your paths yet. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question.

**John:** Craig’s eyes are bulging here. He does not like the word.

**Craig:** No. It’s just a mistake. That’s all. It’s just a mistake. It’s a mistake. It’s like adding N-E-S-S to something to nounify it when you didn’t know there was already a noun. The word you want when you say “comfortability” is “comfort.” That’s the word you want. It’s a perfectly good word. Shorter and faster is better. It’s just an unnecessary complication.

Sometimes we do have to invent nouns for adjectives. Famously – I can’t remember which president it was, Coolidge maybe or Hoover – somebody came up with “normalcy.” It was a president. There was no word. There was no noun. There’s “normality,” which is different.

**John:** It is different.

**Craig:** He just invented “normalcy.” It’s kind of useful. “Normalcy” is useful, and it became a word. We don’t need “comfortability.” That’s just dumb.

**John:** I agree with Craig that it’s probably a mistake. It’s probably a frequently made mistake that I think will become an accepted word. It fits enough patterns that we’re going to hear it more and more.

**Craig:** On accident?

**John:** Yeah, brought in by accident, because it fits a pattern, and so people get comfortable using it.

**Craig:** It’s incorrect.

**John:** In general, as we talk about on the show, English tends to want to become more regular, and so we move away from our dramatic words into our Latinate words. It’s a natural progression.

**Craig:** Yeah, but all the more reason why you don’t want to see “comfortability.” What you’re describing is an entropy of language, where things are moving towards whatever they call it, absolute zero heat death. But the universe is not designed to spontaneously make things complicated. Even evolution is trying to simplify by addressing problems.

**John:** I’m arguing that it’s a way of simplification.

**Craig:** Right. The problem is that “comfortability” isn’t actually simplifying anything, because we already had the word. It’s just that people made a mistake. They just were adding a whole bunch of… You could just as easily say “comfortabilitization.” We don’t want to do that instead of “comforting.” It has to stop somewhere. This is where I draw the line. Hyah, and no further!

**John:** When I was doing the edits on Arlo Finch, one of the words that came up was “kneeled” versus “knelt.” Both were acceptable, but “knelt” is fading away, and “kneeled” is rising, because it just fits the E-D pattern more often.

**Craig:** I would’ve definitely gone with “knelt,” but I’m an old fuddy-duddy. I think we’ve established this.

**John:** “Weaved” and “wove.”

**Craig:** The answer is “wove.”

**John:** But “he weaved between the trees” versus “he wove between the trees,” they’re actually different.

**Craig:** Yes. “Wove” I would think of more as-

**John:** Fabric.

**Craig:** Fabric, exactly. That’s sort of like the “dived” thing or the “hanged” and “hung.” That’s a big one that people struggle with.

**John:** I think we have one last one. Helena, who’s writing about writing during production.

**Drew:** Helena writes, “My first movie’s going into production in a few weeks. It’s for Amazon, shooting in the UK. I’m British. I’m wondering what my role is in terms of the script once the camera starts rolling. You just mentioned in your show that with movies, it’s the writer’s job to keep on top of the script and be the script coordinator. Do you mean with every change? And how can you do that if you’re not on set? Does someone just feed back to you on the phone?

“I can’t be on set because I’m writing the sequel, which is a lovely problem to have, but now I’m concerned about how much day-to-day work I’ll have on the first movie while I’m trying to write the second. I guess I’m just wondering how the mechanics of it all will work. I suppose I can ask my producers, but I’m trying not to look too green, so I thought I’d give it a shot to ask you guys.”

**Craig:** I hope the producers aren’t listening to this, because then they’re going to know.

**John:** It’s Helena. Maybe that’s not her real name. But it’s an Amazon movie shooting in the UK that already has a sequel.

**Craig:** “Do you think it’s our Helena?” “No.”

**John:** “No.”

**Craig:** “No.”

**John:** “Our Helena, she would never be intimidated to ask these questions.”

**Craig:** “No, no.” Darling, listen. First of all, congratulations. That’s what you should be thinking about, although this is an indication that Helena is a real writer. She’s working. She’s got a movie. She’s not sitting here going, “Look at me. I’m awesome.” She’s like, “Oh, god, my stomach.”

**John:** She’s Megan McDonnell-ing here, where it’s like, “Things are going fantastically.”

**Craig:** “And I’m in trouble.” First of all, practical thing. Most of the time, writers of movies are not on the set. This is why so many movies go so awry. When it comes to the changes, they are usually changes that are happening because they are requested of you by the director or producers, so you won’t have to worry about what those are. There will be people to make incidental changes along the way. Generally, those aren’t generated in page form.

It’s a little different in the UK. I’m not sure how it goes there. But in the U.S., if somebody’s writing stuff down on a piece of paper, unless it is what we call an A-through-H exception, which is basically defined as incidental, non-writing writing, then somebody has to be hired and paid. That’s part of the union thing. If it’s significant work, they’re going to call you, and they’re going to ask for it.

You may also find yourself on call, where they may pick up the phone in the middle of the day and say, “We have a problem. It’s just not really working,” or, “Can you replace this line?” or, “Can you come up with a better idea?” or something, or someone’s throwing a tantrum. Then you just race in like a firefighter, but from your seat. Don’t panic. They’ll let you know.

**John:** I was recently going through the Scriptnotes book, and we have a chapter on writing your production and really talk through what the writer’s role is in pre-production and going up. We go through script stages and when you lock pages. We get really detailed about that. When the book comes out in 2025, you’ll be able to read this. That’s not going to help you right now, Helena.

I think what you need to do is actually ask the producers, “Hey, when you go into production, how can I help? What do you need from me? How is this going to work?” because what Craig describes as the incidental changes, which is basically like, this time it’s happening in a grocery store, and now it’s in a hardware store, you don’t need to generate new pages for that. They probably won’t care about that, and you’ll be fine.

There may actually be a script coordinator on your movie whose job it is to actually put out those pages and such, if things do happen. If a scene needs to be rewritten, they’re going to hopefully come back to you – they should come back to you – and talk to you about the problem, and you’re going to generate a new page that goes in there. If you’ve never done that before, it’s intimidating, because it’s weird. You’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** There’s going to be somebody in the production that’s pushing the new pages out, through usually Scenechronize. Somebody is covering the technical end of it. It would be good, I think, for you, Helena, to, as John said, reach out to the producers, but also, let them know you’re on call, even though you’re writing the sequel. Of course you’re invested in the quality of this movie, and you’re on call if they should need help. You are available. Then you just do it.

As nervous as you might be about doing something for the first time, like production rewriting, there is nobody on earth that is more qualified to do the production rewrite here than you. I know this because they’ve already hired you to write the sequel, which is a very good sign.

**John:** It is a good sign.

**Craig:** This must be good. Wonder what it is, when it comes out.

**John:** There’s already a sequel in development. Thank you for the questions. Time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a card game that I started playing this last week called Regicide. It is a cooperative card game. If you’re playing with multiple players, you are working together to try to do this thing, basically to overthrow this monarchy. You have your own hand, and you’re playing cards out of your own hand in turn to make things happen. Really smartly done.

It uses a standard deck of cards, so you don’t have to get their fancy deck, but their deck is actually a little bit better for it. There’s a Solitaire version that you can also get on iOS or Android. Just a really smartly designed game. It was a Game of the Year two or three years ago, been recommended on some of the blogs I’ve read. But a really good game. It’s regicidegame.com if you want to look up the rules. Again, you’ll play with a standard deck of cards, but the deck they sell you is also really good.

**Craig:** You watched The Crown, and then you played Regicide.

**John:** Indeed. It’s all been royalties for me.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Interesting.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is a bunch of One Cool people to me. The Creative Arts Emmys were on just a few days ago, really, I think this past Sunday. Was very happy to see The Last of Us, our crew did great. They won a combined total of eight Emmy Awards.

**John:** That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** I am so proud of them. If the downside of being the showrunner is that you become the strange adoptive father of a thousand people, the upside is you get to feel the pride. They have done so well, and they worked so hard. I just want them all to know, nominees and winners, how proud I am of them. Happy to report that I think everybody that won will be with us again.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Congratulations to our hardworking crew. They are the best.

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

**Craig:** What, what.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Say.

**John:** Outro this week is by Sudarsham Kadam. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can 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 knowing when someone’s just being nice to you.

**Craig:** Aw, that’s great, John. I’m really excited for that.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Hello, premium subscribers. Thank you very much for being premium members.

**Craig:** We love you guys. You’re great.

**John:** We love you. Start of the new year, we just wanted to tell you that.

**Craig:** This is genuine. We really love each and every one of you.

**John:** We genuinely do love it. It makes the show possible to do. We got a question from one of you named Spencer. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** “When you finish a draft and send it to trusted readers for notes, how do you know if they’re just being nice? I recently sent my script to a couple of writer friends who were extremely complimentary and gave only minor notes. My ego loved it, but there is a part of me that just can’t believe they’d like it that much. How have you found ways to decipher politeness from genuine interest, or does that come down to just having good people skills?”

**John:** Spencer, you sent it to your writer friends, so writer friends who hopefully know what they’re talking about, and it’s good that they liked it. But I think you’re right to be wondering whether the lack of specificity and volume of notes indicates that there actually is more of a problem than everything is fantastic.

**Craig:** It can be. There are two kinds of scripts that people give no notes on. The first kind is a work of genius, and the second kind is an absolute wreck, because there are some times where it’s like the note is, “Stop writing.” But nobody’s going to say that to a friend. Now, I don’t think that’s what’s happened here. I think they really did like it. But they are going to err on the side of positivity.

This is a moment for you to say to them, not, “Hey, I don’t trust you,” or, “I’m suspicious,” but rather, “Thank you. This has been great. Now, I’m going to give you permission to only say negative things. Give me five, six, seven, if you have, things that you didn’t like or that didn’t connect for you, because I need access to that. I’m giving you a clear runway to not worry about my feelings, but just go ahead and spit some of that stuff out. It would be helpful for me.” Then they might.

**John:** A mutual friend of ours, if I am giving her a script to look at, she’ll ask, “Do you want me to tell you how smart you are or to point out all the problems?” which I think is a great way to frame it from her side. They didn’t do this ahead of time, so maybe you need to give them permission to pull the threads that may be uncomfortable for you to be pulling.

It may also help for you to go in with a set of questions, because you may have things that you’re considering doing. If they are smart writer friends you actually trust, say, “This is a thing I’m thinking about doing. I’m going to talk you through what I’m thinking about doing, and we can figure out whether this is going to work.” That may unlock other ways for them to be pointing out stuff that didn’t really work for them.

**Craig:** In general, it’s probably a good instinct to wonder if people are just being nice. It’s hard when you are not yet a professional, because as we’ve often talked about on the show, the only way you know that somebody actually really, really likes something is they give you money. Until they give you money, they don’t. They don’t like it enough to give you money.

**John:** But if they’re not a person who gives you money, what they’ll do is ask, “Can I show it to somebody else?” They’ll ask to pass it along.

**Craig:** Something will happen. Something will happen that basically indicates they are willing to do effort of any kind, which is a big deal. But it’s harder when you are aspiring, because you really are, at that point, at the mercy of friends. We’re all socialized to be kind to each other and to not simply say, “That shirt’s stupid. I don’t like your haircut.” Nobody does that. It’s rude. If somebody gets a new haircut and says, “What do you think of my new haircut?” the answer is, “I love it. It’s great.”

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** Women understand this; some men don’t. When you give people a script, it’s like you’re saying, “Hey, what do you think of my new haircut?” “Love it! It’s great. I love this and this. Oh, this part over here, I wonder if next time they could do this. But all around, it’s fantastic.” Then they walk away, and they’re like, “Oh my god, it’s like she lost a fight with a lawnmower.” But you have to give people permission, or they’re going to be nice.

**John:** There are times where people don’t have a lot of notes, but they really are genuinely like, “I think this is fantastic.” I had that with my script for Go!, people just like, “This is great. I love it.” They would ask follow-up questions. They were curious about things, not trying to point out problems.

We did an episode called Patterns of Success, where we talked through how to tell when someone’s going to make it and how we’ve noticed that someone’s going to make it. With my previous assistants, it was always when they found out that someone’s passing along on their scripts without telling them. They would get a call from somebody who they didn’t know, saying, “I read your script. It was great.” Like, “Oh. Bye. You’re not going to be my assistant much longer.”

**Craig:** There’s also compliment inflation. Until somebody is almost over the top with their praise, it’s almost not really praise. You’re waiting for someone to go, “I read it. I am blown away. This is so incredible. I need to talk with you about the things I loved here.” You’re like, “Oh, this feels real.” If someone says, “What a great read. I kept turning the pages. I thought it was really interesting,” that sounds like a compliment, but there’s compliment-flation going on, and so it’s not really a compliment. It’s sort of minimum.

**John:** It’s the writer’s equivalent of when you saw your friend in a play and like, “Wow, I just can’t believe you did that.”

**Craig:** “You did it. You pulled it off.”

**John:** “You pulled it off. Wow. What you were able to achieve up there was great. You only had how much rehearsal? Wow, that’s crazy.”

**Craig:** “Good job.” That’s tough. I know I’m a tough reader. I know that. When people give me things to read, I always offer them the options. I never give them the, “Do you want me to tell you you feel smart, or do you want me to tell you,” whatever that was. I just basically say, “Mild, medium crispy, extra crispy? What do you want?” I’ll gauge it. There’s no shame in going for mild whatsoever. But I’m a tough read. Every now and then, when I do say, “This is really good,” that means I actually really, really think it’s really, really good. Reading things that people write is treacherous. Even when people tell you, “Give me both barrels of the shotgun,” sometimes they really don’t want it, and they get their feelings hurt.

Also – and I’m very aware of this, and I say this every time – I’m just a person. There are movies that everyone loves that I don’t like. What if that person gave that movie to me? I would be like, “No.” I could be wrong.

**John:** I’m always envious of friends of ours who have relationships with other writers where they’ll freely show everything, and they’ll work on stuff together, they’ll help each other out. I’ve just never had that, that sense of just like, “This is really rough. I just want to get a quick read on that.” I don’t have that.

Christopher Nolan was saying that he sent the first 40 pages of Oppenheimer upstairs to his brother Jonah to say, “Does this make sense at all?” Jonah’s like, “Oh yeah, this totally makes sense. I see what you’re doing.” I don’t have anybody in my life who I can feel quite that close to. I definitely have Drew and folks who have done Drew’s job before, who are reading early stuff, but also, they’re on the payroll.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re on the payroll, but I think they probably also feel fairly safe, hopefully. They shouldn’t, as you have your hand on the lever that leads to the trapdoor that leads to the whirling blades.

It would be very cool to have Jonah Nolan be your brother, because then you’d just say, “Hey, brother Jonah Nolan, you’re my brother.” It’s also like, “You can’t really hurt me that bad. You’re my brother.”

I do have friends that I can show things to. I’m pretty private about my writing. I keep it within the writing family. But cuts of things, that’s something where I can bring somebody in. Certainly, I’ve had friends who have shown me things. We do talk about stuff like that. I’ve also had times where I was like, “Oh, I’m stuck with a problem. I’ve got a story problem here. I think I’m going to pick up the phone and call Scott Frank, or I’ll pick up the phone and call Alec Berg, and we’ll talk it through.”

Chris McQuarrie once called me. It was the first Mission Impossible movie he was doing. It was the middle of the night in London. He was like, “Here’s the problem.” Then he laid out the problem, and we just talked through its possibilities. As is often the case, as I recall, it wasn’t like I said, “Do this and this and this,” and then he did it. It was more that he just needed to talk it through, to go, “Oh, you know what? I posed the question to a friend, and they said, ‘That’s an interesting question, but maybe you should be asking this question,’ and that led me somewhere else, and now I know what to do.” So many of those conversations, whether I’ve been the person that they called or I’m the person calling, ends with the person going, “Wait, stop. I got it. I know what to do. Thank you. You’ve done your job,” by just having me move my mouth and think about it in a different way.

**John:** You are a friend with a pickup truck. Basically, they needed to move from one place to another place, and you were the guy with a pickup truck. They didn’t need you. They just needed the pickup truck.

**Craig:** They needed the truck.

**John:** That’s what you were there for.

**Craig:** Sometimes that’s the most valuable thing is somebody saying, “I know that you’re asking me to solve this problem for you, but I think you’re looking at the wrong problem.” There’s something that Alec Berg [unintelligible 01:05:37]. There was a guy that he worked with who was infamous for saying, “There’s a problem here, and this is the problem. Can you help me figure it out?” People would be like, “Okay, what about this?” “Yeah, no, I thought of that, but the problem with that is… ” “Okay, what about this?” “I thought of that, but… ” No matter what anybody ever said, he would, “Yeah, I thought… ” “Okay, what if the planet turns inside-out, and everybody that is a human becomes a squirrel, and all the squirrels become humans?” “Yeah, I thought of that. The problem… ” You’re like, “No, you haven’t thought of this. No, you have not.”

**John:** It’s tough. Someone was describing it as an XY situation, where people are looking for a solution for X, when really the problem is Y. They come to you, be like, “Help me figure out a solution for X.” That’s actually not the problem. The problem is Y. You’re trying to do the wrong thing.

**Craig:** We have the benefit when we’re not inside of a problem to have none of the weight of the grounding of that problem. We get rooted in a problem. We create false parameters for ourselves. We think what we have to do is figure out how to get through this brick wall. Then a person comes and goes, “Walk around the wall. See, it’s open over here.” We just get blinkered. That’s the good part of talking things through with people.

**John:** I think it’s one of the reason why our Amazon writer here, who may not be on set, may be so valuable in post-production, when seeing that early cut of the thing, recognizing, “This isn’t working for these reasons,” because she’s not so close to it. She’s not so familiar with like, that actor was a nightmare, we lost that location, all that stuff. She’s just seeing, “This is what’s in front of me.”

**Craig:** Stuff.

**John:** Stuff, and feels free to cut it.

**Craig:** Good editors are certainly also great. Editors are very frustrating that way. They just don’t care, and they don’t have to. They don’t care. They’re like, “Oh, was that hard? Well, it didn’t turn out, so anyway, I did this instead.” You’re like, “That thing that we just shot as just a little afterthought?” “Yeah, it’s really good, and it’s going in.” You’re like, “Oh, god. Fine.”

**John:** You’re saying the best editors are the ones who are not just being nice?

**Craig:** Oh, do not get yourself a nice editor. Pleasant is different than nice.

**John:** Yeah, pleasant.

**Craig:** They’re pleasant. They should be pleasant. That would be terrific. But you need editors to tell you the truth. You need an editor to turn around and look at you and go, “Okay, if you really want to do that, but here’s why I don’t think you should.” Then you listen. You don’t always have to agree. There are people, when they push back, I’m like…

I always say to my actors, “Your red flags are my red flags. It doesn’t matter I have direction and I think you should do this.” They’ll be like, “Okay, I’ll try it, but I don’t… “ I’m like, “Let’s all pause for a second. You don’t have to explain why you think this is incorrect. You just feel it. You’re the actor. Let’s honor this and come up with something else. It doesn’t have to be logical.” It’s good to just accept people’s instincts and work with them that way.

**John:** Yeah. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [First baby of the new year arrives at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2024/0101/1424306-new-year-baby/)
* [Mazinger Z](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169473/)
* [Regicide](https://www.regicidegame.com/)
* [The Last of Us Comes in First at Saturday Creative Arts Emmys](https://www.emmys.com/news/awards-news/creative-arts-news-240106)
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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)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sudarshan Kadam ([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/626standardV2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/back-in-the-fyc).

**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:** And this is Episode 625 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, it’s finally here. It’s awards season. We’re so excited. What does awards season mean for you, Craig?

**Craig:** It means losing to Succession a lot.

**John:** Yeah, that’s probably going to happen.

**Craig:** It’s going to be quite the blitzkrieg, and well deserved. It would be tougher probably if I didn’t love Succession and I also didn’t know Jesse Armstrong and know him to be a fantastic person and an amazing writer and leader of his whole staff. It’s their final season. I think we’re all getting swept under the tide. I’ll cry onto the lapels of Mike White, or perhaps he’ll cry on mine, or maybe a shocker.

**John:** Yeah, it could.

**Craig:** But I doubt it. We’re going to be at the Golden Globes. Because of the strikes, everything got squished into… We’re going to be at the Golden Globes and then a week later, AFI, which is nice, because it’s not a competition. Then Critics Choice, and then the Emmys. It will be one crushing loss after another.

**John:** Smear of awards.

**Craig:** I’ve been trying to practice my face when they announce that I lose multiple times. What do I do with my face? Because I’m worried that somehow-

**John:** You’ll have to have a reaction.

**Craig:** … my sadness will leak through, although I’m not sad. But I also don’t want to be a goof about it. You have to practice a very neutral…

**John:** That makes sense.

**Craig:** “Well done, Jesse.” That’s going to be my face. “Well done, Jesse.”

**John:** Absolutely. For folks at home who cannot, of course, see this, because this is an audio medium, there’s a little nod there. It’s a good acknowledgement. “That makes sense.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “That’s about right. Yeah, that’s about right.”

**John:** Now, for 99% of people who listen to this podcast, they don’t have to worry about their faces during awards season. They get to enjoy the movies and the TV shows and read the scripts or take a look at the scripts that were behind all these amazing achievements.

**Craig:** Via your app, I believe.

**John:** Yeah, so all these things are available in Weekend Read, but I also will put links in the show notes to the original pdfs. I think it’s sometimes good for us on this podcast to look at the pdfs, to look at what they were like on the page, literally the layout on the page, because we talk about this a lot in the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Everybody’s different. It’s always interesting to see how people do things.

**John:** We’ll be taking a look at a lot of the For Your Consideration scripts to see what lessons and trends we can learn from the movies that got made this past year. We’ll also answer some listener questions about writing routines, shared credits, and more things like that. And in our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, how do we feel about lab-grown meat, and would we eat human flesh if it were created in a lab? Craig is laughing, but we’ll get the real answers only in the bonus segment for premium members.

**Craig:** I’m laughing and suddenly hungry.

**John:** Strange, that.

**Craig:** Mm, humans.

**John:** We recorded this before the calendar has flipped to January, but some of the last news coming out of December was the possibility that Paramount is up for sale or that Shari Redstone had considered selling Paramount. Warner’s has apparently had a conversation about it. I don’t feel good about Warnamount.

**Craig:** Very good portmanteau.

**John:** I didn’t create that, but I hear it being said.

**Craig:** Para Bros.

**John:** Para Bros. Para Bros.

**Craig:** Para Bros.

**John:** I don’t want Warner’s to buy Paramount. I don’t want another Disney-Fox situation. I don’t know how that avoids happening.

**Craig:** I’m not sure Warner Bros shareholders want this either.

**John:** The stock prices were down after, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a bit confusing, because so much of what’s been going on post any of these mergers is that the company that acquires the other company then has to manage all the debt, because these are all leveraged. Apple, I suppose, could do it. Everybody else needs to borrow money to buy these companies, with the understanding that it’ll pay off in the end. But in the short term, you do get saddled with a lot of debt. Discovery bought Warner Bros and then was saddled with a lot of debt. It seems counter-intuitive that they would want to buy someone else. The upside, I suppose, of buying Paramount is you also get CBS.

**John:** Yeah. That’s one of the unique situations is that basically you’re not allowed to own two broadcast networks, but Warner’s doesn’t own a broadcast network.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** They’re one of the few existing studios that could legally conceivably buy Paramount/CBS.

**Craig:** They could buy it. There are a lot of great Paramount… Star Trek alone-

**John:** It’s great. It’s a good franchise.

**Craig:** … has been kicking off a trillion dollars over the last decades. Look, I don’t understand, because I don’t buy companies or sell them. But Paramount seemingly has been on the block forever. The thing that I wonder about, and it’s the same thing I wondered about with Disney and Fox, is the lot itself. What happens? Fox is a smallish lot.

**John:** But it’s incredibly prime real estate.

**Craig:** Prime real estate, but it’s smallish. You could argue, let’s keep it, and let’s use the sound stages and all the people that have offices there. Paramount is massive.

**John:** Warner’s is massive.

**Craig:** So is Paramount.

**John:** You were saying what was a small lot?

**Craig:** Fox.

**John:** I think Fox is a huge lot.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think of it as a small lot.

**John:** I think of it as a much bigger lot than Paramount, actually.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I do.

**Craig:** Can you quickly scan this up and let’s see?

**John:** Let’s take a look. We’re going to look at Google Maps here.

**Craig:** In my brain, Paramount just goes on and on and on.

**John:** But having picketed at Paramount a ton, you really can walk around. You can’t walk around the north perimeter of it, because it backs up against the cemetery.

**Craig:** I’m looking up sizes here. Paramount Studio, their lot is 65 acres.

**John:** 65 acres.

**Craig:** 65 acres. Now, let’s talk about Fox lot by size. The Fox lot is 50-plus acres, so Paramount is bigger.

**John:** It’s bigger.

**Craig:** It’s bigger. Now, 65 acres, by the way, or 50 acres, in the middle of either Hollywood, like Paramount, or Culver City-

**John:** The west side, yeah.

**Craig:** … or I guess West LA, like Fox, that’s worth a gazillion dollars. There is another argument, which is you’re buying real estate, incredibly valuable real estate. That’s terrifying, because it’s our history. It would be so sad to see one of the great studio lots torn down and parceled out into condos.

**John:** Yeah. Getting back to beyond the real estate, I was concerned about Disney buying Fox. It felt like there’s just one less place to sell a movie-

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** … one less place to sell a TV series, and that it should never have been able to go through. I didn’t see Fox really struggling that much. They still had franchises. They were still able to do stuff. I also see Paramount doing stuff. I’m frustrated that it feels like we’re setting these impossible standards for what a studio is supposed to be able to kick off and generate, and ignoring the fact that there’s cycles and ups and downs, and there’s hits and misses, and Paramount could be on the uptick.

**Craig:** It’s possible, although as a movie studio, it has felt a bit more abundant over the last 10 years even. When you and I started, Paramount was a full buyer like anyone else. Over the last 10 years, it just felt like their output dwindled down to Transformers, occasional Star Trek, not a ton else, Indiana Jones.

**John:** But now Indiana Jones is Disney.

**Craig:** Now it’s Disney, yeah. It did feel like it was shrinking. I agree with you that any time there’s one fewer buyer, that’s bad news. On the other hand, it is counter-balanced by the fact that there are all these other buyers that didn’t exist before, so Apple, Amazon, Netflix.

**John:** A24.

**Craig:** A24.

**John:** The other thing I would say is CBS as a brand is really good. It’s still an incredibly powerful broadcast networks. The shows I actually watched are broadcast shows: Survivor, Amazing Race, Big Brother. Those are all CBS shows. They tend to skew older.

**Craig:** Also sports.

**John:** Sports. It’s got huge sports.

**Craig:** The sports alone is a pretty big deal. If your argument is, hey, if you’re a big studio, you should have a television network, yeah, I guess that makes sense, but I don’t understand. The one thing that people have suggested is maybe the government would thwart it. Doesn’t seem like they ever thwart it.

**John:** This FTC I don’t think would’ve allowed Disney and Fox to go.

**Craig:** I don’t know. They’ll probably push on it and challenge it and delay it, but it seems like they never stop anything.

**John:** They actually just stopped Adobe from buying Figma.

**Craig:** I don’t know what that is.

**John:** Adobe was trying to buy-

**Craig:** What’s Figma?

**John:** They are one of the big design software places.

**Craig:** Then okay, something there.

**John:** The push for the FTC is always whether consolidation is bad because it hurts prices or does it hurt competition overall within the industry. I think that consolidation could hurt worker power.

**Craig:** It’s a little tricky, because hurting worker power is probably not enough, although that’s certainly our interest. There are still a lot of competitors in Hollywood, whereas Adobe buying Figma maybe reduced the pool of… If it increases their market share to 80%, now you’ve got a problem. But nobody has 80% market share. The only company in Hollywood that would even be whiffing at some kind of monopolistic market share would be Netflix.

**John:** Yeah, agree. If Netflix were to try to buy something, I think there would be-

**Craig:** Netflix would not be able to buy something. I can’t imagine that would go through.

**John:** Some follow-up. A couple of sessions ago, we talked about that I was going to start learning the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s actually really interesting. I’m working with a tutor but also going through some books and learning some stuff. There’s just things you never think about. The “huh” sound, we have “huh,” but we also have “wh,” and so the different between “who” and “hue” is really strange. I’m actually really enjoying learning all that stuff. In particular, there’s a chart you can see, which shows all the sounds that are in all the languages, basically where they fit into the mouth. There are sounds that humans can make that for whatever reason don’t show up in any languages, which I think is really interesting.

**Craig:** Maybe they just weren’t considered valuable for some reason or another. Obviously, some languages have clicks and things like that, but no one really has [odd, indescribable mouth sound]. Nobody does that, which is probably for the best. There are certain sounds in other languages that we can copy, even though we don’t use them without too much difficulty, like [clicks tongue], like that one. Then there are certain sounds, for instance in Icelandic, where you’re like, “I don’t know how to do that. That’s a hard sound to make if you haven’t been raised natively.”

**John:** They can be hard sounds to make and also hard sounds to hear. Classically, if you’re not raised in a tonal language, it’s very hard to hear the tones and stuff if you’re trying to learn Mandarin as an adult.

**Craig:** You can hear them, but you can’t hear the shades in between them. It’s hard to discriminate. It’s that thing where someone’s like, “No, no, no, I said this, and you said this.” You’re like, “You just said the same thing twice.” “No, I didn’t.” I can understand. There’s also these funny things that happen, particularly with British English compared to American English, where a lot of British people will drop the Hs, famously, so, “‘Ow are you doing?” But then they will add Hs or aspirations where we don’t. Instead of “HBO,” a lot of people in Britain say “haych-BO”. “Haych-BO” is kind of incredible.

**John:** Or classically, also adding the aspirated H before a W, so “h-where.”

**Craig:** “H-where.”

**John:** “H-where.”

**Craig:** “H-where are you going? H-what?”

**John:** “H-what?” We’re making up accents. There’s clearly patterns of things that go together. The thing I’m also, was a little bit brain melting – I think I’ve mostly gotten the way through it – is the two TH sounds in English.

**Craig:** “Th” /ð/ and “th” /θ/.

**John:** Yeah, which you think you understand fully, and then you realize almost the same word can have a different thing. As you’re writing stuff out in phonetic things, are you using the theta, or are you using the other one to show it.

**Craig:** “With” or “this.”

**John:** “Withdrawn” doesn’t have the voiced.

**Craig:** “Withdrawn.”

**John:** You could say “withdrawn.”

**Craig:** You’d be wrong. “The” is the simplest one. It’s not “the.” If someone said “the,” it would actually be kind of incredible.

**John:** Imagine you’re a speaker who doesn’t speak a language with those sounds.

**Craig:** It’s bizarre.

**John:** How do you tell those apart?

**Craig:** That’s the con of learning English. On the plus side, the easiest conjugations ever.

**John:** Love it. So good.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** If you learn the sounds of English, you can get through a lot of other languages pretty easy.

**Craig:** Also, if you’re not a native English speaker, and you say, “I would like the bagel,” no one’s going to be like, “H-what?” They’ll say, “Got it. Here’s the bagel.” It’s not that far off.

**John:** I’m also just always impressed by deaf people who learn spoken English and just how challenging that must be to figure out what all the sounds are without being able to have the feedback mechanism.

**Craig:** It is fascinating to see where the difficulties are, because there are certain things that we apparently need aural, A-U-R-A-L, feedback for to get. Typically, when deaf people are first learning to speak out loud, it’s very nasal, and certain sounds are just clipped or not there, because there’s not a feedback loop. Nasality is a really interesting thing that you just, I don’t know, I guess hearing, you auto-correct. Strange.

**John:** Strange stuff. That was one of my goals for 2024 was learning that. But Mike and I made a joint list of goals for things, like 24 things we’re going to do in ’24.

**Craig:** You guys are so organized.

**John:** We’re so organized. I would just encourage people to think about that. It’s good to set couple goals stuff and things like we’re going to do bar trivia at least four times in 2024. I love bar trivia.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** We’re going to see at least two shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Make a list of not homework stuff, but things like, “Oh yeah, let’s actually make it a plan to do those things.”

**Craig:** That sounds great. Did you ever read the story of that couple that was like, “For this year we’re going to have sex every day.”

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t do that. That just seems like too much, because sometimes I think couples are like, “We should do it. We should do the sex every day.” I feel like I would probably make it eight days and be like-

**John:** We did it for a month.

**Craig:** You did it for a month?

**John:** For a month, and it was a lot.

**Craig:** Around Day 22, was it like, “Time to make the donuts.”

**John:** I think it was actually a useful thing for us to do, just as a reminder, a prioritization of that.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty interesting notion.

**John:** It’s sort of like those folks who do Whole30, where they don’t eat any refined sugars or any of that stuff for 30 days. You do actually come to appreciate other things because of it.

**Craig:** I guess you can do anything for… You know what I’ve stopped doing?

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** I stopped biting my nails.

**John:** Good. That’s terrific.

**Craig:** I have a friend who has a habit that she’s trying to break. It’s a similar sort of habit. Just to be an ally, I was like, “I’ll do it with you.” I had been biting my nails my whole life. Every now and then when I find my nails resting on my tooth, and I’m like, “Nope,” and I take it out. But I’m having to learn how to use nail clippers. I thought maybe it would just get it all in one shot, but it doesn’t. You have to go around.

**John:** Yeah, like the rest of us.

**Craig:** I’m like a little child learning to walk, with my nail clipper.

**John:** You’ve stopped the auto-cannibalism of biting your fingernails.

**Craig:** We will discuss that in the bonus segment.

**John:** In the bonus segment. Let’s take a look at some of these scripts that are now available For Your Consideration. I remember when Big Fish was out for awards stuff, it was just at the early days where they were starting to really send out the scripts and have people read the scripts. They would mail printed copies of the script or the bound things. I had a pdf on my website for stuff, but pdfs weren’t as big of a thing to be shipping around. Luckily, now, in 2023, 2024, basically any script that’s award-eligible is going to have the script out there, which is great resource for people.

These are all theoretically the final shooting scripts. But let’s talk about that for a second, because they sometimes are, and they often aren’t. If you were on set, shooting the last day of that production, versus the script that we’re reading, it’s probably not the same thing. It probably doesn’t have those color change pages or the partial pages. Stuff will have changed.

**Craig:** Sure, and probably more will change then in the editorial process. One of the things that we have to do when we’re putting our stuff together is say, “Okay, do we leave this scene that we deleted? Do we leave it in? Do we leave this longer version of the scene in?” Generally, I do. The stuff that I will amend to conform it to the final edit usually has to do with things that involve meaning, or if there were things that I was just like, “It actually wasn’t that good. I’m glad I took it out. It doesn’t need to be in the script.”

**John:** Or if you reshot something, and it really does not resemble the final version of that. In Go!, there were reshoots and whole sequences that are no longer.

**Craig:** Exactly. For a movie it’s much easier, because there’s just less of it. You can spend the time conforming it. You can make it almost a transcript version of the final cut. For television shows, it’s a little more annoying. My general thing is go with the shooting script, do a version where you unlock the pages. Maybe I take off the scene numbers. They’re not particularly useful for people. Remove the asterisks and the production headers. Then here or there, make your choices about whether or not you want to conform it.

**John:** A friend of ours worked at a studio. One of his jobs every awards season was to go through and put together that final script that would actually go out there, because sometimes there were little changes or things that were in the final movie that weren’t in this. He had to conform those things. That’s a tough job. You’re literally going through scene by scene, watching it and then making sure the script matches it.

**Craig:** That’s right. If there is a line that happens on the day, because the director and… Let’s hope the writer is there, although usually not. But let’s say it’s the writer-director. Let’s say Rian Johnson says, “Oh, I have an idea. Instead of saying what I wrote, say this instead,” and they do. That has to now be written into the script or else it just doesn’t have that great line. “Here’s Johnny” in The Shining was not in the script that day for him to do, but you’d want to have that in the script.

**John:** You would want to have that in the script. The only time it’s come up in my arbitration experience, there was one project I worked on where the script had gone through a lot of drafts, and other writers had touched it, and I saw a cut of the film, and then I got the final shooting script for the arbitration process. I had to go back to the Guild and say, “This is not the movie. This is not the movie I actually saw. There’s a ton of scenes that are in this script that are not in the movie at all.” They went to the studio, and the studio agreed, and so they created a new script, which was much more a transcript of what the film itself was.

**Craig:** A reflection of what it was. There’s this thing that when you arbitrate for credit, what the arbiters are asked to do is credit the final shooting script. That’s what the credit is for. Sometimes there isn’t one, because people just started doing stuff or figuring things out on the day and not writing it down, or I do this all the time when I’m editing, where I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to add a line and just put it on this person’s back, and we’ll loop it.” What about all that? Yeah, you do need a conforming process, especially for credit.

**John:** The scripts we’re looking at, some of them may be closer to what was actually shot on the day. Some of them are combined, optimized versions of what the plans were. But I think they’re all really useful. They do reflect the writers’ original intentions behind these things.

I broke these down into a couple categories. I wanted to start with scripts that just do a great job of establishing the setting. When we do the Three Page Challenges, we’re always looking at, do I know what kind of movie this is, do I know what the world is like.

I thought we might start with The Holdovers by David Hemingson. If you take a look at this first three pages here, “Day – December 18, 1970.” Credits on the top. Then we’re going through a sequence of scenes that are establishing this boys’ school on the East Coast. The Choirmaster is leading the kids through Oh Little Town of Bethlehem. I just thought it did a brilliant job of establishing the world of a 1970s boys’ prep school and what the feeling and the time and the season was.

**Craig:** Yes. As you go through, I really appreciate the fact that there is specific music that is called out. The music itself gives you a signal that as you move through these moments, you’re not moving through against dead nothing. It’s amazing how even in our minds, if I just took that line out, even if I just said, “The Choirmaster gives each boy his note, and they sing,” and I didn’t say Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, the rest of this would be very just eh. But now I can hear it, and I’m moving around, and I’m seeing everything that he wants me to see, and I understand the tone of it, which is that it’s set against this choral music. Very well done.

**John:** It’s a great start here. By the end of our three pages here, we’ve met our main hero, our main antagonist. We’ve met Crandall, who’s the main kid we’re going to be following. We’ve met the teacher, Paul, who’s Paul Giamatti’s character. We have a sense of what this world is like. There are some surprises they don’t want us to spoil in the film. But we get a really good sense of the world this film is going to be taking place in.

**Craig:** You know my obsession with wardrobe, hair, and makeup to describe characters. I’m just going to read the description of Miss Crane. “Miss Crane, a bright-eyed, middle-aged secretary, holding a plate with a napkin over it.” Now, I don’t know much other than age and bright eyes. But then, “She smiles, lipstick on her teeth.” Yes, yes, I can see her now. The thing is, we don’t have to describe everything. We just have to describe the stuff that we think will matter to the reader to get the essence of who a person is. There is something about a bright-eyed, middle-aged secretary with lipstick on her teeth where I go, “There’s about a thousand different people who could play you, but I see all of you.”

**John:** Having seen the film, I don’t remember that lipstick being on her teeth, and it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter.

**John:** It gives us a sense of who she is as the reader, who doesn’t get the visual otherwise.

**Craig:** It helps you with casting. We’re going through quite a bit of casting right now. When we look at auditions and things, we’re not looking for the scene. We’re looking for the intangible stuff, the little moments that go, “They’ve captured the essence of something.” Now, once we cast somebody, it’s new, and now we change things. There may be somebody that didn’t need the lipstick on the teeth.

**John:** Next up, we’re taking a look at All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh. This did, again, I thought a really good job of establishing a place, a time, a setting. It’s modern day. It’s London, but we’re outside of London. We’re looking back at London. This script goes a very long time before a character speaks, and so we’re just watching Adam going through his day, trying to write, not really writing. We’re establishing the world inside of his apartment, this bubble that he’s sealed himself in. “His flat is comfortable and well-looked after. Furniture is all carefully selected and the shelves are lined with books, DVDs and records. Adam lies still for a while, more than a while, watching the light fade from the room. He sits up, switches on a lamp. His stomach grumbles.” We’re just getting a sense of place, time, space in these initial pages.

**Craig:** Then hallelujah, some sound. The final paragraph of this second scene is, “He looks down at his hands resting on his belly and rubs his thumb gently against his finger. The room is quiet enough to hear the sound of skin stroking skin, such a strange, sensual sound.” Thank you. Then the transition is, “Adam opens the fridge door, the ‘buzz’ of the appliance loud in the silence.” This makes me so happy. Anybody out there who’s still doing the whole, “Don’t direct on the… ” Yes, yes, direct. Direct, and use sound as much as you can.

**John:** The first dialogue occurs between our two main characters, Harry and Adam, on Page 3 here, which is this initial very important meeting. Very awkward dialogue. But Haigh does this thing where he does explain what’s happening inside of Adam’s head, which is always a debate, how much do you offer up here. Page 4 here, “Harry lifts up the bottle. He really does seem fucked. Adam wants him gone.” “Adam wants him gone,” that’s a playable thing. It’s totally appropriate to have it there. I know there’s screenwriter teachers who would say, “That’s not a thing. You’re inside of his head.”

**Craig:** Why shouldn’t you be in his head? I’m in my characters’ heads all the time. The important thing is whatever you say either should inform them about what they’re feeling and thinking or give them a motivation. But it’s perfectly fine to give them something that they don’t… It’s not a want or an action. It’s just context, because then it maybe helps. Instead of putting in parentheses, “Lying but trying not to be caught,” have a little bit of space in there, like, “This is a lie, and no one is going to realize it’s a lie until blah blah blah.” Whatever you want to do, as long as it helps them get context and removes questions. Otherwise, there’s a lot of questions. When there’s a lot of questions, there’s the danger that somebody that doesn’t know will answer them incorrectly.

**John:** It’s also important to look at, this initial conversation, the scene description is breaking up the conversation a lot, which is giving you a sense of what the pace of this is. This is not a rat-a-tat-tat, we’re zooming through here. There’s a lot of pausing and reconsidering on both sides.

**Craig:** Yes, and these pages also look good. If you have all this dialogue without any commentary in between, it feels amateurish, and it feels like there are missing opportunities. It just feels like talking at that point.

**John:** Next up, let’s take a look at May December. Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik have the story credits. Samy Burch has the screenplay credit. I like these pages a lot. A lot is established and set up very, very quickly. We are meeting our central characters, the two woman who we’re going to be following throughout the story. We don’t know context behind who Elizabeth is talking to in these initial scenes, but we get a sense of what Savannah, Georgia is going to feel like. “Shady oaks drooping with Spanish moss frame historic blocks of Georgian and Victorian townhouses. American flags hang from exteriors. A high school marching band assembles near a park block.” We’ve established this butterfly imagery that’s going to be happening throughout here.

**Craig:** Theme.

**John:** Theme, theme.

**Craig:** Theme.

**John:** Once we actually get to Gracie Atherton-Yoo’s house, there’s a party being set up here. We get some sense of what Gracie’s like. One of her first bits of dialogue I really love is that, so her husband, “Joe takes a beer from the fridge and heads out,” and Gracie calls out, “That’s two.” You know something about the relationship from that very first little exchange. Once he’s out barbecuing, “Joe mans the grill. There are so, so many hot dogs.” Great. Love it. I really enjoyed setting stuff up for these initial pages.

**Craig:** What can we say? Good writing is good writing. Part of what good writers do is manage to use every ounce of every page without filling it with text. Every page looks balanced. It is not blanketed in words, and yet so much information is being imparted in such clever and interesting ways. It’s incredibly visual. You can kind of smell it. You can kind of hear the chirr of the insects outside. You are drawn in, because it is providing you with the… Like a puzzle that’s at the exact right level of difficulty, even though you may not know what’s going on, you know the movie knows you don’t know what’s going on, and it’s okay, so you feel like, “Ah, yes, take me along on this journey. You will reward me.” It’s just good writing.

**John:** The experience of watching the film is very much like the experience of watching the script. You are a little bit confused, and you’re also confused how much do characters really know about each other, like what do they know versus what I do. That’s thematically what the story is about, so it’s completely appropriate.

**Craig:** It’s funny how often people do get hung up a little bit on, “I don’t know what’s going on.” It’s changed over time. If you watch movies that are from, let’s go back to the ’80s, you’re almost never confused about anything. Everything is really explicit. You go back earlier, it’s absurdly explicit. It’s just, “I am now going to the store. That is my so-and-so.” We’ve gotten way more sophisticated with that stuff, and people are keeping up just fine.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. In the spirit of keeping up, Saltburn, Emerald Fennell, really jams through a lot in its first couple pages here. Just stark imagery. Cigarette cases. Match striking. A man’s mouth. “I wasn’t in love with him,” is the first line spoken, which becomes a repeating theme. We are zipping through a bunch of flashback scenes establishing Oliver and Felix, the object of his affection, getting a sense of what this world is like, the college quad, just how stunning Felix is, and what a magnetic focus he is. We’re zooming through a lot, and then by the end of Page 3, we’re going back to the question, “But was I,” quote unquote, “‘in love’ with him?” And then making it clear that this must be some retrospective, something bad has happened, that we are narrating the story.

**Craig:** We’ve got a little prologue. The prologue is letting us know who the problem is, the object of desire. It is also these kinds of voiceover prologues I often think of as Holden Caulfield prologues, where the narrator is trying to tell you something, and already you kind of suspect he’s just lying, he’s not telling the truth, or he’s spinning it to himself and you at the same time. You don’t trust him already, which is great. Even though people say, “She was also directing it,” lots of direction on the page. Tons of direction on the page, as well there should be.

**John:** We have a whole category for the “we ares” and “we sees.” This is a “we are” and “we see” script.

**Craig:** Side note, Oliver Quick is the best Charles Dickens name that Charles Dickens never wrote. It’s up there with Oliver Twist. I want there to be an Oliver Quick and Oliver Twist movie.

**John:** I would also say Oliver Quick is the name you can get away with if you’re setting up in that first couple pages, but if halfway through a movie you’ve made a character named Oliver Quick, you’re like, “Wait, what is this?”

**Craig:** “Hold on a second. I’m sorry. Did you say Oliver Quick?”

**John:** You would stop if you met somebody like, “My name’s Oliver Quick.” Like, “No, it’s not.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “Let’s bring it down a notch there, Quick.” But it’s tonal. You do get it right up front, even if no one’s saying it out loud. You get it. You the reader get it. It’s a delicious name.

**John:** I set up that we’re talking about “we hears” and “we sees.” Let’s go to Eric Roth, a well-known, established writer, and a Martin Scorsese. Never heard of that.

**Craig:** I don’t know either one of these guys. Who?

**John:** Killers of the Flower Moon is their film. As we look at the shooting script here, Page 1, we’re establishing two-column dialogue, which is a choice you can make when you have things that are going to be subtitled, and it’s important that you have things in both languages. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once did the same kind of thing with its Chinese dialogue. Here, we’re establishing these places and the initial setup for our story here. First line of scene description, “We see eyes through cracks and openings of the bark.”

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** “We see slices of faces peering in.”

**Craig:** Wait, no!

**John:** “We hear-”

**Craig:** No! You can’t. Reddit says you… Oh, wait. For the 4 millionth time, if you hear someone, if we hear someone say you can’t see “we see,” “we hear,” “we” anything in a screenplay, print the script out. Don’t hit them on the head, but threaten to. We don’t want you to cause violence. But nothing wrong with instigating a little bit of fear. If anyone’s like, “It’s okay. They’re established,” here’s the bigger point. It’s not that Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese are established. God knows they are the definition of established. It’s that no one cares. No one cares. There is no more attention paid to “we see,” than there is, I don’t know, the word “exterior.” It’s just not relevant to any of us. Stop talking about it. Who do we talk to?

**John:** We don’t even talk to anybody. I think we talk to ourselves-

**Craig:** We talk to ourselves.

**John:** … on a weekly basis, and eventually, people will learn about this.

**Craig:** We talk to ourselves. I’m also really interested in this numbering system.

**John:** Our numbers are here, P1, P2, P3.

**Craig:** Is that prologue?

**John:** Maybe this is prologue, because it does get back to 1 eventually.

**Craig:** That’s what it is.

**John:** This prologue does look different.

**Craig:** You know what I suspect happened?

**John:** This was added on?

**Craig:** Yep, because if you start a script and you number it, then you lock the numbers. Oh my god, if you change a scene number-

**John:** Oh god, no.

**Craig:** … the entire system falls apart. Now someone’s like, “I have an idea.” I’m going to try and be Martin Scorsese. “I have an idea. I have a great idea. We should do a prologue.” We have a prologue that’s going to have a ton of little scenes. Normally, if you put a scene in front of one, you don’t call it Scene 0, you call it A1. Then the next one would be B1, C1, D1. Too many damn 1s at that point. I actually feel like using this method makes total sense. I’ve never seen it before. But I suspect that’s what happened.

**John:** I suspect that’s the case, because also these are formatted differently than the rest of the script, because these have, instead of scene headers, it’s, “Cut to Osage Princess Contest.” Wow, this is a really strange screenplay format. Then once we get to Page 5, it’s much more conventional.

**Craig:** This looks a little bit like a first AD went into maybe what was considered three scenes, because what happens is P1 is an interior, P3 is an exterior, P2 and all the other Ps are non-scene headers typically. They’re more “cut to, cut to, cut to.” But a first AD knows, “I got to treat each one of these as a scene, because they’re in different places with different people, so I’m just going to go through and number these myself.”

**John:** Scrolling ahead, there are cases where things that we would normally do an interior/exterior scene header are just big uppercase sections. I’m looking at Page 13, where Scene 12 is listed as, “Mollie emerges from Beaty’s office. Ernest goes to her.”

**Craig:** Right. There are other indications that maybe this is the combination of different people doing it. For instance, on Page 10, Scene 6, the scene header is underlined; Scene 7, not. You have Eric Roth, great writer who has his druthers. You have Martin Scorsese, who has his way of doing things. And then I really do think there was a third person working here to help transcribe ideas. This is an example where format is not relevant at all, because guess what? This thing’s been nominated for 4 billion awards.

**John:** What I don’t want listeners to do is to over-learn lessons from this thing, where it’s like, “Oh, I can switch up my scene headers all the time, chaotically.” No one set out to do this.

**Craig:** There’s no advantage to it. But on the other hand, no one’s going, “Sorry, I got to Page 3, and one of the scene headers was underlined, so we’re passing on Killers.” No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think you are.

**John:** I was very excited to finally see the script for Barbie, which is Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. We’ve had them both on the show before. They are absolutely terrific. I love the opening to Barbie and how it set up why Barbie matters and what an iconic change she was on the landscape. We see how they write up the 2001 sort of homage to this. Again, “we hears,” “we sees,” and it’s very much captioning the experience what it would feel like to see the movie. It’s not afraid to show things that are not in evidence, because they help us understand how things feel.

**Craig:** I will say again, the whole thing, the reason we harp on the whole “we see,” “we hear” is not because people use it and other people say don’t use it and it’s just annoying to us. There’s value to it. This, “We go,” “We see,” “We see,” “Finally, we see,” “We float-”

**John:** “We float above the Barbies.”

**Craig:** I understand what’s happening. The point is, the camera is a point of view. A lot of directing is figuring out where do you put the camera. And a lot of figuring out where to put the camera is whose perspective is this from? Who matters here? Do I want to imply isolation? Do I imply etherealness? Do I want the audience to feel voyeuristic? Do I want it to be somebody’s clocking of things? “We” is the indicator that it is us.

**John:** It’s the audience getting to see things through the camera, through where we are.

**Craig:** The camera is moving in a way that is for us, like we’re ghosts that are moving through and around, being steered by an invisible hand, to show us things. That’s valuable.

**John:** “Barbie takes her slide down to the pool. Because she can!” Exclamation point. “Barbie’s Dreamhouse. Kitchen. Day. She eats a nothing breakfast, drinks a big glass of nothing. Barbie Margot stands at the top floor of her house, waves to her friends and then improbably sails through the air and lands in the driver’s seat of her car.” It’s just giving you a sense of what this is going to feel like and what the tone is. Conveying tone in a script is absolutely crucial. It’s the relationship of the filmmaker to the audience and the writer to the reader. They have to mirror each other.

**Craig:** It’s a very clever way of imparting the rules of this world without explaining the rules of this world. I’m not a big fan of scenes that explain the rules. Sometimes you have to. In The Matrix, it was so nuts, somebody had to say, “Here’s a rule. If you die in the fake world, your body dies in the real world, because the mind can’t live without the body.”

**John:** You have to say that, because otherwise-

**Craig:** But it doesn’t even really make sense, but it doesn’t matter. They needed stakes, and it works, and I love the movie. But you had to say it. Here, once Margot Robbie steps out of the heels and reveals her feet, we’re like, “Okay, I get it,” because there’s so many different ways of saying a doll is going to be represented by a person. What I learned from this is she is a person, she is flesh and blood, but also, she follows general rules of actual Barbieness, which is, I can teleport if a kid teleports me, and my feet are fixed, and I don’t really eat or drink, and that’s part of the fun.

**John:** For sure. I want to take a look at two scripts that are just really complicated setups and seeing how they’re conveying a ton of information on the page. Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham. We take a look at these pages here, they are establishing in a sequel, basically characters we’ve already met before, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening here. This initial sequence is Gwen Stacy on the drums, establishing what’s happened with Miles Morales is the time before this, “Miles watching his uncle Aaron die… Miles’s dad Jeff unwittingly pulling a gun on his own son.” There’s so much happening that’s really complicated, and yet it’s making clear this drum sequence is going to get us through all that backstory and getting us up to speed with where we’re at in Gwen’s world and Gwen’s dimension of Earth-65.

**Craig:** While already creating mystery with the repetition of, “He’s not the only one.” We understand there’s more coming here, especially when somebody says, “You think you know the rest. You don’t. I thought I knew the rest, but I didn’t.” That’s a really good way of warning the audience to expect the unexpected. It’s also a very clever way of saying, “Hey, we have to undo finality.” Sequels are hard, because a good ending feels final, unless it’s really meant as like Chapter 1 of the continuing episodes. Dune sort of ends like that, because we understand there’s more book to tell. It doesn’t have to conclude. But the Spider-Man multiverse movies, Across the Universe [sic] concludes. So now you have to unwind it without making the audience feel like they got baited and switched. What they’re doing is saying, “Hey, empathize with her. She got baited and switched. Let’s find out how and why.”

**John:** On Page 2, there’s a choice to… Em Jay has, “Gwen! Gwen! Yo! Def Leppard!” The first “Gwen” is tiny font. Then it gets a little bit bigger, little bit bigger. Sure.

**Craig:** Do it all the time. I do it all the time. Love it.

**John:** Then we’ll get to Oppenheimer. We had Christopher Nolan on the show. He was delightful to talk through his process and his writing process on this. We talked a bit about, he had to find ways to describe these impossible-to-visualize things of quantum mechanics. There are sequences in the script that really reflect a jumble of images that get you to what that point is. A thing we didn’t get into too much on the episode was that he doesn’t like to reveal anything that the audience wouldn’t directly know. If you look at the script, they’re very spare. There’s not a lot of description of settings, of wardrobe, hair, costumes. There’s not a lot of that. It’s very, very spare and efficient. Even places that we’re going to come back to a lot, like these two interview rooms, we’re not seeing a lot of details here. It works for this movie.

**Craig:** It works for him particularly because he’s in complete control of the process from beginning to end. Now, what it means is that Christopher Nolan is going to have to have some very long meetings with his department heads to explain what he sees. There are probably a lot of conversations with the actors.” But that must be part of his process. There is value in saying, “Look, actually, this information that I need you to know, I’d prefer to impart one-on-one, individually with you guys.” The other thing is, it saves space. This is a 195-page script. Now, right off the bat, what I notice is between scene headers there is not-

**John:** A second line.

**Craig:** … a second line. You can feel him trying to fit this into 200, because he is like, “Look.” He knows this is going to ultimately be a very long movie. If I make a choice to fully describe things, it will be 500 pages.

**John:** He was sitting in your chair. He said, “Listen.” He looks at a screenplay as a way to get his thoughts on paper and make it clear what it is he’s trying to do, but it’s also a sales document that he has to give to somebody and then see, “Okay, I understand what you’re trying to do here, and I’ll give you the money to make this movie.” If it had been a 250-page script versus cut off the A and B pages and it’s only 180 pages, but still, it’s long-

**Craig:** It’s a Scott Frank sized script, and that’s fine. Look, the movie is a long movie, but if it holds people’s attention, that’s great. Part of it is like, “Hey, you’re going to be here for a while reading. I’m not going to bog you down. You just won’t make it, so I’m going to save a lot of this.” It’s a very efficient way of doing it, which I think probably was necessary.

**John:** Something you probably don’t realize yet is that instead of third-person or second-person plural, it’s written first-person. Oppenheimer in the “I” in this. It’s strange when you first encounter it. Then you eventually understand, “Oh, I get why he’s doing that,” because he’s always the POV character in these things. In the scenes that he’s in, it saves him from typing Oppenheimer 5,000 times in the script.

**Craig:** Very long name. It also adds this kind of Doctor Manhattan style wistfulness, because he’s not narrating; he’s living it. But yet you feel like he is watching his own life and he is just describing what he does to us all in this slightly numb way. “I drop a beaker. It shatters.” That’s very Doctor Manhattan.

**John:** Yeah, it is. Last one I want to talk through is Cord Jefferson’s script for American Fiction. These are great-looking pages. They’re very much I think what we are talking about when we describe what looks great and classic and normal in a Three Page Challenge is that the pages are inviting, they’re very clean to read. We get right into the story too, from that very initial scene, when you’re like, “Oh, this is going to be about a Black professor confronting race,” and we know what the central theme and question of the movie is going to be.

**Craig:** Sometimes I see things. I’m like, “Oh, do I want to steal that or not?” Stylistically, Cord does an interesting thing. He capitalizes not only names as he’s introducing people, but of course, like we often do, capitalizes things. What we does in the capitalization of these things – typically they are for people – is he bolds that. I’m kind of interested in that.

**John:** It makes it easier to find where a character first appears.

**Craig:** It is interesting. Sometimes I look at stuff like that. Now, he also bolds and underlines his scene headers. I just bold mine.

**John:** It depends on the script. I’ve done it both ways. There’s something nice about the bold and underlined, because it just makes it really clear, like, here’s the next thing. It can look good on the page. He doesn’t need to do it.

**Craig:** You’re right. The pages lay out exactly as I would expect. It’s just well-written. You could tell.

**John:** You never flip to a page and like, “Oh Jesus, that’s a lot of text for me to tackle.” Some of these scripts do have just a lot of words on the page, and it’s a lot. In Cord’s script, you never get to a page that’s like, “Oh my god, I don’t have the strength to get through that page.”

**Craig:** Right. Also, American Fiction is a comedy. It’s not a raucous physical comedy, but it is a comedy, so you want a certain lightness in speed and pace. One of the things I like is this first scene is one and a quarter pages.

**John:** Yeah, not long.

**Craig:** It’s not long at all. It tells us so much about who Monk is.

**John:** And what the mood is in 2022, 2023 when this is happening.

**Craig:** And it’s funny. It’s really funny. It just cuts right to the heart of things. It’s just tight. It doesn’t need to dwell.

**John:** Let’s compare this to the first script we looked at, which was The Holdovers. It needed to establish this is what 1970s New England prep school feels like. Here, we don’t need to establish what the campus is like. We don’t need to see-

**Craig:** We just need to know he’s in the situation that we know about. You just get it right away. Also, the subsequent scene where he’s called on the carpet by his bosses and colleagues, again, funny and zippy. While this is happening, and Cord’s teaching us, okay, we’re actually in our world, this is incredibly topical and current, also, this is who Monk is, and it’s not like, oh, he’s just a victim of circumstance. He does have a problem.

**John:** He is creating his problem.

**Craig:** What I really thought was interesting about this second scene, you can see it across Page 2 through 4, is you don’t necessarily root for him. You want to root for him at first. Then you’re like, “I don’t know if I… ” There’s this great exchange where he says, “You’re under the impression that time spent with my family will take the edge off. I’m fine.” “You’re not fine. I saw you crying in your car last week,” which is really great and sort of makes us wonder if maybe Monk is actually problematic. He is, but not politically problematic, not philosophically problematic. He’s emotionally constipated. It is interesting to see how that unfolds.

**John:** We talk about how important it is to figure out where to come into a scene and when to exit a scene. On Page 2 here, we’re coming into this conference room scene quite late into it, which is great, but we automatically catch up to where we’re at. The first line is, “Well, it made some of your students uncomfortable, Monk.” The other 20 minutes that happened before this were not important.

**Craig:** There’s also a really smart choice. Sometimes you get to a point in a scene where you’re like, “Uh-oh, someone just started trouble,” and then you have to write the trouble. Now, what happens here, and Cord’s very clever about this, so Monk is a professor. He’s written a Flannery O’Connor title on the board that includes the N-word, but spelled out. A white student has a real problem with that, even though Monk is Black. Here’s what she says. “Well, I just find that word really offensive.” He says, “With all due respect, Brittany,” I wish I could talk like Jeffrey Wright, “With all due respect Brittany, I got over it. I’m pretty sure you can too.” She says, “Well, I don’t see why.” “Monk, who has been affable up until now, casts an icy stare at Brittany.”

Now, what Cord chooses to do is then cut to her storming out crying, and him shouting out, “Does anyone else have thoughts on the reading?” We know something went down in there. It’s better that we didn’t hear it. If we heard it, we might actually really start to not like Monk more than we don’t want to not like him. We might get confused about whose side we’re on. But right now, what’s important is, in our minds we go, “Okay, this guy’s got a problem. He’s a little hard on the students. But also, Brittany is kind of ridiculous.” It worked. It was a great elision.

**John:** Yeah. It also establishes our trust in the storytelling. This person knows what they’re doing. They’re going to lead us through a story. We’re in good hands. Hopefully, these were useful lessons for people. You don’t need to ape any one person’s style. You can see there actually is a range of really good scripts out there to read. It’s just important to read them and process them and see what actually fits for your own personal style.

**Craig:** Completely. Of note is probably that all these individual styles are expressions of something internal going on in each one of these writers’ brains that is unique, specific to them. That’s why some people want to do it this way and some people want to do it that way. It’s just how it fits with the way their mind works.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s tackle maybe two listener questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have a question from Tim L., who asks, “When do you write? Do you have a set routine or just when the mood hits you?” Craig, you’re in the middle of a lot of writing right now. What is your writing routine these days?

**Craig:** These days I’m being very productive, because we’re on a little holiday hiatus, so I’m back here in LA. I don’t have 500 meetings every day to go to for prep, so suddenly I’m like, “Wee!” I’m getting a lot done. We’re pulling into the station with just about everything for the whole season being done writing-wise. But typically, my process is to wait until I know what the scene is and what I’m supposed to write and what the beginning and the end is and what the turns are. I really wait until I know what it is. Then I wait until I’m so ashamed that I have to write. I am not a set time of day person. It’s incredibly unlikely that I will wake up and just start writing. That’s not how it works for me.

**John:** My writing routine, right now I’m mostly just doing the Scriptnotes book edits. It’s different writing than usual, but still, it’s getting the work done. It’s getting through that. I tend to have two or three writing sessions in a day. If I can write for an hour, I’ll write for an hour, go away, come back, write for an hour, go away. Doing the Arlo Finch books was the most routine I actually really had to establish, because if I didn’t hit 1,000 words a day, those books would never get finished.

**Craig:** You weren’t going to get there.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where I mostly learned, okay, this is just how I get the work done. When it’s stuff on my own for whatever, there’ll be moments where I know how to do this thing now, and I will stop everything and get that written down. In my 20s, that was a lot more possible to stay up all night and just follow the inspiration. I can’t do that now. It doesn’t work the family, but also doesn’t work for me. I’m ruined for a couple days if I don’t get a good night’s sleep.

**Craig:** I need to sleep. If I don’t, I’m a mess. I think we’re all a bit of delicate flowers. People that just go, “It’s 9:00 a.m.,” (imitates typing sounds) and then, “It’s 4:30. Kaching, I’m done,” suspicious. Deeply suspicious.

**John:** But we both have friends who can do that, and God bless them.

**Craig:** It’s terrifying, but I salute them.

**John:** Second question, Single Card writes, “I’m a UK writer with a question about shared writing credits. I’m the third and, fingers crossed, final writer on a film that is due to shoot in spring. The initial agreement was for me to share a written by card with the other two writers, but the work I’ve done on the script since that agreement is substantial enough that the producer has agreed to renegotiate on that point. He has offered a separate written by card for me, which would follow a shared written by card for the other two. In this instance, is it preferable to go first or second? Is there anything else I could be asking for regarding the credits to make it clear that I am the writer who made, by far, the biggest contribution to the script? This would be my first major credit, and I’m eager for this to be as reflective as possible of the work I have done on the script.”

**Craig:** Single Card, you are definitely a UK writer, as this is not something that happens here. The WGA litigates all credits and comes up with a single writing credit that may include multiple names, but it would always be on one card. In this case, it would be written by you and, A-N-D, so-and-so, ampersand, so-and-so, if they were a team, or three A-N-Ds. That is the maximum credits allowed for a screenplay would be three names. There would never be two different cards. Also, it would never be up to the producer. This is a very foreign concept to us.

**John:** The theories we can apply here from our experience is that in general, the writer’s name that’s listed first is considered the person who contributed the most. If we’re going through an arbitration, and we have to determine the order of, is it Writer C, then Writer B, then Writer A, whatever the first name that appears is, in the belief of the arbiter, is the person who contributed the most to the finished screenplay.

**Craig:** Correct. Nobody in the world notices or cares. It doesn’t really matter. I suppose if you were concerned about the ordering and where the prestige is, typically the closer you get to the final credit, the more prestigious it is. The Writers Guild, for instance, negotiated many years ago to get into the second-to-last position. It used to be writers, then producers, then directors. Now it’s producers, writers, directors, so we’re the second to last. Director is always the final credit.

But I got to tell you, Single Card, I’m not judging you here, but it is clear that this is your first major credit, because you’re dwelling on all of this. Don’t. It doesn’t matter. Here’s the way it works. Nobody cares what the order is. Nobody cares that it’s on a separate card. This will get hashed into an IMDb thing. That’s what people will see. Also, unless there is some sort of awards or things like that, in and of itself, it’s only going to matter to the business. Most people aren’t really paying attention. The business pays attention. You can certainly get more opportunities. But the ordering, separation of cards, you’re focusing on the wrong thing right now.

**John:** Yeah. Now, Craig, on the podcast, we’ve established why the US is an exception, that we are actually a true labor union for the writers of America. I guess what I’m confused about is whether any other international groups have come together to figure out writing credits for themselves, because there’s nothing that would stop a volunteer organization to come together to do this, the way the PGA credit is. Producers Guild is not an actual union, but they actually come together to determine the PGA producing credits on things.

**Craig:** Yes, but they only are able to do so because the companies allow them to. The companies and the academies basically said, “We’re going to outsource this dispute to you guys. We are allowing you to decide.” I’m not aware of any other organization around the world that adjudicates credits in a way that is legally binding per a contract with the companies. There are droit moral and first writer rights and things like that that exist as a function of law. I don’t know if anybody else does it like us. Our system is infuriating, but preferable to going hat in hand to a producer, because in this case, Single Card, I’m just going to take her or him at their word that they did do the vast majority of the work. But let’s say they didn’t, because writers say that all the time. We know as arbiters, we read those statements, and someone’s like, “I clearly did everything,” and then I read the scripts, I’m like, “You didn’t do anything.” Sometimes we get delusional about our contributions. If you’re buddies with the producer, if that’s your pal, does that mean you’re more likely to get credit, somebody else gets screwed over? It’s not good.

**John:** Not good at all. If you are a listener who actually does have information about how other international bodies may be determining credits, I’m just curious what’s out there.

**Craig:** It would be good to know, even if it’s an arrangement like the kind the PGA has, where it’s just a studio, or maybe like the BBC goes, “Yeah, we’ll let you guys figure it out.”

**John:** I could totally imagine something like BBC might have its own credit determination process.

**Craig:** It may very well, as it is a government.

**John:** Our animated projects that are not WGA-covered, they do have their own process, which is not always great.

**Craig:** Their own process is the producers decide.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, what is your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, I guess it’s a little late, because this is coming out in the new year, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It would’ve been good for you guys to know about this during the holiday season. But you know what? The holiday season keeps going. It’s a fun game that you can play with kids, families, large groups of parties, even eight, nine people. It’s a website called Gartic Phone, G-A-R-T-I-C phone dot-com. It’s just a twist on the good ole game of Telephone. The idea is, instead of somebody whispering something into someone’s ear, and then they pass it along, you draw a picture. Everybody draws a picture. Then the game figures out, okay, I’m going to send each one of you one of the other person’s pictures. You are going to write a caption that you think is what this picture meant to say. Then I’m going to send that caption to another person, who’s going to draw what they think that caption should be. It keeps going. Then at the end, it shows you the evolution of these things. It’s hysterical. It’s fun. It’s the kind of thing that is so absurd and silly and yet a delight. It’s totally free. You can do it on your phones, iPads, laptops. Fun for all ages. Gartic Phone.

**John:** Gartic Phone. The physical version of that that I play is called Telestrations. There’s these little whiteboard notebooks. The same idea, where on one page, you get a card with a prompt. You have to draw that thing, and you pass it to the next person.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Always a good game to play. Mine is also a game. It is Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Craig Mazin, for the last three years, coming on four years-

**Craig:** God.

**John:** … has been hosting a session, often weekly, playing D&D, of Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which is an established campaign setting world. It takes place underneath Waterdeep, in Halaster’s tomb of madness.

**Craig:** Domain.

**John:** Domain of madness. We started on April 7, 2020. I looked back through.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I have an Apple note that just goes through session by session what happened in a session.

**Craig:** We literally started like, “It’s the pandemic. Let’s do this.”

**John:** Craig, I want to thank you, because you were the person who made this all possible. Pandemic happens. We’re like, “Oh crap, are we still going to be able to play something?” Craig figured us out Roll20, which is the system which we are all looking at the same map. We’re all on Zoom. We started playing this game. It was an absolute lifesaver. That group stayed together. We added a few members over the while. I can’t believe we are finally finishing it. By the time this episode comes out, we will have finished the Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

**Craig:** The final battle is upon you. What are we, 100 and some odd sessions?

**John:** 113 sessions.

**Craig:** 113 sessions. That’s a whole lot of DMing.

**John:** That is.

**Craig:** I’m looking forward to it. My hope is that we keep going, that we find another game. I would love to play. As much as I enjoy DMing, it would be nice to play as well.

**John:** We’ve obviously done this podcast for 625 episodes, so we have a sense of doing things every week for a very long period of time is natural to us. Did you have any anticipation that it was going to take this long to get through this?

**Craig:** No, because I played it as part of a group, and that group was just faster. I think every group is different. You guys were way more deliberate and liked to look everywhere. That group would be like, “Oh, we found the way down. Let’s just go. We don’t care. Next.” You guys, which is great for me as DM, you love looking in every corner. There were very few things where I thought, “Aw, they missed this cool part.” You guys kind of did everything, which was great. Obviously, I homebrewed a bunch of it. There were some things that I knew were boring that I got rid of or made exciting. But by and large, it was an incredible dungeon crawl. You guys milked it for all it was worth. There’s this other thing. Middle-aged men are notorious for not having friends, and then they die. Having friends-

**John:** Yeah, it’s nice.

**Craig:** … is important. Having this ongoing group is important. It is a stellar group. We have some pretty famous people in it.

**John:** We have some heavy hitters in there.

**Craig:** Everybody is distinguished in one way or another, and while we were doing it, became more distinguished. Kevin Walsh became a five-time Jeopardy champion while we were doing this. There’s all these things that are just happening. It’s been great, and I’m looking forward to the final fight.

**John:** I just wanted to acknowledge the years of work and also the fact that obviously you created and are showrunning this massively expensive TV project, but for the eight of us who get your world-building week after week, I want to thank you again.

**Craig:** Thank you. It was a joy. It was a great thing to do. There were times where I was running sessions out of my trailer while we were shooting, at night. This was as much fun for me, and I’m glad it was… Advice for DMs out there: make the game fun for your players.

**John:** Crucial.

**Craig:** Crucial. You can’t baby them. They got to be a little scared. It’s okay that they get frustrated. But ultimately, if they don’t want to come back, you must be doing something wrong.

**John:** I think I’ve told you this before, but our neighbors moved in during the pandemic, and so we only met them a year after they moved in. They asked, “Why is that one light on in the second story of your guesthouse only on Thursdays, but until midnight?” It’s like, “It’s because I’m playing D&D.”

**Craig:** “Because I’m awesome.”

**John:** Because I’m awesome.

**Craig:** That’s why.

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

**Craig:** You know it.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also 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 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 record on lab-grown meat.

**Craig:** Lab-grown meat. What a great name for a band.

**John:** I would be shocked if it’s not already.

**Craig:** It’s got to be.

**John:** It’s got to be there.

**Craig:** Got to be there.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so a thing I’ve noticed over really the last year but maybe a little bit longer is I see you eating more fake meat.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not necessarily an ethical choice, although I think it probably is more ethical. But I like it. I don’t need it to be like, “Oh my god, it tastes just like regular meat.” Sometimes I want a burger, and sometimes I think I’ll go for the Impossible Burger, which is quite [indiscernible 01:04:31]. Also, I love Morningstar chicken nuggets, like a child. They’re good. They taste good.

**John:** They taste good. All the things we’re describing so far are just synthetic versions of things, like pea protein.

**Craig:** Tofu, pea protein, seitan, etc.

**John:** Rearranged into things. But have you had any of the stuff that’s actually animal cells but put together in a lab?

**Craig:** I don’t believe I have.

**John:** I don’t think I have either.

**Craig:** Is it out there?

**John:** No, I don’t think there’s any commercial applications. It’d be at some special restaurant that might have it or something.

**Craig:** But they’re working on it?

**John:** They’re working on it.

**Craig:** They’re working on growing meat in labs.

**John:** I’ve not eaten beef or pork or lamb, any mammals for 30 years.

**Craig:** For ethical reasons?

**John:** I became a full vegetarian in college. It was just for economic reasons. We were just broke, and so we would just eat lentils all the time. I wasn’t eating meat, and so I just stopped eating meat. Eventually, I started eating fish again, and I started eating chicken. Then I just stopped there. It’s been 30 years since I’ve had any red meat. I need to think about, would I eat fake cow grown in a lab. Maybe, I guess. I have no great ethical issue with it.

**Craig:** You can afford it, and it’s not hurting anything, so probably worth a shot. You might go, “Oh my god.”

**John:** “Oh my god.”

**Craig:** At some point, what’s the difference? If they can make it exactly the same, why not?

**John:** Right, which raises the question of, if they take human cells and put them together in that way, is it cannibalism?

**Craig:** I would argue it is not cannibalism any more than shooting someone in a video game is murder. But the thing is, would I want to? Supposedly, just based on the composition of humans, it’s not supposed to taste good. We don’t have a good distribution of fat and muscle and stuff. The fat sits on top of the muscle. I don’t think we’re going to be good. Pigs are the most delicious animal, I have to tell you.

**John:** I wouldn’t know.

**Craig:** Listen. As a Jew, I can tell you, we got that one wrong.

**John:** I guess what is cannibalism comes down to, is the prohibition because you’re doing harm to a human being and eating them? Doing the harm would be the murder. Doing the other thing… Or is it like not eating pork, like it’s wrong to do it?

**Craig:** It doesn’t feel like there should be anything in between. There’s no consciousness there. They’re just making meat. If they were cloning people to be eaten, no, that would be terrible. But I think growing it, it’s just protein and stuff, and no one suffered. No one was deprived of anything. No opportunities were lost. No life was removed.

**John:** In our stories, we often look at cannibalism like alive, or there’s a plane crash and there’s dead bodies, do you eat the dead body, or post-apocalyptic.

**Craig:** The old religions would occupy themselves with this question. In the Jewish faith, I can’t remember what the term is in Hebrew, but it basically means you have a duty to keep yourself alive and healthy as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. For instance, you are supposed to fast on Yom Kippur to atone for your sins. However, if you are physically frail and fasting would damage you, you’re not allowed to. It’s not just so you don’t have to. You’re not allowed to. I would imagine that they would be like, “Look.” I’m sure it doesn’t say this, but-

**John:** You really need to.

**Craig:** The Bible is very flexible. Among the various rules of how to purchase and sell slaves, I’m sure there is some sort of… Oh, the Bible.

**John:** Oh, the Bible.

**Craig:** Oh, Bible.

**John:** Save it for another bonus topic.

**Craig:** Yeah, that one will go over great.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Vultures Are Circling: Who Will Walk Away With Paramount?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-sale-shari-redstone-suitors-1235778461/) by Alex Weprin for The Hollywood Reporter
* [The Holdovers by David Hemingson](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Holdovers-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2dtdybqjrehxv9cwx9t4c/All-of-Us-Strangers.pdf?rlkey=g30scn7qf9nlspf49en2g7tub&dl=0)
* [May December by Samy Burch](https://film.netflixawards.com/assets/cms/films/May-December/Script/MAY-DECEMBER-Final-Script.pdf), story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik
* [Saltburn by Emerald Fennell](https://amazonmgmstudiosguilds.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Saltburn_Script.pdf)
* [Killers of the Flower Moon by Eric Roth & Martin Scorsese](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Killers-Of-The-Flower-Moon-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Barbie by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cd2bym23kd0kwsrysdpvi/barbie_final_shooting_script.pdf?rlkey=g3zc8e6vep6vf351p01zul6xt&dl=0)
* [Across the Spider-Verse by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller & Dave Callaham](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Spider-Man-Across-The-Spider-Verse-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b7a0udq0942rrbllaf0av/Oppenheimer.pdf?rlkey=frfag98w0o361drdhg36vhlo9&dl=0)
* [American Fiction by Cord Jefferson](https://amazonmgmstudiosguilds.com/app/uploads/2023/09/AmericanFiction.pdf)
* [Weekend Read 2](https://apps.apple.com/in/app/weekend-read-2/id1534798355)
* [Gartic Phone](https://garticphone.com/)
* [Dungeons & Dragons – Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage](https://dnd.wizards.com/products/waterdeep-dungeon-of-the-mad-mage)
* [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 Zach Lo ([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/625standard.mp3).