Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/is-this-person-going-to-ruin-everything).

**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 635 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, sometimes on this podcast we talk craft. Sometimes we talk business. Today on the show, it’s half and half. On the business side, how do you make sure that person you’re hiring for your movie or casting on your show, Craig, isn’t an absolute monster?

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** We’ll talk through best practices on vetting people. And on the craft side, how do write for characters whose native language is not English? We’ll look at and listen to examples for how to do it right and some pitfalls to avoid. We’ll also answer some more listener questions. And Craig, for a bonus segment, something I don’t think we’ve ever talked about enough on this podcast: cults.

**Craig:** Oh, god, I hate cults.

**John:** I love cults so much.

**Craig:** Why did it have to be cults?

**John:** Why did it have to be cults? Now, I joined the Zoom late, but I think you and Drew were already talking about this first item of business here, which is you love word games, but I was playing the new New York Times beta version word game, and I suspected, this is not gonna be Craig’s thing. I’m talking about New York Times Strands.

**Craig:** Strands. What a nice way for them to just rebrand word search, the dumbest of all puzzles. It’s not a puzzle. It’s just searching.

**John:** It’s a word search with a theme you have to discover, unlike a classic word search where a word can be either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Here, they can go around in various permutations, because it’s all done digitally.

**Craig:** One of the things that Dave Shukan, my frequent solving partner, and I often discuss when we are going through puzzle suites, you will see certain types of puzzles emerge over and over, because that’s pretty standard. Acrostics, for instance, is kind of a slog. I don’t know if you’ve ever done an acrostic. The New York Times used to run them and just stopped running them online for some reason no one can fathom. But they’re a bit of a slog. Word searches are the ultimate slog.

One of the things that Dave often remarks is, he’ll say, “This is a puzzle, but it isn’t any fun.” I agree with that. Word searches are just simply not fun. They’re just the busy work of puzzles. You just sit there, and you isolate a letter and then look around and see what other letters connect to it, and then you just keep going. But there’s actually nothing to solve. You’re merely just looking.

**John:** I’m not a huge fan of this. I’m still playing it every day, sort of out of inertia. What I will say is the fact that you don’t know quite what the theme is and what the unifying themes are, then once you actually discover, oh, this must be the pattern, then you actually can start looking for words you think might be there. My standards are lower than yours.

**Craig:** Listen. If people enjoy it, I’m not taking it away from them. And I don’t want to be a puzzle snob about it. I’m not snobby. There are certain versions of word searches that can be inventive. Foggy Brume, who makes the Panda Magazine puzzle suites, will often do word searches where there is some fascinating little gimmick inside of it. And discovering the gimmick and how it functions is the fun part. The word search itself is fairly easy. You’ll start to see words right away and then wonder, but what does this have to do with anything? And then you realize, oh, I see. If you take the end of this word over here and the beginning of this word over here, they spell a country name. Aha. What does this mean? There’s solving to do. This just looks like find a bunch of words and see what they are. Strands, I’m out.

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** No, thank you. I think when it comes to a bunch of words that are then unified by a theme, my prior One Cool Thing, Squeezy, far more fun for that.

**John:** I thought we might start with a question here as an amuse-bouche, because we have two big topics, but sometimes the questions get shunted way to the back of the episode. Drew, can you start us off with a question here?

**Drew Marquardt:** M.R. writes, “Yesterday I gave notes on a script and called out what I’ve always heard is script cheating, which is a piece of information that’s written but it’s unfilmable, like an action like saying something like, ‘Kate enters. She’s the sister of Jess,’ or, ‘Mike sits at a desk. He thinks a lot of himself.’ Kate entering and Mike sitting are filmable, but the descriptors are not. And you can’t tell an actor, ‘Just act like Jess’s sister,’ or, ‘Think a lot of yourself.’

“I called out a very similar situation in said script and received this email back: ‘Hey, M.R. I went through some of the notes, and I just want to let you know that your script is supposed to have voice. I don’t think it’s wise for you to give people notes saying script cheating, which is not anything I’ve ever heard of. I think you may be hurting other writers with some of your feedback. Just be careful with notes like that.’ Obviously, every script has a voice, but was I wrong to give this script a cheating note?”

**John:** Neither side here is completely perfect, but I think there’s some balance and subtlety.

**Craig:** Everyone’s wrong.

**John:** Everyone’s wrong. There’s some balance here that I think we need to find. Let’s start with the second person, like, “I’ve never heard of that as called cheating.” I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast as cheating. There’s things you could put on a page that if they’re genuinely unfilmable and they’re not actionable in a way – there’s pieces of information you could put on a script that there’s no way for the audience to have that piece of information – that is cheating. There can be an issue with that.

It also feels like M.R. may be going overboard in what he was considering cheating, because as we’ve talked about on the podcast before too, there are times where you want to give some flavor, some texture, some tone on the page that lets you know what this feels like, even if it’s not directly something you can aim a camera at.

**Craig:** Look. This is why writing groups and such are problematic at times. We don’t know M.R., so we don’t know the tone. We don’t know if this is the final straw, if this is something that happens all the time. We don’t know if everyone’s like, “Oh my god, M.R., why are you so mean to everybody?” I don’t know. We don’t know the context. All we know is this.

In this isolated bit, script cheating is the nice way of saying bad writing. This is already the nice way, because it’s bad writing to say, “Kate enters. She is the sister of Jess.” That’s bad. It’s bad because it is short circuiting the writer’s obligation to inform the audience in a creative way that Kate is Jess’s sister, which I assume happens in the script at some point, and so the cheating is probably not even necessary.

But yeah, script cheating is a perfectly fine… Honestly, if you can’t handle that, I don’t even know what to tell you about what you’re facing in your career, should you have one. John and I have sat in rooms and been just obliterated. Especially when you’re starting out and you don’t have enough credibility for people to even respect you when you walk in the room. You walk into a room, the knives are out before you even sit down. Yeah, you’re gonna hear some stuff that’s harsh.

Look. John, you and I are old. We’re of that generation. And I know the new generation really doesn’t like this stuff. But as far as I’m concerned, script cheating is a perfectly fine way of saying that’s just bad.

I’m more annoyed by somebody saying, “I don’t think it’s wise for you.” You could always just say, “Hey, you know what? Thank you for that. I have to tell you it kind of hurt. I know you didn’t intend to hurt. I’m just letting you know it did and that maybe if there was a kinder way for you to say that next time, it would just make it easier for me to hear, and it would be more productive for me. But thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.” There’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** I’m thinking back to notes I’ve given to writers. At times, I’ve been overly… They’ll send me the script, and I didn’t ask the question first, like, “What do you want? Do you want me to tell you how great it is or to give you constructive feedback or to be really, line by line, diligent about things I’m noticing here?” There have been times I’ve over-corrected on the page, and that was a problem.

In the situation of, let’s talk about, “She is Jess’s sister.” There may be times in a perfectly fantastic script where, on a first introduction of a character, you might say, “Tina, Jess’s sister, comes through the thing.” We’re establishing that they’re sisters, and we’re gonna find that out really quickly anyway. But as a service to the reader and figuring out what the context of all this is, it’s really genuinely helpful. I do find sometimes writers get obsessed with these “have to figure out everything from first” principles, like you can’t put anything on the page that wouldn’t be immediately visible to the audience. That’s not doing anybody a favor either, because again, the script is meant to approximate the experience of being in that movie theater. But in that movie theater, you’re going to say, “Oh, those two characters look a lot alike. They’re probably sisters.” Sometimes you need to give that information on the page, that you would not need to give in the actual film.

**Craig:** That is true. In those instances, sometimes what I will say is, “Kate enters. We’ll find out shortly that she’s the sister of Jess.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** To help the reader there get a few things that might be pretty evident on screen, but you’re also telling them, “Hey, you will find out. This isn’t the only time that the information will be available to you here in an action description in a script. Just trust me, you’ll find out, but for now, FYI.” Perfectly fine thing to do. But I don’t know, tone policing here. It feels a little tone police-y to me.

**John:** Yeah, it does. It does a bit.

**Craig:** That said, if M.R. is a total jerk and everyone hates M.R., then all the people listening to this are like, “Oh my god, why are you enabling M.R.?” I hope M.R. is not a jerk. I really, really do.

**John:** I hope so too. It’s not also clear from this context whether the person who was writing back was talking about their own script or maybe they’re part of a group that were looking at some other third person’s script. We don’t know what the whole context of this is. But just again, be cool. As you’re giving notes, make sure you’re understanding the context the person’s asking for the notes, and think about how you would receive those notes as a writer.

**Craig:** Can I give a guess?

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I think that the person who wrote M.R. is not the person who wrote the script, but rather, that person’s friend. The person who wrote the script complained to their friend about it, was upset, and then the friend said, “I’m gonna go tell M.R. to not do that anymore.” That’s my guess.

**John:** Hey, Craig, in our actual real life, there have been times where one of us has had to go to a third person and say, “Hey, this is a thing to be aware of.” That’s a scenario that happens in real life.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes you need to be an intermediary. And when you are, it always goes best if you feel like a neutral intermediary, where there aren’t judgments involved, but rather, just facts and requests. I think the problem with this is, “I don’t think it’s wise. I think you may be hurting people,” and then an imperative, “Be careful.” Not, “In the future, it might be helpful if.” For somebody who’s concerned about hurting people with feedback, this person didn’t seem too concerned about hurting M.R. with feedback.

**John:** The last little point about voice is there are times where you’re gonna put something in a script that it’s not filmable, you’re never gonna see it, but it just helps give the reader a sense of who that person is, what the space is like. You can describe how it smells. Listen. You’re not gonna actually ever smell that, but it gives us a sense of what it’s ultimately gonna feel like and sound like anyone else to. You say, “Oh, that’s cheating.” It’s not really cheating, because you’re providing context that is gonna be helpful for the reader to understand what this is ultimately gonna look and sound like.

**Craig:** And for the actors as well.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** They can perform smelling something. They can perform having sweaty armpits. We probably won’t see it, but they know what it feels like. No question. As always, our advice is follow the rules but don’t necessarily follow the rules. The only rule we have is write well.

**John:** Write well.

**Craig:** Write well.

**John:** Podcast done. 635 episodes, we’ve reached our conclusion.

**Craig:** We got there.

**John:** We got there.

**Craig:** We got there in two words.

**John:** Now, Craig, as we’ve established previously on this podcast here, one of my goals for 2024 has been to become better at understanding and appreciating the differences between accents and dialects in English. This is a thing that you have a very natural talent for. You’re very good at performing different accents. I can hear it. I don’t have trouble writing it. But it’s not in my bones. It’s not in my brain to quite the same degree. And so I’ve been studying it. I’ve been working with an instructor on that. I’ve been working through, first off, the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then really learning different native accents in English, so going through the British Isles and other places to really figure out what are the differences here, what is the musicality and changes between these different dialects and accents.

But one of the things we’ve been working on more recently is folks for whom English is not their native language and what are the common characteristics we see, what are the, not just mistakes, but just the structural changes they’re gonna make, what are the sound changes you’re gonna hear throughout that.

This is a thing that I think probably most of our listeners are gonna encounter at some point, is you have a character whose native language is not English. How do you write them on the page? Because you’re not obviously going to go crazy and try to approximate their accent. But they are gonna make different choices. I want to talk about the actual choices that’ll be reflected in the written dialog that you are doing to understand how a person whose native language is not English might be communicating their ideas.

**Craig:** This is an area where I think people used to blithely stumble about. And in their blithe stumbling, they may have conveyed intention well, but for people who were authentic speakers of that dialect or that accent or that language, they may have thought, “This is just ridiculous,” because we, all of us, I think, just used to just do stuff with less consideration for other people.

If you could look back at some of the scripts that were floating around when you and I started, people would routinely write Black characters with a Black dialect, AAVE, African American Vernacular English, and in doing so, just bungle it, or it just felt weirdly insulting if they were not Black themselves, and it just felt a bit foreign. That’s understandable.

What’s happened is there’s been a correction. But in the correction, I think a lot of writers – and we are always writing people that we are not – are kind of afraid to make a mistake. Writing out of fear is not helpful either.

**John:** What I want to talk about today is really looking for and listening to the changes in the musicality and the word choices that are gonna be likely for people coming from certain other native languages. And so we have some good examples here. Before we even get into the examples, I just want to talk through some things I’ve observed that are probably helpful if you’re thinking about a character whose native language is not English.

Most other languages are gonna have a different thinking word or sound. In English, we do an “um” or some sort of stalling word. Every language is going to have their own version. People tend to revert to their native thinking sound if they’re speaking English or some approximation of that. Be thinking about what that sound might be. You and I both have been in situations where, other countries, and we are reaching for a word. We kind of know what that word is, but we can’t quite get it. Your characters are gonna be doing the same thing. Be thinking about the pauses they’re taking, the approximations of the word they may try to get to.

If you’re speaking a language and it’s not your native language, you’re probably going to have reduced variation in how you’re forming structures in sentences. Non-native English speakers are gonna probably reach for the simple past rather than “he had” or “he did,” because we have so many ways to create the past in English. Other languages do too, but they’re gonna probably go for the simplest version of that. They will tend to go back to recycle the same word rather than go for synonyms and variety the way that we might, because they’ve found that one word, they’re gonna keep using that one word.

**Craig:** There is always a risk that you’re going to make your character sound dumb. Part of the counteraction is to show the frustration, if somebody does not speak English natively and they aren’t very good at it or they’re still learning, that there is a frustration, because I’ve felt that frustration trying to speak another language myself, where you’re like, “Okay, I know exactly what I want to say, but I’m struggling to put it into the words that I have available to me.” There’s also even the recognition and embarrassment that other people are looking at you and thinking you’re not doing very well. All of that stuff is good human work to think about when this is happening, so it isn’t just a convenient immigrant patois that we have seen many, many times, where people just say, “Me going to store,” and it just becomes Tarzan.

**John:** Sometimes when I’m speaking in French, I feel like, “Crap, I’m like a third grader here,” because I don’t have really simple stuff, and yet I have really complicated vocabulary, because I have cognates in English I can reach for. I could say some really complicated things pretty easily, complicated terms, but I can’t stitch together really simple things. I can go into a store, and I can’t describe the ice cube tray holder, maker thing. I don’t have that, but I have “lugubriousness” or I can reach for bigger words. But I don’t have simple things at my grasp. That’s a real frustration.

**Craig:** I kind of like the idea of you walking into a store, saying, “I need object for the making of ice. I apologize for the lugubrious nature of my request.” How confused would that guy be?

**John:** So bewildered. Another common feature would be overgeneralizing a rule. This is a thing that happens as people learn English. We make plurals by adding S’s to things, except when we don’t. We have “mice” rather than “mouses.” Those things are going to happen.

If the person’s native language doesn’t use articles the same way, like Russian doesn’t use most articles, they will drop them out. And so you’ll hear that in nonnative speakers, where we would put an “a” or a “the,” and they just plow through without them. That’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Interestingly, also, I’ve noticed the opposite. Ksenia Sereda, who is our director of photography here on The Last of Us, is Russian. I watched as her English has improved dramatically over the year since she started with us. She speaks about eight languages. She’s just this remarkable polyglot. Her English was good in the sense that she could absolutely communicate, but she had a few phrases. She loved the phrase “such as.” She would struggle at times to get things across, or there were those simple mistakes. For instance, when she would refer to the character of Joel, she would call him “the Joel.” Maybe in Russian, there is something that works that way. As the years have gone on-

**John:** I think she’s overcorrecting is probably what I suspect.

**Craig:** It may have been. She may have been overcorrecting. There are all these wonderful little things that over time she… When we switch a lens, like we’re on the 27, and we want to go to the 35, she would say, “Switch on 35.” One day I said, “I’m regretting saying this to you, because I love listening to you say, ‘Switch on 35,’ but for switching a lens, we would say, ‘Switch to 35.'”

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I do regret telling her that, because I miss it. I miss, “Switch on 35.” But it has been amazing watching somebody’s English improve so wildly and so impressively over the course of just a couple of years.

**John:** That gets back to our prepositions. Language is language. There’s just not gonna be a one-to-one match. Anybody who’s had to suffer through “por” and “para” in Spanish, it should be clean, how it does it, and some things just don’t work right. Some things don’t fall directly that same way.

Same thing happens with the verb tenses, and particularly in terms of how we’re dividing time. Very near future, far future, recent past, further back past, we have ways that we do it in English that just don’t match up with other languages, and there’s never gonna be a one-to-one match. Our present progressive, there are equivalents in other languages, but they’re probably not gonna get there very quickly as an ESL speaker. You may be stuck in the present rather than present progressive or the near future, because it’s what you have handy for you.

Lastly, I would say a thing you’ll often notice is, if a character is doing reported speech, so like, “He said to me this and this,” that’s really challenging to flip into that, because I’m staying in the present, but I’m reporting something that happened in the past. I have to get prepositions right for how all this fits together. Reported speech is often a place where you’re gonna notice inconsistencies. That’s often an opportunity to reflect the difference and difficulty of trying to communicate these ideas in English.

**Craig:** Native speakers will even struggle with that. That’s also part of recognizing it. There is this other thing when we’re trying to write people speaking English who don’t natively speak it. What they do speak and where they are from also should influence how they sound.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** If you listen to, for instance, comedians are so helpful for this, because so many comedians who are first-generation Americans will talk about their family and talk about their parents and do impressions of their parents. Listening to that gives you this incredible insight into the specificity of the pattern. It’s different. Koreans who have learned English sound different than French people who have learned English, because the root language is always there. The root patterns, the intonations, musicality, tempo, rhythm, all of that stuff bleeds across.

Here’s some really controversial advice here, folks. When you are writing someone from a country who is speaking English as a not first language, talk to people who know, if you are not one of them, and have them look it through. Have them advise. They will help you. They will make it so much better if you do.

**John:** Absolutely. Last, I would say always consider when that character started learning English, because that will not only affect the accent down the road, but also their facility with the language. For my dialect class, I was going through some Japanese speakers of English, and there were these diplomats whose English was just so spectacularly good, and there were also folks who had learned it much more recently. You could really hear the differences and how in their bones it was, and also, which English did they learn. You can definitely hear some of them learn British English versus American English. Those changes carry through.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s listen to some examples here. We’re gonna start with a clip from Anatomy of a Fall, the amazing Sandra Hüller here. This is a really amazing performance, because it’s all in France, and yet she is a German woman who is much more comfortable speaking English than speaking French. Some of her most pivotal scenes take place in English. Let’s listen to her in Anatomy of a Fall.

**Sandra Hüller (as Sandra Voyter):** You complain about the life that you chose. You are not a victim. Not at all. Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner. You’re incapable of facing your ambitions, and you resent me for it. But I’m not the one who put you where you are. I’ve nothing to do with it. You’re not sacrificing yourself as you say. You choose to sit on the sideline because you’re afraid, because your pride makes your head explode before you can even come up with a little germ of an idea. And now you wake up and you’re 40 and you need someone to blame. And you’re the one to blame. You’re petrified by your own fucking standards and your fear of failure. This is the truth.

**John:** Just so, so great. You could listen for her accent and her dialect, but really I want to focus on the word choices. A native English speaker probably would not have constructed those phrases in that way. I think she goes through a phrase, and then she repeats the end of that phrase in a way that feels kind of German to me. But Craig, what’s your telling on that?

**Craig:** It’s difficult to separate it from the accent, because the accent does add a certain… You just start to think this is definitely a German person talking. It doesn’t have the backwards syntax, or I suppose what Germans would call the non-backwards syntax, forward syntax. German syntax is very Yoda-like to us when we learn it.

**John:** The verb at the very end.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t have that. What’s also of interest here is that the person writing this, who is now an Oscar award winner for their fine screenplay, was also not a native English speaker. There’s all sorts of possibilities going on here. There’s a clipped nature to the pronunciation of the words that is wonderfully German. If you were to remove the accent using some horrible AI de-accentifier, you would notice. I think you would notice something would be strange. You just wouldn’t be able to put your finger on it.

**John:** If you look at the words scripted on the page – I haven’t gone back to the script to see exactly whether she’s saying word for word what was on the page – you would not guess that this is an American speaker. It doesn’t have an American way of putting stuff together. I could hear the same thing with an RP British accent. I could feel that working more, but it’s not an American accent. There’s a musicality to it. It’s really what I’m trying to get to. It’s that the order of the word, how it fits together, it feels specific to this character and this world, and it’s not some generic American accent.

**Craig:** There is a formality to it. Even the fact that the pronunciation is so careful. Even though there are words where it’s supposed to end in a D and it sounds like it ends in a T or something like that, which is typically German, or I believe she says, “Germ of an idea,” and she pronounces it “cherm.”

**John:** “Cherm.”

**Craig:** There is nonetheless a kind of over-pronunciation of some words, whereas, you’re right, a native American speaker would be eliding and slurring a bit more of the pronunciation there.

**John:** She’s speaking passionately and very quickly, and yet every little phoneme is coming through. That feels very specific as well.

Let’s jump through it. We don’t have the clip for it here, but we actually have the pages in this case. This is Past Lives. We had Celine Song on the podcast earlier. Here I want to take a look at, this is a scene happening in the East Village bar with Hae Sung, Nora, and Nora’s husband, Arthur. Just Hae Sung’s dialog here, he’s not a comfortable English speaker at all, and so his first line here is, “When I was 24 year, I… ” That’s right. That’s absolutely correct. The idea of 24 years old is a complicated thing. “When I was 24 year” is probably the Korean way of constructing how old you are.

**Craig:** There’s a video I saw floating around that a Korean American did, basically he was having a conversation with himself, like two people on a phone. The idea was what a conversation would sound like if Koreans just spoke English but in a perfect translation of what the Korean was. It’s remarkable. It is nothing at all like what we would understand the translation to be. It is very specific. Way fewer words are being used than you would use in English. It’s more compact. It’s more efficient. But it is very, very different. There’s a lovely extraction of that here. Listen. Oscar award nominee, Celine Song.

**John:** When we had her on the show, we didn’t have the script in front of us. I do like seeing how Nora’s dialog here when she’s talking to Hae Sung, the Korean comes first, and then there’s a slash and then what the subtitles would be come after it, which is a very natural, native way to do this. It feels really great.

Just going back through to Hae Sung’s English dialog, “But. Military, work, it’s… same.” Just as written on the page, you can sense he’s searching, he’s trying to find a way to communicate this idea. “There’s overtime pay, stuff like that here, right? In Korea, you work overtime all the time, but there’s no overtime pay.” He’s found the words. He’s keeping to the words he actually has and that have worked before. He’s staying with these simple patterns.

**Craig:** Phrases like “all the time” are easy to remember. But then later down, when she asks him, “It’s hard physically, or mentally?” he says, “Both. Definitely physical. Hard. And… ” She says, “Mentally?” And he says, “Mentally, I… strong,” which is probably how I would… If I were thinking about that in French, I would be like, “Je,” and then if I was just emotional, I would just go, “Fort.” Because “I am,” “je suis,” and then yeah, it just falls apart there at times.

What’s fascinating here, and Celine understands, when you’re talking with somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you will naturally reply back with what they’re saying but in the correct format, almost as if you are teaching and confirming. “You’re strong mentally,” she says. And he says, “Yes, right.” There’s an appreciation there of, okay, good, you understood me, because part of the discussion between a person who speaks natively and a person who doesn’t is a confirmation that one is being understood by the other.

**John:** Absolutely. So crucial. The next clip is something that Drew found for us. This is from Irma Vep. The context here, we have a Hong Kong actress shooting a movie in France, and like Anatomy of a Fall, English becomes the British language between these two characters.

[Irma Vep (1996) clip]

**Zoe:** And you went to see the Batman, you know?

**Maggie:** Batman?

**Zoe:** Yes. No, not Batman, for with all, you know, Catwoman?

**Maggie:** The Return? The second one?

**Zoe:** Yeah.

**Maggie:** Oh, yeah.

**Zoe:** And you liked it?

**Maggie:** No.

**Zoe:** I thought, you know what, it was completely crap. I just went because Rene was mad and he said to me, “You have to go there to understand the film.” But I think it’s a movie for the fans, you know.

**Maggie:** The first one was bad enough, right?

**Zoe:** Yes.

**Maggie:** I don’t know why they’d make three.

**Zoe:** That’s true.

**Maggie:** But I think Catwoman was all right.

**Zoe:** Yes, it’s true. I like Catwoman. She’s nice. You know, I tell you everything, and then you can know me a lot. I mean, I don’t like American films. No.

**Maggie:** Right. I know what you mean.

**Zoe:** Yes? Everything is too much decoration, too much money. You agree with me?

**Maggie:** Sure.

**Zoe:** And all this money, this big money, big-

**Maggie:** And they’re so lucky to have so much money.

**Zoe:** Yes, but why? For what? For this? Or this? Nothing, you know.

**John:** Again, here we have two characters who are obviously seen in the film that they are looking at each other to try to get confirmation, like, do you actually understand what I’m saying, are we talking about the same things. Their levels of English are approximately the same. The French actress has a stronger French accent. But again, I think you could read it on the page and understand that these are characters communicating at 100 percent because they are trying to cross this bridge.

**Craig:** They’re using very simple phrases, a lot of questions. A lot of questions to make sure that the other person understands what they’re saying. This is an inherent insecurity of people that do not speak English as first language. They’re making sure that the other person gets it. Luckily for these two characters, they’re discussing something that everybody around the world shares, which is a ridiculous hatred of American movies that they all seem to watch over and over and over.

French people hate McDonald’s. They’re like, “Get out of our country, McDonald’s.” I’m like, McDonald’s would totally get out of your country if you stopped eating at McDonald’s. It’s a business. This is kind of amusing in that regard. It almost feels like a French textbook discussion. “Do you like American movies?” “No, I do not like American movies.” “Do you agree?” “Yes, I agree.”

**John:** Getting back to the question of, “Do you agree?” Do you answer that question with an affirmative or a negative? There’s the, “Yeah, no.” There’s all these little subtleties that we have in English. Every other language has their own specific subtleties there. When it’s not native in your bones, you’re going for the simplest way to make sure that the other person understands that you hear them and you can follow what they’re saying.

**Craig:** Yes. And if these people were speaking their native language, the discussion would be even more obnoxious, because it would be full of brilliant examples and wonderful moments. And there would also probably be much less agreement, because it’s too hard to disagree when you’re struggling to find the words. “I don’t like those movies, but I like Catwoman.” “Yes, I also like Catwoman.” Do you? Sure. At this point, now you’re just trying to have the conversation, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. There is a social grace to agreement. Disagreement requires subtlety, care, a lot of small discrimination between words, some of which will push things into a bad place, some of which will push things into an interesting discussion place. If you don’t have the instantly accessible toolkit for that, you may just default to agreeing.

**John:** I would say even though they’re both ESL speakers, I can imagine on a page that their voices still can read differently. Zoe, the French speaker here, the choices that she’s making and the small mistakes she makes feel French to me. The musicality feels specific to it. Maggie’s, who’s from Hong Kong, who has a more British background, also feels specific. I suspect even on the page, you can really read them as two very different voices, even though they’re still nonnative English speakers.

One of the most difficult exercises I had to do for my dialect class was take a scene that I’d already written, that was supposed to have two American speakers, and have one be Irish and one be Scottish. Really tough for my brain to switch between the two of those, because they’re distinct sounds, but in my brain they’re hard to hold apart.

**Craig:** What’s interesting, John, one of the things I admire about you is that you find these areas that are challenging for you and you just steer your boat right into them. Accents are fun for me. I enjoy them. That exercise you just described, I would actually look forward to. I don’t think it would be too much of a challenge for me. But there are things in my life that are incredibly challenging, like for instance, drawing. I am so bad. I have such a zero ability to naturally create realistic looking things, perspective, any of the fundamentals. The thought of taking a class to try and get better just makes me pee my pants in fear.

This is a honest question for you. My concern is, I would put a lot of time and effort in to become as good as somebody who had talent was when they were in kindergarten, because you either do or you don’t have that thing. What is your goal here?

**John:** With drawing, for example, that was one of my earlier areas of interest. I spent a year and I learned how to draw. I learned how to see and how to draw. I’m much better at it than I was. I’m not doing my practice every day or anything like that. But I got much better at it. But I also realized that, as you said, I’m only gonna get up to a level who was a 6th grader who was pretty good at drawing when they started.

With this, this is actually useful for me to be better at, because if I can hear these voices distinctly in my head more clearly, then it’s gonna be easier for me to write those characters and really hear their voices in my head clearly before I’m putting them down on the page. This is genuinely useful for me, I feel.

Again, recognizing what your weaknesses are and striving to improve them is fun to do. I picked up running, and so I can run really far now, which is surprising to me. Again, it just took practice and recognizing that you’re going to give up some other things in order to spend the time running.

**Craig:** There’s a topic for us to discuss maybe in a future podcast, if we continue to do the podcast. What episode are we on now?

**John:** 635.

**Craig:** That seems like a good round number. In any case, let’s say we were to keep going. That is about help, the concept of help, and recognizing as you move through your career where you’re going to need help. Even if you’re trying to shore those areas up, there are places that you identify.

I’m gonna give you an example right now for me. As I go through production, as I’m directing, one of the areas I know I need help with is – because, again, I have a very good sense of composition, but what I struggle with is just the very simple notion, as we’re shooting, of eye lines and which side of the shoulder you should be on. I need help with that. I have a fantastic sense of how things edit together. I understand where one shot should die and where another shot should pick up. I understand what kind of coverage I’m going to need. But oftentimes, I really do need help trying to figure out, wait, so in this shot, when they’re looking across the room from this one to that one, should the camera be over on this side or that side. I have help. I have camera [crosstalk 00:38:43].

**John:** You have help.

**Craig:** I have a script supervisor. I have a DP. There are all sorts of areas where at some point you just have to say, no matter how hard I’m trying, here are the following areas were I need help. But that’s a topic for another time.

**John:** Absolutely. I guess the last point about why I learn new things is that I enjoy being bad at things and struggling and being a newcomer at things, because it also just makes me feel young. I remember when I was young, things were hard. It was like, “Oh, I can’t figure this out.” Then you get better at it. It’s like, “Oh, I feel young.” It’s nice being a beginner at things sometimes.

**Craig:** I do enjoy the horror and excitement of being a level 1 character in D&D or starting a new video game that’s level-based, where you’re level 1 and basically one punch takes you out. You have no idea what the hell you’re doing and where you should go. You’ve barely mastered anything. It is like growing up all over again. It’s fun.

**John:** Let’s segue to our next topic, which can rely a bit on our experience of not being complete newcomers to things, which is on vetting. This past week, Craig, you and I were talking about a producer who had done terrible things. We were both surprised to learn about this, and shocked. But I also was reading this article in Slate talking about what they called Mean Too, so the extension of the Me Too movement, which is just like, oh, these people are assholes, and now we actually are going to identify these famous people as being assholes. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

A point they made in this article is that once you’ve hired a star, once they’re in wardrobe fittings, that star has a lot of power and control, and that you’ve ceded some of the power and control to a person who may not be a great person. I texted you, Craig, because as we were talking about this producer, you are a person who’s hiring a ton of people. You’re hiring actors and crew and everybody else. I want to ask you, how concerned are you about not just can this person do this job, but are they going to be a monster either on set or do something off set that’s going to reflect badly on the show?

**Craig:** It’s an enormous concern. The tricky part when you’re dealing with actors, there is a lot of information floating around out there. A lot. Now, there are actors that people just say, “It’s gonna be worth it.” There are actors – and it could be the same actor – where somebody else says, “Life’s too short.” I have a little bit more of a “life’s too short” vibe. There are certain people that have been proposed, and I would think to myself, “They would be perfect, but life’s too short.”

But when you’re talking about all these other people that you can be hiring, heads of departments and things like that, the danger is that there is an interaction gap. I typically will call fellow showrunners to inquire about potential heads of departments. It’s also a joy when I can report back to them. I texted Albert Kim just the other day to say that the prop master that I checked in with him about and hired has been doing just such a wonderful job, and that’s great.

But we, who are running things, have a certain kind of interaction with those people, because we’re their boss. What’s happening though when we’re not there, and they’re the boss in their fiefdom? How does that go on?

One of the very interesting aspects of showrunning that I hadn’t even anticipated was that if there is any kind of serious HR complaint, that the executive producers are filled in. We’re told. Thank god it does not happen frequently at all. But it is an eye opener to go, “Oh, okay, that’s surprising, because my interactions with that person were of this kind.” Apparently, once the cats were away, the mouse was mean. That’s a little nerve-wracking. It’s harder to get a read on that by checking around.

**John:** Let’s talk about vetting, because when you are considering hiring a person, be it an actor, be it a crew person, you’re going to look at their references, but hopefully you’re gonna find somebody who you can go to to say, “Hey, can you tell me honestly what it was like working with this person?”

When I get those incoming emails, I will say, “Yes, let me call you about them,” unless that person is just so spectacular that I will just email back, like, “This is the best person in the world. You should absolutely hire them.” The phone call is your friend here, because people will be honest and direct in a phone calls in ways they will, for reasonable reasons, won’t want to put down in an email.

Your point about, yes, ask showrunners, but if you could find somebody else to ask, that’s also going to help a lot too, because you get a sense of who are they like to assistants. There have been cases where I’ve called up folks who were assistants to people, said, “Tell me about them. What was it like to work with them?” Because if I’m just asking the people who hired them, they could be really good at managing up and managing their bosses, but absolute a monster when it comes to the people working for them. I don’t want that in my life.

**Craig:** No, you don’t. But there’s only so much you can do. That said, do all the things you can do as best you can. There are going to be errors. As you try and figure out who should be joining your crew, whether it’s as an actor or as a craftsperson, do your best, ask your questions. Just understand some people will be lovely and yet not a good fit for the show, in which case a change is made, and sometimes some people will be very talented but nightmares for various reasons, in which case there must be a change. But you’re hoping for that beautiful thing where what you expected is what you get. We don’t tolerate what we used to.

I myself have become way more aware of my own anger levels. I’m angry all the time. I’m like the Hulk. I wake up angry. I go to bed angry. But my anger is not at people. My anger is not this irrational whatever. My anger is entirely about trying to figure out how to get the stuff that’s in front of me to be like the stuff that I want to be in front of me.

There are times where I get frustrated, because, let’s say… They make me go to meetings, John. I go to a lot of meetings. I don’t want to go to the meetings, but I go to the meetings, because they tell me it’s really important, because I have to answer the questions so people know what to do. I will go to a meeting and I will get asked a question and I will answer it. Then there’s like three more meetings that feel very duplicative to me, and the questions get asked again, and I answer them again and again. And then I show up on the day, and the answer I gave 12 times in meetings has not occurred. This is enormously frustrating.

I’m just very aware that the frustration can be expressed, I can express it firmly, but volume is kind of a thing. Also, I’ve become aware – this is something like, if I taught a showrunning school, this would probably be lesson of day 1. You as a showrunner may think of yourself as – you may have a low self-esteem. You may have a lot of core shame. You may think of yourself as a schlub. You may have imposter syndrome. It doesn’t matter. When you interact with all of these other people, they are looking at you as the person who can fire them. You have this enormous influence on their lives. If you loathe them, not only will they get fired, but people are gonna call me, and then they’re worried that I’m gonna tell them that they’re no good. There’s a lot of just built-in fear. You have to remember what it was like talking to the big boss. You have to remember how intimidating that was, before that person even opened their mouth, before they did anything.

That lesson in awareness of your own power is really important, because I think a lot of people in Hollywood with power don’t feel like they have it, and so they don’t act like they have it. You have to just remind yourself that you have it.

No one’s perfect. There are moments. But we are hearing quite a bit about some people for whom it seems the moment of awareness will either never come or has yet to come, and no matter how many times people have officially complained, they don’t seem to care.

**John:** We’ve talked about Scott Rudin on the podcast before. There was a person who – it was like this weird badge of honor to have survived working in his office. That was incredibly screwed up. We completely misunderstood the assignment in terms of how to think about having survived in a difficult office. I think and hope we’ve moved on a bit from that and that we have come to understand, both as employers and as employees, the social contract we’ve made there cannot be about subjugation and control.

**Craig:** That’s right. We will always be a strange business in that we are empowering artists with a lot of money and a lot of control, and that means writers, directors, actors, as well as other artists, like cinematographers and production designers. Artists aren’t necessarily the most rational, calm-headed people in the world. It’s one of those things. There’s brains that work a certain way. Everybody accepts a certain amount of that. There are things that I think showrunners or directors or actors do, that if you did in an escrow office, you’d probably be shown the door almost immediately.

**John:** Oh my god, the number of conversations I’ve had with Mike where he’s like, “I cannot believe that this is permissible in your industry,” because he’s coming from a more corporate setting. He’s like, “How is that even possible?” It’s how it all works.

**Craig:** It is possible because you are dealing with very specific brains. You’ve gathered a lot of people together who are artists. There is a case to be made that extreme artistic talent and mental illness are very hard to distinguish from each other, that there’s probably quite a bit of overlap. People understand a little bit of it.

Also, specifically with actors, there is this understanding that no matter what we’re all doing, they’re the ones on screen, which means if they’re having a day, you gotta figure it out, because we can’t have the scene, which will exist forever in fixed form, be bad because they were having a day and everyone else said, “That’s unacceptable.” Then of course, you don’t want to necessarily encourage them to have their days. You have to figure out how to make it all work, and we generally do.

**John:** That’s very familiar to anybody who’s a parent. It’s like, how do you get through this tough situation without creating a pattern in which this is how you’re gonna deal with these situations all the time.

**Craig:** Showrunning and parenthood are remarkably similar. Remarkably. When you were raising Amy, I’m sure you and Mike at some point turned to each other and said, “She’s gonna be complaining about us in therapy, what, in about 10 years,” because you can’t help it. You can’t help it. It’s gonna happen. It’s just gonna happen. I know that there are probably people that have complained about me to their therapists, because I’m in charge.

Do you remember when you were starting out, the people that were in charge, it didn’t matter who they were, that one thing that everybody could bond over is either making fun of or complaining about the boss. You hope that you can be as close to, “You know what? He’s a great guy. He just has his weirdnesses.” That’s the best you can hope for.

**John:** That’s the best you can hope for, for sure. 100 percent. As we wrap up this topic, it’s easy to think about red flags. Let’s talk about some green flags. This is something, if you’re seeing these patterns, that’s a good sign.

One thing I always look for as a green flag is they repeatedly work with the same people again. They’ve worked with that director, that producer time and time over. There’s something there that’s working, and they’re willing to work together again. That’s generally a green flag for me.

**Craig:** Agreed. Also, what is their personal life like? It’s not anything that’s determinative. But if somebody is clearly going through a phase in their life where they have a relationship that’s falling apart, they are being sued, they’re getting into bar fights, they’ve become unreliable, that’s a problem.

Best practice, green flag, somebody whose life appears to be rather stable. They’ve got good people around them. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been married for 30 years to the same person. It just means that there’s a certain stability in terms of their management, their friendships, their living situation, the way that they comport themselves. That’s always a green flag to me.

**John:** When people say spontaneously, “I love them,” you get a sense, oh, people love them. They didn’t have to say that. It’s not just they love their work. They actually love being around that person. Green flag.

**Craig:** Huge green flag. The thing is, we want to love people. When you hear that, you’re like, what a relief. The best information is exactly that: “I love them.” I’ve said to people – they’ve asked me about an actor or they’ve asked me about a crew person, I’m like, “I would take a bullet for this person.” The best recommendation you can get, the best green flag is, “I absolutely love this person. You may not hire them when I need them.” That’s the best green flag there is.

**John:** Red flag/green flag combo here. If you’re looking at their social media and they seem like a not stable person on social media, they’re not gonna be a stable person in your actual life. The green flag version of this is, you look at their social media, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I get this person. I get what they’re into. They’re posting some dog photos. They are also talking about things in a rational way.” That’s a green flag for me.

**Craig:** Yes. When it comes to actors, I have to say I’m old-school in the sense that I believe that backstage is backstage. What we want people to see are the characters that the actors play. That’s what we want. Obviously, there’s enormous interest in actors’ personal lives, and people are always gonna be asking questions.

But if social media feels a little bit like, “Hey, once the cameras are off, my reality show begins,” that’s a red flag for me. Green flag, like you said, once the cameras are off, the things that I put on social media are not that different from what anyone puts on social media, that implies a certain stability and maybe possibly the absence of extraordinary narcissism, which is always a red flag.

**John:** Probably – this is something you actually texted me – one of the best handers-out of red flags and green flags is your casting director, because casting directors, they know all the actors. They know the actors who they’ve seen over the last 20 years and the interpersonal relationships between those actors. They get a sense of that. You said casting directors. I said other actors. Those are folks who know what these people are actually like.

**Craig:** Yes. If I had a choice between asking an actor or a casting director, and I can only pick one, I would pick the casting director, because actors can have remarkable on-screen relationships with actors who are nightmares everywhere else.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** But casting directors hear back from everybody. They hear back from the directors and the producers, so they get the feedback. And they have been tracking people over the course of years. And they also saw those people when they were starting out. They can also say, “This person’s become a monster,” as opposed to, “This person has been just a solid human being from the very, very jump, and they continue to be.”

Our casting director this year is Mary Vernieu, and she was so helpful in that regard for a lot of the people that we’re bringing on. I have to say it’s been fantastic. Every choice, we’ve been rewarded. Green flags everywhere. Very, very excited.

**John:** Let’s answer one more question. I see one here from Steve about Dungeons and Dragons, so of course we have to answer this question.

**Craig:** Oh, gotta answer this question, yeah, obviously.

**Drew:** Steve writes, “My son Elliot is big into the Dungeons and Dragons world. He watches the movies, loves the 1980s cartoon, reads Monster Manuals from the library. Now he wants to play the actual game. However, it’s recommended for 12 and older, and he’s only 6. This hasn’t stopped him from designing dungeons,” he has a little image attached here, “and using monopoly dice to create characters. I’ve looked for junior versions but haven’t found any. Do you have any recommendations for a 6-year-old who desperately wants to be 12, so that he can better understand D&D?”

**John:** Oh, god, I’m so happy for Elliot. I’m so happy for Elliot’s dad, Steve, who’s gonna contribute to his love of Dungeons and Dragons. Googling around, I found a link I’m gonna put in the show notes here – it’s on Everhearth Inn – about how to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids. It gives some suggestions for here’s how you scale down the experience so it actually is appropriate for younger kids. It goes down to six. It goes down to Elliot’s age in terms of how you do that and how you get the sense of, okay, I am playing this character who’s doing this thing. Some simplified rules, so it’s very straightforward, but also fun for a kid that age.

**Craig:** It’s a tough one, because I think, Steve, probably Elliot is special. A six-year-old who is reading the Monster Manual and is designing dungeons and using Monopoly dice to create characters is pretty advanced. The issue is, who is he gonna play with? You know your son better than we do, Steve. If you feel like your son is particularly advanced and can do this, then my suggestion is, perhaps there’s a world where if you play, Steve – I hope you do – that maybe you can build a little one-shot for you and maybe a couple of your friends who play and also Elliot. Then maybe if Elliot has a friend that really, really wants to play, then now there are two kids who want to play. But six is very young. It’s exciting, I think, for Elliot. But I think he’s probably a rarity.

**John:** My friend Quinn has a kid who also loves to play D&D and started really young. Quinn’s frustration was that it’s hard to find other kids his age who can actually do stuff. They got a little school group together, and they eventually started doing it, but it’s a challenge.

I think Craig’s instinct, where you, Steve, are gonna be the DM, and Elliot and hopefully some other friends or some other adults are going to play through a little bit with him, feels right, and you’ll find ways to have it make sense.

I love that he is really into the actual Dungeons and Dragons game, so I don’t want to send him into a video space, but there are some video game versions of D&D or things that are like that, that could scratch that itch for a while before he has the ability to sit down and roleplay with others. I’m just nervous about it because I don’t want to lose this ability to imagine worlds in his mind and the reading of it all to be looking at a screen.

**Craig:** The video games unfortunately will probably not be content-wise appropriate for him at six. Certainly would not steer him towards Baldur’s Gate 3.

**John:** Not Baldur’s Gate 3.

**Craig:** That would be bad, although, boy, I love that game. But no, he’s six. He’s so young. He’s so young. It really is about providing a fun environment for him, and also, no matter how special he is, making sure that the adventure or the nature of it is short. Anything beyond an hour is going to seem like a thousand years to him.

**John:** Or it might be he might want to play for six hours, but again, you have to be the parent who’s structuring this. I want to talk about Elliot’s dungeon here, because look at how great this is. It has a gibbering mouther in it, a mimic surprise, some flameskulls.

**Craig:** I would say gibbering [said like jibbering], by the way.

**John:** Jibbering, gibbering. I like jibbering. I like jibbering.

**Craig:** You like jibbering? I don’t actually know how that is pronounced.

**John:** We’ll look it up.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s jibbering. Yep, it’s jibbering.

**John:** Okay. But it’s great. The fact that he’s into this, that his handwriting is actually pretty good for a six-year-old too.

**Craig:** It’s outstanding. It’s so much better than mine was. Again, to reiterate how bad I am at drawing, this right now is about what a map I would draw would look like. But I love that he understands some basic concepts. For instance, it looks like there’s some sort of water in the beginning. And then there’s an arrow, which I love, that says turn to the right. And then there’s a huge room with the gibbering mouther. Obviously, that’s not an easy two words to have as a kid. Then mimic surprise, he corrected his spelling of “surprise,” which a lot of adults fail to do. I love that he understood what the point of the mimic was. It looks like he might’ve drawn a T for trap there.

**John:** I think it’s a trap, yeah. But he’s got his door symbols there just right too.

**Craig:** He’s got flameskulls.

**John:** Who doesn’t love a flameskull?

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:00:09].

**John:** Adventurers don’t.

**Craig:** It also says “the end dungeon,” so I suspected that there’s more planned.

**John:** There’s more.

**Craig:** Elliot is terrific. I will say this, Steve. Your son will be a DM. He has big DM energy.

**John:** He has DM energy. It’s true.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** He’s also very lucky to have you as a dad, because you’re trying to figure out how to help him do what he wants to do.

**Craig:** Thank you for not being a total monster.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ronan Farrow – it ran in The New Yorker this last week or maybe the week before – on RuPaul. The article’s title is RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business, which I think is just great. If you ask RuPaul how are you doing, RuPaul says, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” which I think is just the best answer.

**Craig:** Oh my gosh, that’s great.

**John:** I watch Drag Race. I’ve known of RuPaul for forever. Never met them in person. I thought the article was great and really dug into the weird contradiction of a very public face who’s incredibly private and is always trying to draw out, “You gotta reveal the real you,” from the drag queens who are competing on the show, and does not want to reveal the real him very much at all. Of course, this is all in service of a memoir that’s coming out. It’s just really good writing by Ronan Farrow, just a really good profile of an important media figure, RuPaul.

**Craig:** This goes exactly to my earlier comment about in front of the curtain and behind the curtain and, especially when you think about somebody who has specialized in bringing drag to the forefront, how presentational and performative that is – not performative like the fake performative, but performance-oriented – and how there is a backstage. Even on Drag Race, which shows you the backstage, that backstage is on stage. There’s a real backstage that you never get to, which is correct.

He says something in this article that is so – I don’t know if he’s been to therapy, but it sure sounds like it. “Feelings are indicators. They’re not facts.” That’s a fascinating way of putting it.

**John:** That’s very therapy, yeah.

**Craig:** Very therapy and a wonderful thing. Also, the thing about RuPaul that’s always been evident is how smart he is. Reading this, it just sounds like… We do profiles of people that do these things that seem overtly funny and frivolous and silly, and then when you meet them, you realize how smart, because again, or awards should only be won by people that do comedy, and Drag Race is comedy.

**John:** Also, you recognize that what RuPaul wants contestants to be able to do are not things that RuPaul himself could’ve done coming up. The expectations, the levels have gotten so high that you have to be able to be an amazing designer, an amazing performer, an amazing dancer, amazing everything. And that’s just the table stakes to start playing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also love how much of a businessperson he is. But you can’t make a show like that without being a very rigorous, serious person. Comedy is serious. I’m gonna read this. I’m fascinated by him. I really am. I just think he’s such a force. I’m so tired of us taking people who pretend to be serious seriously. I like taking people who pretend to be not-serious seriously. I think that’s far more interesting.

**John:** In our last episode we talked about counterfactuals. The counterfactual where we didn’t have RuPaul, where RuPaul wasn’t born or didn’t do drag or did some other thing, we would be at a different place. There would be drag 100 percent. But would we have the popularization, the mass platform of drag that we have now? I don’t think we do.

**Craig:** I don’t think we do. I think he’s an incredibly important person in that regard. There’s just an entire vocabulary we wouldn’t have. I think we know this for a fact, because until RuPaul came along, that culture existed.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** But mainstream wasn’t looking at it. Just wasn’t. Even when it popped through a little bit, like, what was the documentary, Paris is Burning?

**John:** Yeah, Paris is Burning. Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It popped out, and then it popped back down again. It’s not the same.

**John:** We always had drag performers. We had [unintelligible 01:04:32]. We had that gay camp sensibility. But it wasn’t all put together in a way like this.

**Craig:** No, and it wasn’t also unapologetic. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, it always seemed like we were laughing at the drag performance, and now we laugh with the drag performance. It’s very different.

I’m not a religious watcher of Drag Race, or any television show for that matter, as you know, but when I see it, it’s incredibly entertaining, and it’s so funny, but it also feels very authentic. Even though I know it’s reality television and a lot of it’s drummed up and not, you do feel like you are seeing the authentic culture happening in front of you. The people that they pull from are real. They’re not finding people and saying, “If you would be willing to start dressing up in drag, it would be great.” They are who they are.

**John:** Also, having been on the air for so many years, the queens who are competing now grew up with RuPaul’s Drag Race existing, and so they’ve been swimming in this water the entire time. Not just the expectations of performance but also the culture has changed too. In early seasons, contestants who were trans were hiding it, because it felt like that’s cheating to be trans and be on Drag Race. That seems absurd now, but things move pretty quickly.

**Craig:** Things move pretty quickly. I think RuPaul is at the center of it all. Also, he’s 9,000 feet tall. I wanted to go up and say something to him at the Emmys, because he’s at the Emmys every year, because he wins every year. I show up every four years, I guess. Maybe I’ll never show up again. But when I do show up, there’s RuPaul. I’ll tell you why I didn’t go up to him. Can you guess why I didn’t go up to him?

**John:** Intimidation?

**Craig:** Yes. Terrified. Terrified. In looking at the Ronan Farrow article here, I feel vindicated. I think that he would be like, “Get the eff away from me. I don’t know you.” But I would love to. I’m such an admirer of him as a creative force.

**John:** Craig, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a game. There’s a company called Glitch Games. I’ve definitely promoted them before on the show. They make escape room, puzzley type point-and-click games for iOS typically. I think it comes out maybe on Android, but who cares. This latest one, I can’t tell if I like it or if I loathe it. I’m putting it out there for people to see what they think.

**John:** It’s a $4 game, so it’s not a huge burden.

**Craig:** It’s a $4 game, so it’s worth the $4 bet. It’s just like their other games in that you’re in a facility and you have to figure out how to get out and there are a lot of puzzles, but the gimmick is that this facility was working on some sort of time loop thing. It’s an increment of time that you can set, I think, between 3 minutes and 10 minutes. It sends you back to the beginning and undoes most of what you’ve done. You solve puzzles. You figure out how to proceed. Then it goes schwoop, you’re back to the beginning, which means you have to re-solve a bunch of puzzles – not hard to do – to get further. I gotta be honest. I found it incredibly frustrating and I quit. But the puzzles are quite good, and I do love their game in general. People who have a little bit more patience than I do may actually really, really appreciate it.

**John:** Recursion.

**Craig:** Give it a shot. Recursion by Glitch Games.

**John:** Give it a shot.

**Craig:** It’s four bucks.

**John:** That was our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Woo-woop.

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

**Craig:** Wop-wop.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. 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’ll find the show notes to 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.

Thank you, a little shout-out to our Premium members, because it just keeps growing, which is fantastic. This last year, we were able to not just pay for Matthew and Drew, but we also were able to give some money away. We zero out our balances every year. We were able to give away some money to some really good charities. Thank you very much for our Premium-

**Craig:** You and I also got to buy really nice beach houses.

**John:** That’s what it is. It’s the beach houses plus that. For clarification, we get no money ourselves out of this. It all gets donated away.

**Craig:** Yeah, no beach houses.

**John:** No beach houses for us. But thank you again to our Premium members. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, Drew and I both just watched a documentary series on HBO Max called Love Has Won, which is about a Colorado cult. Drew, you saw it most recently. Tell us what you liked, what freaked you out about it.

**Drew:** Everything freaked me out about it. I always have a terrified feeling that I’m somehow susceptible to cults, even though I’ve never actually run into one. Love Has Won is about the cult of Mother God.

**Craig:** She’s the one where they just left her body in the room?

**Drew:** Exactly. It starts with you seeing the body cam footage of the cops coming in and finding basically her mummified corpse, and then it goes from there.

**John:** Then we go back in time to follow it. But what’s so fascinating about this documentary is – because it’s all very recent, there are still members in that cult right now – they were online all the time. They were also posting YouTube. They have so much footage of just inside the cult while it was just doing this normal stuff. It’s not all recreations or just talking head testimony. It’s a lot of just actual real footage of what it was like being inside this cult.

I love cults. I just think they’re great story fodder, because you have charismatic leaders, you have people who are devoted to it, who are sacrificing other things. There’s that sense of a mission that is so cinematic. There’s something just really appealing to me about cults. I don’t ever want to join one. I don’t want to ever start one. Maybe Scriptnotes is a cult. I don’t know. But I dig them.

**Craig:** We’re the worst cult ever.

**John:** We’re the worst cult. We don’t make any money.

**Craig:** I’m just fascinated by where cult leaders come from. In this case, Amy Carlson, prior to becoming a cult leader, was a manager at a McDonald’s. Being a manager at a McDonald’s is probably very hard to do. But I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of overlap between the skillset required there and running a cult.

**John:** The documentary would actually push back about that, because she was a manager at McDonald’s, but a rising manager. She wasn’t just managing one store. She was moving up the corporate chain a bit.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** She was able to really motivate her employees in a way that feels like has analogous skills to getting people on your side and following you to believe that you are the incarnation of God.

**Craig:** I see. Do you think that her belief that the Jews wanted everyone to do the work and they would take the money was part of how she got them to do their jobs better? Why is it always the Jews? I don’t know this lady.

**John:** A fair criticism of the documentary, which I think you can look at both ways, is that in trying to really look at the cult from its own perspective and emotionally connect inside the cult, they did leave out a lot of their crazier conspiracy beliefs and their QAnon stuff and all that kind of stuff. They really were focusing on what it felt like personally in there, rather than their bigger belief system. But it’s funny to me how once you believe yourself God, you do look for villains, and funny how they often become Jewish.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know why it always happens. I like that their belief is that Adolf Hitler’s intention was to serve the light. I think he was pretty clear about his intentions, actually. I don’t think we have to guess there, do we? He wrote a whole book.

**John:** He did, yeah.

**Craig:** He wrote a whole book.

**John:** Of his struggle. Thinking to cults in general, they’re easy targets for cinematic stories, for villains, because they’re sinister, they have dark motivations. You and I grew up in a time of panic over Satanic cults and these people who were sacrificing babies. That never happens.

**Craig:** That just doesn’t happen.

**John:** It doesn’t. Instead, we have a lot of people who believe themselves to be incarnations of God and to have divine messages, and the people who follow them believe they are doing right for the world. They believe that they alone can save things.

**Craig:** It does seem like the Catholic Church and the Baptist Church and Pentecostal, all the big traditional Christian movements, big ones, do think that there’s a lot of these Devil-worshiping cults out there. And maybe there were in the, I don’t know, 1400s, but now, that’s not a problem.

Every now and then, some town will want to put up some sort of religious thing, and then they’re saying, okay, the court said you have to let every religion do it if they want, and then the local Satanist group shows up, and they’re just a bunch of dorks that like to wear black. They’re always like, “We’re really actually very nice.”

It’s this kind of New Agey baloney. It’s baloney. A lot of baloney about energy, past lives, and all that stuff. And a lot of the things that I think a lot of people believe, but in a perfectly innocuous way, some people take so seriously. That plus the cult of personality leads to these extraordinary situations, where people are so deep in, there’s no way out, because once you start picking at one thread, the whole thing falls apart, and they’re so brutal about you leaving. Once you’re in, you get love bombed, and only they understand you, and only they care about you, and then you’re stuck.

**John:** The obvious reflection is like, what is the difference between a cult and religion? Religion has structure around it that lives on beyond its creator. Obviously, so many of our religions, if you look back in the early phases of them, look a lot like our cults. But I’m curious about secular cults, cults that don’t go for any grand or religious view. They still have to have some perspective on what’s next.

I imagine there will be some kind of AI cults coming up here. Some of our charismatic founders of these corporations are very analogous to cult leaders. People will follow them to the ends of the earth.

**Craig:** Elon Musk feels culty.

**John:** Yeah, it does feel culty. I’ll be curious to see what that looks like. I guess in some way, Elon Musk, there was an expectation like, no, you need to sleep at the factory in order to make sure this all works right. The people who were working for him were not just working for that paycheck. They truly believed in the mission.

**Craig:** Yes. Donald Trump clearly is a cult leader. There’s no way to argue he’s not. That is a cult. They behave in the most cult-like way possible. All of these movements seem to collapse when the cult leader dies. They are ultimately about the person. They cannot exist past it. This woman, Amy Carlson, she dies in 2021, and that’s the end of that.

**John:** Actually, it’s still dribbling on a bit. Her people, they still believe what she believed, but they haven’t all held together.

**Craig:** It’s gonna fall apart. It just doesn’t work. L. Ron Hubbard died pretty early on in Scientology. It was David Miscavige who really continues to be the hub of that wheel. I don’t know how old he is, but one day he won’t be here. He will go the way of all mortal beings, and then we’ll see what happens to Scientology too.

**John:** We’ll see what happens. Did it jump past that initial needing to have the charismatic founder where it can keep going with its own energy? Maybe. But we won’t know until we see.

**Drew:** I feel like LA is lousy with those centering cults though. Scientology is probably the most prominent of that. But there’s the workout cults. There’s all those certain workout gyms. There’s one right now that will give you money off your membership if you get a tattoo of the brand.

**Craig:** That’s disgusting. That’s insane.

**Drew:** Isn’t that crazy?

**Craig:** That’s insane.

**Drew:** All the acting stuff too. Those are all little mini cults.

**John:** Oh, god, yeah.

**Craig:** No question. No question. They’re built around people.

**Drew:** That’s fair. And an idea of better… It’s all that, yeah.

**Craig:** Life improvement?

**Drew:** [Crosstalk 01:17:46].

**Craig:** Yeah, life improvement.

**John:** Exception proving the rule, QAnon, it feels like a cult. There is an entity who’s supposedly Q, but there’s no actual person there. There’s nothing you can point to. Q could be anybody, anything. It feels like it’s now dying down. But I was surprised it was able to be as successful as it was without any visible figurehead there.

**Craig:** There was Q. That’s why the QAnon movement was so pernicious, because there isn’t a single person that you could pick apart and point at as having feet of clay. It was this thing that would just show up, like receiving messages from the sky. It was actually quite brilliant. It’s stupid. It’s floridly stupid. But again, people, once they dig in and they believe it… And it does appear that Q was the son of the guy that owns 8chan or whatever that thing was, and then other people probably posed as it. It’s kind of remarkable how they did a little end-run around having a person be around.

**John:** Getting back to the main episode, how do you make sure the person you’re gonna hire is not actually a cult leader? Check their social media. Do they claim themselves to be God? That’s a red flag.

**Craig:** Do they have a lot of people following them around? If you’re like, “Yeah, we’re thinking about casting you,” and they’re like, “Great. One request is that my entourage of 80 people come with me, and also no one can wear the color blue,” and blah, blah, blah. You’re like, “Oh, no.”

**John:** There are some celebrities who have those entourages. Maybe we have to watch out for them as being cult leaders.

**Craig:** There are celebrities who could, in a second, make a cult. Thank you, Taylor Swift, for having some restraint. If Taylor Swift wanted to install herself as the head of a religious movement, she could, within a day. It would be massive, and it would be serious. Thank you. Once again, I should say, thank you, Taylor Swift.

**John:** Let’s leave it there. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Bye, guys.

Links:

* [Strands](https://www.nytimes.com/games/strands) from the New York Times
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLqgK_LQKS4)
* [Past Lives by Celine Song](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Past-Lives-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Irma Vep – Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VY5vfWIjYE)
* [Is This Hollywood’s #MeanToo Moment?](https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/hollywood-me-too-mean-toxic-bullying-tv-film-jonathan-van-ness-ellen-degeneres.html) by David Mack for Slate
* [How to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids](https://everhearthinn.com/articles/how-to-play-dungeons-and-dragons-for-kids/)
* [RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/11/rupaul-doesnt-see-how-thats-any-of-your-business) by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
* [Recursion – Glitch Games](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/recursion/id1658817293)
* [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 Eric Pearson ([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/635standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 634 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What if Alexander the Great had died at the Battle of Granicus River? What if Robert E. Lee hadn’t lost Special Order 191? Historians consider these questions as counterfactuals, exploring how major world outcomes sometimes hinge on relatively small moments that could’ve gone either way. Today on the show, we’ll explore a range of Hollywood counterfactuals, looking at some moments, people, and events that could’ve gone very differently. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, capitalism. Craig, is it good or bad?

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** We will definitively answer the question once and for all.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy. Craig, it’s so nice to have you back!

**Craig:** It’s so good to be back. I’m sorry that I was gone for so long. The small matter of directing the first episode of the second season of The Last of Us, which I’m almost done with – we have a few days still outstanding that we need to do in a different location. I’ve been monitoring things on the internet a little bit. People are very clever. They like to see where we’re shooting, and then they have all these brilliant theories about what it means.

**John:** Yeah, and they’re all right. 100 percent of them are correct, right?

**Craig:** I wish I could put my arm around each one of them and say, “No.”

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** No, most of the theories are incorrect. Some of them are halfways correct. Some of the conjecture is like 28 percent correct. But I do enjoy it all. I like the interest. It’s fun. But I’m mostly done with my directing stuff and very happily enjoying watching the second episode being done from the more traditional showrunner point of view, which is nice. I do like directing, but also, it’s the most exhausting thing ever. I miss it when it’s over, and then while it’s happening, I just keep asking myself why, why, why am I doing – why did I do-

**John:** Hey, Craig. Hey, Craig. I have friends who direct sitcoms, and let me tell you, one week they’re in and they’re out. If you could go back, why not make it a sitcom? Then you could direct as much as you wanted to direct, because it’s just a week of your time. James Burrows is not exhausted the way that you’re exhausted.

**Craig:** No. It sounds like you’re talking about a good old-fashioned three-camera.

**John:** Three-camera, oh yeah.

**Craig:** So you’re really just working on a stage play that three cameras are capturing. You don’t have to figure out angles and coverage and turning around. That sounds wonderful. Plus just a week. Yeah, so if there is some sort of box I failed to check to have James Burrows’s career and money… That sounds like a plan.

**John:** Did I tell you I finally met James Burrows? After all these years, I met him backstage at a play. And of course, as you could expect, the most lovely man.

**Craig:** I would hope so. If he were just unpleasant-

**John:** Yeah, a monster.

**Craig:** … what a weird choice to keep going back and back and back. Those days are kind of over though, aren’t they? The three-camera sitcom is sort of-

**John:** There are more this development season than in previous years.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** Yeah, I think there’s still some hope for it. There tend to be more of the half-hour single-camera things, which again though, are pretty short schedules. Modern Family apparently did a light shoot. They’d show up to the location, they’d shoot every scene a couple ways, and they were done.

**Craig:** Yeah, the classic network model of doing something like that, the standard is shoot a master and then hose it down, as they say, just simple coverage. If you’re shooting a couple cameras at the same time, the thing about a show like Modern Family is the coverage really doesn’t have to be particularly specific. It’s people talking, and what they’re saying and their faces are the most important things, whereas when you get into these big dramas – and the big dramas are like, each episode is kind of a movie.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Eesh. Oof.

**John:** Eesh. Yeah. I will say, the shows that are like The Office or like Modern Family, they do rely sometimes on the camera finding a joke, because the conceit, of course, is that it’s a documentary crew, so the camera’s finding the joke at times. Abbott Elementary has the same thing. But it is much more straightforward. It’s a very survivable life.

**Craig:** I don’t think it requires less skill. It simply is easier from a kind of how much stuff you have to do perspective. But the specific talent required to know where the camera ought to be – and also, editing those shows is very tricky. Editing comedy is incredibly specific.

**John:** Yeah, it is. Let’s get into some follow-up. This is mostly follow-up on things I think you were maybe not here for, but you could still weigh in. Drew, help us out with some follow-up here. Let’s start with the table reads bit.

**Drew Marquardt:** A few episodes ago, Jacob wrote in asking a question on whether you should send a script for a table read ahead of time or have everyone read it cold.

**John:** Craig, what’s your instinct on that? Let’s say you’re doing a table read with some friends. Do you think you should send the script ahead to those folks or have them come in cold to read it? What’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I’m not a huge table read fan. I think I’ve said that as much. But if I were to do one, I would do it cold.

**John:** That was Celine Song’s recommendation as well. Jacob wrote in with some follow-up here.

**Drew:** Jacob wrote, “Our table read was already scheduled for five days after the episode’s release date, so we ended up going with the dual method. Half of the attendees had the script ahead of time, and the other half read cold. And guess what? Celine was right. Our actor friends who had the script ahead of time put way too much energy in coming up with ways to play their characters, and bizarrely, even some had accents. We definitely preferred the read from those who did not have the script ahead of time, but it was still helpful to receive feedback from people who were able to discover the under-the-radar jokes that might’ve required a reread to enjoy.”

**John:** We talked about this with Celine Song. Mike Birbiglia does this thing where in his development process, he’ll have an interim draft. He’ll have a bunch of his friends, and they’ll have pizza and read through his script. That’s an important part of his process. But he really makes sure that they’re not auditioning for roles in that, that they’re there to read the script aloud. That feels like the right instinct here.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s especially the right instinct when you’re dealing with maybe actors who aren’t as experienced or at a particularly high level. So I don’t know where Jacob is in his life and I don’t know if his actor friends are well experienced or highly professional or quasi professional or aspiring. The more aspiring they are, the more important it is to not give them the script ahead of time, because they’re just going to do the thing. They’re just going to do it. They’re going to do the thing where they care way too much. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is, I assume in this case, for the writer to hear the words out loud, note the things that do seem to be working, note where it gets slow, note where it gets too fast, etc.

**John:** We’ve got differing opinion here from a guy who’s done it the opposite way. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Tom Harp says, “I’ve done reads both ways, with writers and with actors. But I wanted to offer my experience as a counter to what John and Celine said. In my own process, my trusted writer friends read early drafts and gave notes. But before I give it to my agents, I always do a read-through with actors.

“During the read, I’m listening to the pace and flow of the dialogue, but maybe the most important part is the Q and A I do afterwards. Actors have a different set of antenna than writers do, and their instincts have saved me several times. I’ve been told, ‘This feels false,’ or, ‘I don’t think my character would do or say this,’ when none of my writer friends noticed it, nor did I, because writers get why the story needs it. But down the line, an actor is going to call emotional bullshit on set, and then you’ve got your production’s boot on your neck as you try and solve it.”

**John:** Not quite on the same focus here. He’s saying that actors do bring something different to a read, because they’re bringing experience of how to sell a line, and they don’t know how to actually do a line.

**Craig:** I’m not going to disagree with Tom, because he’s obviously getting some use out of that. The only flag I would wave here is that casting is a thing. One of the reasons casting is important is because you’re trying to match an actor whose instincts match the instincts of the character you have created. When you have somebody show up because they’re available or they are your friend, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the right casting for that part.

And they may indeed think, “This feels false,” or, “I don’t think my character would say this.” A, it’s not their character yet. And B, they might not be right for the part, for that very reason. That’s not to say that there aren’t going to be things that almost every actor in that spot would go, “Oh, I don’t quite understand why I would say or do this here.” So that matters. That logic is important.

But if you don’t pick up on it until the actor comes up to you after, so you listen to the whole thing, sounds good to you, and then they call, come over, and say, “I don’t think that this… ” Maybe it’s just that the actor is not the right actor for that part. That’s the only thing I would flag there. But if it works for Tom, it works for Tom.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get to the meat of this episode, which is counterfactuals. Some setup here. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading this book called What If?, which is a series of essays edited by Robert Cowley, about military history. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this book. The important part is that it’s really talking through counterfactuals versus alternative history.

I want to spend a moment to describe the difference between counterfactuals and alternative history. A counterfactual is basically the outcome of this battle or event could’ve turned out different in a way that’s very possible. There’s a distinct moment that could’ve gone either way, a kind of a coin toss. And if it’d have gone the opposite direction, outcomes would’ve been very different.

Alternative history I’ll define as something happened in a very different way or in a different timeline, like what if Africa had industrialized first, or we discovered nuclear power in the 1800s? You’d still get to a place where the outcomes are very different, but it’s not hinging on one moment, one thing where it could’ve gone either way.

So we put out this call to our listeners, saying hey, what counterfactuals do you want us to talk through? Some of them were incredibly useful, but a lot of them were actually just alternative histories, where, like, oh, what if this had happened, or what if this had happened, but it wasn’t hinging on a specific event. It was just like, there’s a different version that came out of here.

Some of the alt histories that people proposed, like what if Zoetrope Studios had succeeded, sure, but it’s not based on one movie succeeding. What if Jacksonville, Florida had become the filmmaking capital of the world? It could’ve happened, because it was an alternative way things could’ve gone, but it wasn’t based on one moment that could’ve happened. Or the wars in Europe, like what if the wars in Europe hadn’t happened or had happened differently, and European film industry became the dominant one rather than American? Again, it’s not based on one event. I just wanted to make it clear that thank you for sending those through, but those are really alternative histories and not the counterfactuals I was looking for.

**Craig:** You were really looking for those fork in the road moments, where there’s definitely-

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** … two ways you can go. Things went left instead of right, but what if they had gone right instead of left?

**John:** Exactly. The first I want to talk through is Edison. Back in 1915, he’d already invented many incredible devices that we use today, electricity. How he was getting electricity and light bulbs and things out into the world were incredibly important. But he also had patents on the original motion picture camera and projection technology. Because he had this patent and was trying to enforce it very vigorously, a lot of people who were trying to avoid his sort of patent thugs were heading out to the West Coast. It’s one of the reasons why the Hollywood industry developed out in California was just to get away from this guy and his very ambitious enforcement of his trademark over things.

He lost a 1915 court case, which was crucial in his ability to constrain how people could use his devices and whether these things he was creating, these projectors, could only show his own creations. This feels like an important moment in terms of the evolution of the early film industry, so 1915.

**Craig:** 1915. You have this court case that basically allows an industry to exist. Prior to that court case, everybody had to go through Edison and his company, the Motion Picture Patents Company. I did not know this until – I’m looking at the article that you linked to in the Saturday Evening Post.

When you say “patent thugs,” you mean it. Edison famously occupied a space in New Jersey. There is an Edison Township, New Jersey. I believe that is named for him. But in West Orange, New Jersey, that’s where his base was. He would hire mobsters – and there sure were a lot of them up there on the East Coast – to literally beat up people, filmmakers that were using cameras and film. Edison’s argument basically was, I control the entire chain of creation of motion pictures, from film stock to projection. And anybody that tried to get around him and do whatever they wanted without getting his approval could even theoretically get physically assaulted.

The court case said no. Basically, the court said you can sue somebody for infringing, but you can’t use your patent as, quote, “a weapon to disable a rival contestant or to drive him from the field.”

This’ll tie into our capitalism versus anti-capitalism discussion later on. We used to be quite invested in busting trusts, monopolies in this country, particularly around then. Teddy Roosevelt was quite the pioneer in that effort to create a healthy form of capitalism. We seem to have lost our way. There are a number of companies, I look around now, who I think Teddy Roosevelt would be thrilled to break apart. But yes, if that goes the other way, then John, you and I are probably working in New Jersey.

**John:** Yeah, I think we’re working for the Edison company or some offshoot of the Edison company. It’s hard to find a perfect analogy for what this system would’ve been like, because it’s not quite like the app store, where everything has to be done through the app store. It’s not quite that. But it is like there’s just basically one funnel, and everything has to either license or be done by this one company. All motion pictures have to go through this one channel, which would be vastly different than what we’re expecting.

Do I think this would’ve lasted forever? No. I think there would’ve been other ways around this, other alternative technologies that didn’t infringe on the patent. There would’ve been ways to do it. But clearly, our early film industry would’ve been very different. What we do goes back to 100 years ago when this was all being figured out.

**Craig:** It’s almost certain that in order to get around this, a healthy motion picture industry would’ve sprouted outside of the bounds of the United States.

**John:** That’s a good point.

**Craig:** Where would that have taken place?

**John:** France?

**Craig:** Europe, certainly. But in terms of what we do, the Hollywood style, the very American style of creating things and making a huge business out of it, as opposed to thinking about it specifically in terms of art and cinema, which is a very European and certainly French way of approaching things.

I think about where I’m sitting right now in Vancouver. Canada would’ve been a wonderful place. The immigrants who founded Hollywood way, way back when, Warner Bros and so on, may have just headed up to Montreal or Toronto.

**John:** Mexico would’ve been another great choice. There’s other venues.

**Craig:** Lots of sunshine.

**John:** Again, we are not legal experts in here. This is really our first glimpse of the history here. But it looks like it’s the projection technology is the issue. Basically, if any projector sold in the U.S. could only project things that Edison had approved, that still would’ve been a challenge for American audiences. It’s not just where you film the things. It’s also how you’re showing the things. It would’ve gotten sorted out. There would be some way to do it, but it would’ve really limited the spread of Hollywood movies.

**Craig:** When you have something that people want, it will find a way to exist. It’s a little bit like Prohibition, which also fell apart a few years after this happened.

**John:** Rather than the manufacture of distribution of alcohol, manufacture and distribution of film.

**Craig:** People want it.

**John:** People want it.

**Craig:** If you really want to go down that other fork in the road, the movie business is run by cartels, and it is an entirely criminal enterprise.

**John:** That would’ve been great. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, because you can envision that. In some ways, the Man in the High Castle and the hidden films, the stolen films of the alternative history, how this all ties back together, is an example of that. There’s a currency for these films that show what happens in the other timeline.

**Craig:** Yeah, I would see that.

**John:** Our next one is actually similar. This is the Paramount consent decree, which we’ve talked about on the podcast several times. Again, this is a question of manufacture and distribution of film materials.

Prior to going into this, the very thumbnail version of this, the studios were allowed to also own movie theaters, and they could control the entire channel of, we’re making the movies, we’re showing them in our theaters, we’re constraining all of our product. The Paramount consent decree held that the studios cannot own exhibitors, and therefore films from other companies can be shown in theaters.

**Craig:** Had that not fallen apart, I think you would’ve seen a creative paralysis in the business. What happened immediately following the collapse of that was the breakdown of this incredibly formalized manner of presenting art to people.

Even though there are incredible movies that were made in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, there were also very clearly rigid constrictions. Because it seems like a long time ago, it’s hard for us to see how fast things changed and how dramatically they changed, because it was before our time. But let’s say you were born in the ’30s. You’re used to watching movies of a certain sort. By the time you get into the ’60s, you now have nudity and graphic sexuality being shown on screen. You couldn’t even show people kissing with tongue, and now there’s sex. It’s kind of incredible how fast it changed, because if the studios don’t control the screens, other people can make movies to put on the screens. That’s the big difference. The other people didn’t have to follow along this rigid formality.

**John:** It’s important to understand this both from a producer and a supplier point of view, because this allowed theaters that were not affiliated with studios to compete for titles they wanted. So it allowed for more independent theaters, but also allowed for filmmaking that took place outside of the studio system. Those are the ones that you first see nudity and moving past the Hays Code and really pushing what cinema could be.

Obviously, this had a huge business transformation on Hollywood, but also had a huge creative impact. If the Paramount consent decree hadn’t happened, we would be in a different place. The irony, of course, is that the Paramount consent decree was overturned in the past 5 years, 10 years. How long have we been doing this podcast? In theory, now studios can own movie theaters. We haven’t seen a huge change in that. They haven’t come in and bought out the AMCs in the world.

**Craig:** Probably because it’s not a great business to be in.

**John:** It’s not an amazing business.

**Craig:** It’s funny, the Paramount decree fell apart right around the time it was no longer necessary, because studios found a new bunch of screens they could control via streaming. However, because of that window from the 1950s through let’s say up to 10 years ago, where the screens were so important, the proliferation of different kinds of content occurred. That toothpaste cannot go back in the tube. We’ve all grown up with and have become used to a certain kind of entertainment.

Ironically, when you look at the movies Paramount itself was making in the ’70s, starting with The Godfather, and onward and the kind of filmmakers they were supporting, they themselves benefited more almost than anyone from this, because they were allowed to make new kinds of things.

The companies do now control their own screens via streaming, but people want what they want. It’s one thing to say, “I want some things that I haven’t seen, but I would imagine I’d like them,” and it’s another to say, “I have seen the things I like. You can’t take them away.”

**John:** Before we move on, I think it’s worth looking at; both the Edison case and the Paramount consent decree, at the time these things were being decided, the justices and everyone else involved couldn’t have anticipated what the long-term effects are. They could only really look at what is this date right now, because they really couldn’t know what was going to come 10 years, 20 years down the road. I guarantee you that there was not an awareness of like, this will change the type of movies that get made if this gets overturned. They were just looking at it in terms of, this is a law, this is restrain of trade, this is anti-competitive, and therefore-

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** … we’re going to knock these things down.

**Craig:** If they had taken the other path, I think we would still to this day have a much more restrained kind of content. People look at the ’70s, the freewheeling ’70s, and the rise of the auteurist and all the rest of it as some sort of product of the cultural revolution in this country. And I would argue that no, that is not the case, that in fact, those things happened because of this court case.

I would point directly at network television as proof, because network television is the control of screens. And when you look at what was allowed on network television and is to this day allowed on network television, it is so much more constrained than what is allowed in movies. It’s not even close. Language, nudity, content. There’s just limits. People lost their minds when, in the ’90s, NYPD Blue showed a butt. A butt. They’re still not allowed to drop F-bombs and so on and so forth. I would just say that’s what movies would be like. Movies would be like network television. You’d be constrained.

**John:** And of course, European cinema, Asian cinema could’ve made different choices. But the problem is, if there’s no way to exhibit those films here, it’s moot.

**Craig:** That’s right. Absolutely. That was always the case. In the ’40s or the ’30s, people referred to – my grandfather referred to French films. Those were sort of early Blue Movies with nudity. Sure. But mostly, it would have operated the way network television still operates, under those constraints, which some people argue are positive on some levels. Creative restraint does force certain kinds of creative creativity. But you would not have the things that we have in movies if this had not gone that way.

**John:** Yeah. Simpler what ifs. What if George Lucas had died in his car accident?

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is June 12th, 1962.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** “As Lucas made a left turn, a Chevy Impala came flying from the opposite direction and broadsided him. The racing belt snapped, and Lucas was flung onto the pavement just before the car slammed into a giant walnut tree. Unconscious, Lucas turned blue and began vomiting blood as he was rushed off to the hospital.”

This is George Lucas, who at this time is a promising young film student. I guess he’s made some stuff at this point, but he had not made Star Wars. He had not made Raiders of the Lost Ark. How different would it be if we did not have George Lucas as a filmmaker? What are the knock-on effects of this?

**Craig:** For starters, I just want to say as an unlicensed doctor, if you turn blue and start vomiting, it’s not good. That’s really bad. There’s two ways of looking at this. One way is – let’s go the obvious way – George Lucas doesn’t create Star Wars. He doesn’t bring about the era of the blockbuster. Movies stay a bit smaller. Special effects and visual effects do not advance as far as they did and as fast as they did. The hyper-merchandization of films and the creation of so-called franchises does not occur.

However, a couple of counter-arguments to that. One is that somebody else probably would have done something of the size that would’ve created that anyway. George Lucas was really important, as we’ve discussed, in the creation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I do feel like there’s going to be a – Steven Spielberg was making his own blockbusters, Jaws.

**John:** He’s making Jaws. He’s still making blockbusters.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think there’s going to be blockbusters. But just as importantly, it seems like George Lucas’s brush with fate here was actually quite informative to him as a filmmaker. He sits there in the hospital and starts thinking about what saved his life in that car, and eventually, I think that sort of turns into American Graffiti. There’s this world where it’s like, if he doesn’t get into the – he needs to get into the car accident, I think.

What happens? If he dies in his car accident, we don’t get these movies. If he doesn’t die in the car accident, we do get these movies. We definitely wouldn’t have Star Wars. There would be no Star Wars. That’s for sure.

**John:** A world without Star Wars is different. Beyond the business things you’ve laid out, how it popularized a kind of space opera, children’s stories but for all ages, it did a very specific thing. We already had Star Trek. Star Trek would still exist without Star Wars, but I feel like we kind of need both of those things for in order for us to have-

**Craig:** Sort of. Star Trek is a network television show that gets canceled after, I think it was three seasons. Then Star Wars happens, and shortly after that, Star Trek the movie happens. Star Trek the movie does not happen if Star Wars doesn’t happen. There’s just no chance.

**John:** Very good point. Very good point.

**Craig:** Similarly, all the movies that were inspired by Star Wars sort of happen. The movie that’s coming to mind actually is Dune, because Dune was really the only thing that could’ve been Star Wars, because it preexisted Star Wars as a novel. Maybe the Dune that gets made doesn’t get made. I don’t think the Lynch Dune gets made without Star Wars.

**John:** And the Jodorowsky Dune doesn’t get made either.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s not going to get made either. But at some point, somebody, let’s say it’s Spielberg, in the absence of a huge-

**John:** Or Coppola or somebody.

**Craig:** Or Coppola or somebody. Somebody figures out how to make Dune and gives us the Denis Villeneuve standard type Dune earlier, and that leads – because there’s obviously great interest in those large-scale science fiction fantasies.

**John:** Because it’s crucial to understand there was a huge science fiction community before Star Wars. It popularized it in a way that was important. I think you don’t have the volume of science fiction fandom until you have Star Wars.

**Craig:** Star Wars, it was like giving a very loud and passionate fan base the world’s biggest megaphone, because everybody sort of flooded into the tent. It’s a really interesting thing, a world without Star Wars.

A fun thing I do like to think about when we’re talking about these counterfactuals is that we are currently living in counterfactuals, meaning in our world, Melissa Suzanne – the worst fake name ever – Melissa Suzanne does die in a car accident, doesn’t make blah da bloo, which is the biggest fricking thing of all time in that, and we’re living in the counterfactual where it didn’t happen. We don’t know what we don’t have.

**John:** Exactly. Yeah, we don’t. Let’s talk about another movie that it would be different if it hadn’t existed, which is Titanic. You and I were both in Hollywood as Titanic was happening. Some backstory for folks who don’t know. Filming was supposed to last six months. It stretched to eight months. The budget doubled from a reported $110 million, making it even costlier than Water World’s $200 million price tag. Another counterfactual would be like, what if Water World were a hit? But it was not a hit.

Titanic was incredibly expensive. Craig and I will both testify to the fact that there was real discussion about, “Oh my god, this movie could be a disaster. It could completely tank.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And sink both Fox and Paramount, who were both putting up the money for it. That didn’t happen. It became a giant hit and changed exhibition. It just kept running and running forever, despite its long running time. What happens, Craig, if Titanic had tanked, sunk?

**Craig:** The thing is, we do live in the world where these enormous movies tanked and sunk. That one might’ve killed Paramount. Paramount I believe was the initial production company. And it got so bad that they had to go to their competitor, Fox, and say, would you basically put in all the money we put in, on top of the money we put in, and we’ll give you all of the international, I think is how it worked out. That’s unheard of. I don’t even think it’s happened since on that scale. I think in part it hasn’t happened since on that scale because Titanic did become a huge hit. And the only thing that scares these companies more than a massive bomb is missing out on all of the money of a massive hit.

**John:** Of a hit, yeah.

**Craig:** But I think we would still unfortunately be in a world where some massive films just tank because people take these big swings. The weird thing about Titanic succeeding is that it probably has created more flops in its wake, because everyone goes, “What if it’s Titanic?” Then someone’s like, “We’ve done research, and it’s projected to only make… ” I think Titanic its opening weekend made – $28.6 million is what it made, which is really good for 1997.

**John:** Really good.

**Craig:** Very good opening weekend.

**John:** For a four-hour movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, but if it followed what normally happens, which is then the following weekend would be, let’s say-

**John:** Drops 50 percent, 40 percent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s say the following weekend’s like 15 million, and then it goes to 7 and 3 and 2.

**John:** Disaster.

**Craig:** Oh my god. But in fact, it made more. It went up. I just remember how it just kept making somewhere in the 20s every single weekend forever. There’s never been anything quite like it, box office wise.

**John:** My husband, Mike, was running the AMC Theatres in Burbank at that point. He had 30 screens. And Titanic nearly killed him, because they’d add screenings and those would sell out. So they’d add 9:00 in the morning screenings and not even advertise them, and they would sell out. It was crazy. Yes, it’s really good money for the exhibitors, because they’re getting a cut of that, but it was just so hard on everybody, just staffing those endless screenings.

**Craig:** The creation of that movie was incredibly difficult to do. It is certainly no fun to be making something that massive while the people that are paying for it are freaking out and basically telling you, “We’re screwed.” Making things is hard enough. When you are confidence shaken, it’s really hard, because you already want to curl up and die just from the exhaustion of doing it. And Titanic was an incredibly exhausting thing to make. To think, while you’re making it, that also everyone’s miserable and it’s going to fail, oh my god, how do you even wake up in the morning?

**John:** But you do.

**Craig:** They did, and so people just keep pointing back at this and saying, “Look.” The one thing I think that would be different is maybe there would be fewer flops.

**John:** There’d be fewer big swings. I think there would’ve been someone going like, “No, we absolutely cannot do this thing.” One thing that is different about our current moment is we have some places that have so much money, and they don’t actually need the box office, but they can just spend a ton. Apple, on Killers of the Flower Moon. In any normal situation, that would be a disaster. But it’s not a disaster for them, because they kind of don’t really care about the money. And so they can make a very long, very expensive movie that doesn’t perform at the box office, because that’s not really what they care about.

**Craig:** Yeah, and similarly, Netflix doesn’t – I don’t know what their metrics – I don’t know how any of it works. I work for a company that is oddly old-fashioned in the sense that even though there’s a big streaming service for Max, a lot of people still watch HBO through cable or satellite, and those are subscriber fees that get paid in, and there’s ratings for that stuff. But yeah, Netflix makes these enormous things and go, it kind of doesn’t matter. I don’t understand any of it.

But certainly in the case of Amazon and Apple, those companies are so enormous. Their production wings are such a small piece of what they do, that they can easily absorb any of these things. No problem. The world of Titanic, it was back – I don’t know, who owned Paramount back then? Was it Gulf Western?

**John:** It could’ve still been Gulf Western.

**Craig:** That was a big oil company. If you read about the history of The Godfather, for instance, they were all freaking out when they were making The Godfather, because they were going to lose – they couldn’t stand the notion of losing money.

**John:** There was a history of disastrous films costing studios so much they had to change, like Cleopatra and Fox. We have Century City in part because Fox had to sell off some of that lot to actually earn money, and that became Century City.

**Craig:** Exactly. There’s Heaven’s Gate, which basically destroyed a studio. There’s been movies that were so big and so massive and so horrifying in terms of their costs that just entire companies fell apart.

**John:** A movie that did not cost the company but was a big swing and a big miss was John Carter. John Carter of Mars was a film that Disney made. We’ll link to an article by Richard Newby for The Hollywood Reporter, called John Carter Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped. Based on the numbers, John Carter earned $284 million on a $306 million budget. That sounds like, oh, it was close, but of course, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing on top of that.

Newby argues that Disney realized, like, “Okay, we were trying to create Star Wars. Maybe we should just buy Star Wars.” They might not have reached for Lucasfilm at that moment if John Carter had worked. Possibly. They also were coming off other challenges, like The Lone Ranger, which was another expensive flop. And Newby argues that because of back-to-back misses, Disney got very conservative and were just banking on sure bets.

**Craig:** I’ll push back a little bit on this one.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It seems like Mr. Newby’s hanging a little too much around the neck of John Carter. Yes, it was a flop, but it wasn’t a studio-destroying flop. $284 million against $306 is not good, obviously, because that doesn’t include the, let’s say, $100 million of marketing. And then, of course, they don’t actually get all the money from the ticket sales, but there was video and all the rest. I’m not sure that that’s why they said, “We need Star Wars.” I think anybody who has the chance to get Star Wars and has the capital to do it and also the brand that would convince Lucas to allow it-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … which in this case was Disney and no one else, unless there wasn’t an old existing Paramount that wasn’t there anymore, of the way that he was familiar, yeah, I think anybody would buy Star Wars. I don’t think that you can put too much around the neck of John Carter. The fact is he cites Lone Ranger as an example of how it didn’t help matters. But that’s proof that John Carter wasn’t enough of a cage rattler, because they did make Lone Ranger, so I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s rephrase this though. Let’s refrain it. Rather than saying what if John Carter hadn’t bombed, what if John Carter was a huge, huge, huge hit? What if it were kind of Star Wars level? That I think would’ve been a bit of a game changer, because then it would be validating, like, yes, let’s spend a lot of money, take really big swings on pieces of IP that are kind of known but not hugely known. I would say John Carter of Mars is more in the level of a Narnia book, in the sense of people kind of know what it is, but they’re not necessarily directly familiar with it. That could’ve changed some things. If it were a giant hit, would they still have bought Lucasfilm? Probably, because they would just have so much money.

**Craig:** I think it’s still probably presuming too much logic on the part of the folks that make these things, because there’s always been this strange gravitation towards, quote unquote, IP that I think most people would look at and go, “Okay. If you think that that matters.” When they made – what was the one with Billy Zane? Was it The Phantom?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Phantom, that was something-

**John:** In Europe, yeah.

**Craig:** My dad was into that, barely, as a child. It was not relevant anymore. But it seemed like, oh, that thing. Now, in the age of algorithm-driven companies, I think the computers, as much as we hate them, probably would’ve said, “Please do not make The Phantom.” But you still see what I would call attempts to recreate other people’s large successes. And they sort of work, or sometimes they don’t work.

Amazon and Netflix, without naming names, have certainly tried to reproduce their – “We want our Game of Thrones. Where’s our Game of Thrones?” Then they go looking for IP that people are sort of interested in or maybe not that interested in. Some of it works great; some of it doesn’t. It’s hard to predict sometimes. There are book series that people love but just don’t want to watch adapted. There are other things that people don’t really care that much about, but when they get adapted, catch on. It’s not as logical as all that.

I think if John Carter had been a hit, I don’t even think it would’ve stopped Disney from buying Star Wars. The only thing that would change: a lot more John Carter movies and then a whole lot more movies that are sort of John Carter-ish that don’t work.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** When I was a kid, my dad said, “You’re going to love these books. When I was a kid, I read them. Doc Savage.” You know the Doc Savage books?

**John:** I recognize the title. I don’t know anything about them.

**Craig:** I think they were, I want to say 1930s era.

**John:** They were pulp fiction.

**Craig:** Pulp fiction, adventure stories, largely for boys, about a group of courageous people that go on to the far-flung reaches. Doc Savage was definitely an inspiration for Indiana Jones and even James Bond to some extent. Every now and then, somebody would bring it up in Hollywood as I was coming up. Now I’m like, that’s so old. Maybe there’d be a bunch of Doc Savage – or a Doc Savage movie would’ve been at a large scale and failed. But I don’t know if the world would’ve changed that much if John Carter had succeeded.

**John:** But Craig, what if Iron Man had bombed?

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** I think we’ve talked on this podcast before – I carried a football on Iron Man for just a couple weeks. I love everybody involved. I got to go to the premier. I remember going to the premier and the after-party at the Roosevelt Hotel across the street and saying, “Wow, that was really effing good. That’s going to be a giant hit.” But I will tell you that there was no guarantee that movie was going to be a giant hit.

You look at the folks involved, like Favreau, so smart, so great, had done some movies, but there was no guarantee that he could direct this movie. There was no guarantee that Robert Downey Jr was a good choice or even a rational choice for this, because he was not in the best place in his career. There were a lot of things that could’ve really derailed this movie, and yet it was a giant hit and started a franchise, which has made billions of dollars for the companies involved.

**Craig:** Billions and billions and billions and changed the shape of multinational mega-corporations.

**John:** It’s important to acknowledge that there were multiple movies before that that had not worked, and we’ve still got the Marvel Universe. But I would argue that if Iron Man had flopped, you doing have the Kevin Feige Marvel Cinematic Universe.

**Craig:** Without question. Without question. You could even go further back and say what if the X-Men movies flopped? Because superhero movies – other than Batman always seemed to work, Superman worked for-

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** … two movies. But the other movies that they tried to do, the other things they tried, it all just, eh. Spider-Man also is another one where if that had not worked right…

There were preexisting superhero films that had done well, but those were not controlled by Marvel per se. X-Men was controlled by Fox. Spider-Man was controlled by Sony. Batman was controlled by Warner Bros. Here’s Marvel as a company suddenly finding a partner to make Iron Man with and do it well, and that directly leads into the entire Avengers thing. It also created all the feeder ones, Thor. Obviously, you never get to Guardians of the Galaxy or any of that stuff.

**John:** No, none of that stuff.

**Craig:** Ever, ever, ever.

**John:** I will acknowledge that if you had Iron Man but didn’t have a good follow-up with that first Captain America movie, it would’ve been much more difficult. But you have to have Iron Man first. But the whole choice to center this whole thread on Iron Man was a weird one too, because he wasn’t the biggest available hero there.

**Craig:** No. I loved Iron Man comics when I was a kid, because the suit’s awesome. But the actual Iron Man stories got kind of morose. He was an alcoholic. The comics went into a whole story about alcoholism.

Also, you would not have the superhero saturation and the way that superhero films… There’s going to be some amazing books written 10 years from now about it. The transformation of our culture by that movie and everything that came beyond it is remarkable. What it did to our business, for better or worse – and in a lot of cases worse – is remarkable. What it did to the visual effects industry but also technology is remarkable.

And then here’s this question: does any of this work without Iron Man? Does any of this work without Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr, or does it just begin to fall apart? Obviously, Marvel has created this incredible system with phases.

**John:** We’re in a struggling phase right now. I think it’s not hard to see. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I think on our next episode, we’ll talk a little about when you hire stars, how careful you have to be, because they are going to be the face of your entity. In the case of Jonathan Majors, that did not work out well. In the case of Robert Downey Jr, it worked out great. But if you were to look at those two people at the start, I would’ve bet on Jonathan Majors.

**Craig:** I don’t know what was known, but here’s what was definitely known about Robert Downey Jr prior to Iron Man. He had gone through a very long period of substance abuse problems. He had gone through a very long period where he was highly unreliable. He was considered to be mercurial and brilliant but uncontrollable. He had had issues with the law. There was an infamous story where he just woke up in somebody’s bed in a house, because he broke in, because he was completely out of his mind on whatever he was – I don’t know what substances he was abusing. There was this sense that the last person in the world you put an enormous thing on top of would be Robert Downey Jr, and they just went for it.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** This is the weird thing about trying to game or predict. You want the real hero here. If I can point to one person that is the reason why our culture is full of superhero movies and why Marvel is worth as much as it is and has had as much success, Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr’s wife and producing partner, who is the stabilizing force in his life, who clearly got him back on track and got him sober and focused. If Hollywood could give a Nobel Prize, it should go to Susan Downey. She’s remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, Marvel should write her a check for a billion dollars.

**John:** Let’s do a very short version on this. We’ve talked about fin-syn before. Fin-syn limited the degree to which networks could own the production entities. It’s like Paramount consent decrees in the sense of it’s about how much vertical integration you could have over the course of production. It was abolished in 1993 by a decision. It counts as a counterfactual, because the decision could’ve gone the other way. In a short version, if in 1993 fin-syn hadn’t been eradicated, how would Hollywood look different today?

**Craig:** Oh, boy. You can argue in a lot of different directions here. The deal with fin-syn is it created a system where the only people who could afford to produce television good enough to be on networks were companies that could afford to operate under a system called deficit financing. The only way you could make money making a television show, because the networks couldn’t make them – therefore the networks made money off of licensing, so the networks pay you money to license the show you produced. They run it on the air, and then they sell ads. The amount of ads that they sell hopefully is way more than the licensing fee they’re paying you. But how do you make money? You don’t, because the licensing fee doesn’t even come close to paying you back.

**John:** To covering your costs.

**Craig:** Doesn’t even come close. The only you make money-

**John:** You’re relying on syndication.

**Craig:** Exactly. Basically, you need a hit. If the show makes it to, 100 episodes was considered the classic number to hit, then it could be syndicated, meaning it could then go into reruns. At that point, it just starts to spin off insane amounts of money through licensing fees forever. The game was, right, we’re going to lose a whole lot of money to make a whole lot of money. The only people that can afford to do that are very large companies; in this case, movie studios, basically. Those were the ones doing it.

**John:** If fin-syn hadn’t gotten shut down, you can imagine somehow more capital would’ve flown in to create more things that were like the Carsey-Werners and that stuff. The experienced producers would somehow be able to raise enough money to be able to make the shows they’re going to be able to make. But it would still be dicier. Those people would be very wealthy in hits, but these companies would also go bankrupt more often. Generally, you want to strike down vertical integration where you see it, because it is anti-competitive. It can drive down wages for people, because there’s fewer places you can sell your thing.

But it would’ve greatly changed how we’re doing stuff. It’s hard to know what would this look like in today’s streaming world, because there are companies that bring their own money to do stuff today. Those things still exist. It’s just different. You have the Legendaries. You have the Fifth Seasons. You have the companies that actually are coming in with their own money to do stuff. It would look a lot different. I can’t even suss out what the real changes would’ve been.

**Craig:** I think that you would probably have had much larger productions. We can look at companies that are not impacted by fin-syn. Fin-syn fell apart. But when you look at Netflix, for example, Netflix produces and distributes their own material. They are not beholden to these rules. The reason that fin-syn was a thing is because it applied to broadcast television. Broadcast television used the public airwaves to send their signals out, so the government therefore had the ability to get in the way and create regulations. There’s no regulations on an end-to-end agreement like Netflix, where they’re not using public airwaves whatsoever.

**John:** The FTC or the Justice Department could still come in there, but without the broadcast aspect of it, it’s much harder to enforce anything like that. It’d be much harder for them to win the judgment they would have to win.

**Craig:** Yes. The government has a clear, established interest in the rules regarding the use of public airwaves, going all the way back to the age of radio and so forth. But with internet carriers, it’s different. Netflix and companies, Amazon, etc., they’ve never operated under anything like this. They’ve always been able to make their own stuff and exhibit their own stuff. And what you see are massive productions, because there is no arrangement where you deficit finance in the hopes for syndication, and meanwhile the exhibitor is making money off of the sale of ads. In fact, Netflix and Amazon don’t have ads, although now they’re starting to. But even then, they’re starting to just put more money in their pockets.

I don’t know how the finances of these companies work, but you could argue that for Amazon, for instance, it’s possible that their production wing is really a loss leader, and it is a deficit financing, just to drive customers to their other aspect, which is buying toilet paper and pencils. I don’t know. But it does seem like if there had not been fin-syn and the networks could’ve reaped the benefits of their own syndication, that probably you would’ve seen some larger productions happening.

**John:** Last bit of counterfactual. Remember when Netflix was red envelopes you got in the mail?

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually do.

**John:** What if Netflix had stuck with their DVD model, that they were a company that sends you DVDs?

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

**John:** They never started a whole streaming business. How would the world be different if Netflix hadn’t started the streaming revolution?

**Craig:** I’m going to contradict myself a little bit here. Most of what I’ve been saying is when the world wants something, it finds a way to get it. In this case, I suspect that if Netflix hadn’t done what they did, nobody would’ve done it. The reason why nobody would’ve done it is because I’m not sure it, meaning the streaming model, actually makes sense. We watched this happen. Netflix did this. They churned through an enormous amount of money to build the business out of nothing, a little bit the way Amazon did with their larger business.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Then everybody else said, oh my god, we have to do it too. Then they all looked at each other and went, “How do you make money doing this exactly?” That makes me suspect nobody would’ve done it, because it doesn’t make sense. A lot of what we all went through with our convulsions in the labor movement in Hollywood was trying to make Hollywood confront the fact that they had blown up a system that worked fairly well for them and fairly well for us. They had blown it up chasing something that wasn’t like them and something that they could never be like. I think the world would be enormously different if Netflix had just stuck to the red envelopes.

**John:** Counterfactual to your counterfactual. I would say that internet video is going to want to happen. The fact that YouTube exists, there was a market for – people wanted to watch things through video. Even before we had Netflix, we did have webisodes of your favorite shows. The idea that we were going to be getting our TV or TV-like things over the internet I think is kind of inevitable.

The business model behind that could’ve gone many, many different ways. But I do think you would’ve ultimately seen things that looked like Netflix that were using money they got from investors to create shows and put them on the internet. And some of those would’ve grown into things that are maybe not the size or scale of what Netflix became, but it would’ve been big enough that even the other studios would’ve developed their own wings that were doing that kind of stuff. We would’ve gotten to something that looked like what we’re doing now, but just not with the full scale.

**Craig:** I think you’re right that in terms of a distribution platform, places like YouTube would’ve absolutely worked, and they kind of were. If you think back to what we were arguing about in our penultimate strike, the big concern was that the companies were going to use the internet to run our content and have ads run in it, just like it would on any syndicated channel, but because it was the internet as opposed to Channel 5 in New York, that somehow residuals wouldn’t apply.

I think YouTube did and continues to have a very robust system where they run ads. Yes, I think they would’ve struck deals with the companies to rebroadcast stuff. I think the whole thing of like, “YouTube is going to make its own stuff,” they sure tried. It didn’t work. What was it, YouTube Red? That was sort of a thing. Is it still a thing? I don’t even know if it’s a thing.

**John:** They got rid of YouTube Red.

**Craig:** They got rid of it. They got rid of it. Quibi. Good lord.

**John:** If it weren’t for Netflix, then we would’ve never had Quibi.

**Craig:** We would’ve never had the 4 million easy jokes about Quibi. The idea that these independent internet companies would… Remember Amazon Studios? Remember us discussing that whole baloney nonsense?

**John:** Yeah. They were always looking to do a thing. But again, Amazon still, with all their money, they probably would’ve tried to develop something that – again, it’s not Netflix, but they would’ve developed their own-

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** … video streaming service.

**Craig:** Maybe, or maybe they would have just said, “We are happy to be in the business where we pay you a licensing fee to rebroadcast your stuff on our platform,” just like Walmart pays for the DVDs that they then resell. And then Amazon, just like anything, will collect the ad money, and that’ll be that.

**John:** They probably would’ve looked at YouTube and said, “We want to be in the YouTube business,” and the revolution of that.

**Craig:** Where the internet was before Netflix decided to go bananas was this… You and I got yelled at a lot, as I recall, for decrying the concept of the democratization of entertainment creation. There are certainly a lot of people making money as influencers and all the rest of that, but that’s its own category.

There was this moment, and we were podcasting through it, where these companies were like, “The only reason that everybody doesn’t have great television to make is because of the gatekeepers, and if we just allow everybody to … ” No. The answer to that is no. None of that would’ve happened. None of that ever will happen. That’s not a thing. It doesn’t happen. It’s hard to do what we do. There are not a lot of people who do it.

It’s sort of like saying, “We’re going to democratize Major League Baseball. Everybody can show up and play.” Nope, actually, we still just want Juan Soto, which as you know, Juan is going to take the Yankees to the World Series this year. I know that you’ve been thinking it.

**John:** I basically stay awake at night really thinking about all the scenarios that gets him to the World Series.

**Craig:** Soto and then Judge, that number 3, number 4 lineup punch. We’ve talked about it a lot. It’s a big deal.

**John:** There are so many scenarios that it’s why I can’t sleep.

**Craig:** There’s really only the one scenario.

**John:** But you never know. The counterfactual is that, what if he gets hit by a bus, and therefore-

**Craig:** I’ll tell you, if Juan Soto gets hit by a bus, the Yankees will have another season like they did last year, which is really bad. David Benioff, John Gatins, and I have a little three-person group chat that is just nothing but us complaining about the Yankees. That’s all we do. It is just a constant ruing. This season hopefully will be different.

But in any case, I really think that what Netflix did was so improbable and so risky and so crazy. I’m still waiting for gravity to kick in.

**John:** It has basically worked for Netflix. It has not worked for everybody else. Netflix now actually makes a profit. But it was a wild, wild gamble. And they were able to use cheat money to do it. The circumstances worked out the way they worked out.

**Craig:** The circumstances worked out the way they worked out. I think the proof is in the pudding. Even as Netflix started to be successful, the legacy companies still weren’t like, “Oh god, we gotta … ” No, they were like, “Great. Keep licensing our stuff. Here. Friends. Give us money. You can run Friends.” It really wasn’t until they felt that there was an existential threat to their existence, and I think that was a miscalculation, by the way.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. Let’s say streaming never happens. Netflix doesn’t happen, and streaming never happens. Do the cable companies get even more powerful? Because they were the people not making the shows, but controlling access to people’s TVs.

**Craig:** Cable and satellite become more powerful. It is possible that a company like YouTube, which has successfully replaced a lot of cables and satellite dishes, would have become the other new dominant delivery system, but they would’ve been a delivery system. They wouldn’t have been a creation/delivery system. That’s the difference.

**John:** I agree. Let’s wrap up our big counterfactuals segment here talking through why I think it’s useful. It’s because when you look at the coin tosses, the ways things could’ve gone one way or the other way, you recognize that, as you said before, Craig, we are in a counterfactual. We’re in somebody else’s counterfactual. Things worked out the way they worked out, but they were not inevitable. We have to be mindful that the choices we make now will have repercussions down the road that we can’t always anticipate. I think it’s always nice looking at this ecosystem we find ourselves in was not the only possible version of this.

**Craig:** No. It is an either distressing or comforting notion to think that we are in the alternate reality, and in our version of the sim that we all live in, yeah, we’re missing some awesome things or we dodged massive bullets.

**John:** For sure. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We haven’t done a One Cool Thing together for a while.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Mine is on post-quantum cryptography, which is a mouthful but actually makes a lot of sense. I’ll link to an Apple Security blog post they did about it. The idea of post-quantum cryptography is – obviously, cryptography is so important for securing our communications. It’s making sure that the things we want to say private stay private, and messaging, all that stuff. Right now, we are using cryptography which is so strong that computers could spend 1,000 years trying to break the codes behind stuff, and they wouldn’t be able to open these messages. The problem is, at some point we’re going to get to quantum computers that are so powerful and so fast that this cryptography will fall apart. It will not be useful.

And so a thing that is happening is very well-resourced companies or nations can just say, “Okay, we’re going to suck up all this data. We can’t actually process it now. We can’t actually break the codes. But we know that in a couple years, we will be able to.” This becomes like, then how do you prevent that?

This paper goes through these plans for and these actual new algorithms to figure it out, for living in a post-quantum cryptography world, so basically, how do you encode things now so that as quantum computers come online, you still can’t open those messages.

The good news is there’s math that can get you there, so that it’s still going to be incredibly difficult for these super-super-super-computers to open those messages. There are things you can turn on now or soon in these messaging platforms that will keep stuff locked down whenever these quantum computers come online. Interesting. I like that it’s both dealing with problems now and problems 10, 20 years from now.

**Craig:** That’s smart. Phew. There is a problem I hadn’t thought of. Thanks. Now I’ll be awake at night. My One Cool Thing is a bit sweeter, pun intended, but also a bit sad, and somehow one of the most gripping articles I’ve ever read about marshmallows.

**John:** I love marshmallows.

**Craig:** John, have you ever had a Smashmallow?

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Neither did I. Drew, Smashmallow?

**Drew:** I’ve never had a Smashmallow.

**Craig:** Apparently, these were a bit popular a bit ago. There’s this guy, Jon Sebastiani. This is an article in Business Insider. Jon Sebastiani is a scion of a big wine company in Sonoma. He created the company Krave, with a K, which makes fancy beef jerky and so forth. He got into this new area of creating fancy marshmallows, fancy handmade marshmallows that were delicious and had lots of different flavors, and they were hand-cut. And people really dug them.

Then he decided, “It’s time to upscale this business. Let’s go big.” What ensued was an incredible collision of desire and reality, on an engineering level, because as it turns out, making marshmallows to scale is enormously hard. The marshmallows that we all know, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Kraft marshmallow type marshmallows, the reason they are the way they are and they just all vaguely suck is because that’s as good as they can do. Even the shape is necessary. Those are cylinders. Smashmallows were handmade. They would make these big slabs and cut them in squares, and people really liked the squares. Making squares at scale, making cubes, really, really hard.

What happens and how this whole thing falls apart is actually fascinating from a chemical, physical, and business level. And of course, it all comes tumbling down. There are lawsuits. And Smashmallow is no more.

**John:** It’s great. As I’m skimming through this article, it’s the Theranos of marshmallows.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? It really is. When you read it, you’re like… People were lying. He’s looking for this company that can build new machines to make the Smashmallows at scale. This company, I think it’s in the Netherlands, says, “We can do it. We can do it. We’re going to send you a sample of what we made to show you.” He was like, “Oh my god, you did it.” The big secret was they didn’t make that sample with a machine at all.

**John:** It was handcut.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** Just lied.

**John:** This past week, I had to go in for a blood test, and I remember coming back and telling Mike, “Man, I was there, and it just seems really inefficient. I felt like there’s a way you could have a machine that could just do this for you.” I’m like, “Oh shoot, I’m pitching Theranos, aren’t I? I’m going to stop right now. I am pitching Theranos.”

**Craig:** Just to tie back to our counterfactual, was her machine called the Edison?

**John:** Maybe so. A counterfactual is, what if she’d actually been able to make that machine? In theory, it’s a really good idea. But apparently, it’s like the Smashmallow. Yes, you think you should be able to make that thing, when it turns out you can’t.

**Craig:** I think if she had been able to make that machine, somebody would’ve made that machine already. When she was like, “We’re going to take a drop of blood and do all of your blood tests from a drop of blood,” I remember her mentor at Stanford, this wonderful professor, just said to her, “No. That is literally physically impossible on a molecular level.” But there was maybe slightly more of a chance that the marshmallow thing could’ve worked.

**John:** I’m sure that professor would’ve told Thomas Edison that he couldn’t make a motion picture projector, and look at him, he did.

**Craig:** Definitely a better chance of that than the-

**Drew:** Theranos machine ever working.

**John:** Theranos machines. Craig, a pleasure talking with you again.

**Craig:** Great to be back.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Hooray!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We love when good outros come through. Reminder that outros involve some version of (sings). You can hide it in there, but I’m always listening for it. Sometimes we’ll get these outros that are like, that is musically beautiful, but it’s not a Scriptnotes outro. You gotta get that in there. We gotta hear that.

Ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is 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. The one this past week was really good. It’s about oases and the moments in a story where characters find a bit of respite and escape from the plot and how important those are in stories. Inneresting.

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 capitalism.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Yay.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, it’s so nice to have you back.

**Craig:** Great to be back, John.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, capitalism.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It is the water we are swimming in. It is the system of finance and economics that we’ve grown up in. At the same time, when I see people complain about things in the world or about technology or about AI or other things, I’m like, yeah, but that is actually just capitalism you’re concerned about. That’s just how things are. Craig, I’m curious, when were you aware of capitalism?

**Craig:** Early age. Social studies class. You learn about different forms of economy. Certainly, we learned about the alternatives. In the ’80s, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of capitalism as a problem.

**John:** Yeah, because we had capitalism versus Communists. It was us versus the Russians.

**Craig:** There was the middle ground of socialism. But I think there was also a less angry discussion over it. Deregulation began in earnest under Ronald Reagan in the ’80s. But prior to that, we had and still have things like Social Security, which has the world “social” in it, which people that hate socialism are really angry about if you say that you would take it away. We have Medicare, and we have Medicaid, and we have Workman’s Comp, and we have Disability, and we have taxes. The thing is, we do live in a socialist system. I don’t know how you can’t, other than some sort of Ayn Rand fantasy-ville.

Capitalism was never seen as some sort of pure thing, but rather it was a negotiating thing. Tying back to what we were talking about earlier with Edison, one of the things we learned about quite a bit was how capitalism unchecked became a real problem around the turn of the century in the United States, the turn of the 20th century, and Sinclair Lewis and child labor, the meatpacking industry, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, labor movement, and all that leading into the busting of monopolies, robber barons, etc. There was a time when in our country, capitalism got out of hand, and the government stepped in and put it in check, and it hasn’t done so again effectively since.

Where I’m sitting here, I agree with you. When people are complaining, what they are complaining about is capitalism. But from my point of view, I would say what they’re really, really, really complaining about is the dysregulated capitalism.

**John:** We were alive during the time of Reagan and, “We’re going to take away all these rules about stuff that are holding us back.” And it’s hard to remember that there was a time before then, when there were more controls over what people could do, what companies could do and the size and scale of what they’re able to do.

I remember my dad worked for AT&T, or Bell Labs, and when the phone monopoly got broken up, I was like, “Oh my god, what are they doing? That’s crazy.” But it was the right choice, in retrospect. It was a dumb system we were living in. The innovation that was possible afterwards was important.

Let’s talk for a moment about definitions of what capitalism is, because there’s things that are in capitalism that are also common in other systems too. But important distinctions: the idea of a competitive market, that you want to have multiple companies competing for buyers, and buyers can choose between places they want to buy from; the sense of price finding, that there’s not a set price, but the price will find its right balance based on supply and demand; the idea of private property, property rights recognition, which includes patents and trademarks and copyright; the idea of wage labor, which seems so basic, but obviously in a lot of other economic systems, you don’t get paid wages for things.

You could argue, was America set up under a capitalism system? Kind of. The term wasn’t really used. But we also had slavery, so you can’t say that we were under any true wage system.

**Craig:** We certainly were not.

**John:** No. It’s complicated, but I think we have this fundamental belief and understanding that America has always been this capitalist nation. It’s like, not really.

**Craig:** No, we were more akin to a feudal nation. I think our economy was somewhat feudal. Obviously, there were two economies in the early United States. But one economy was victorious in the end, and that was industry. The growth of industry and the Industrial Revolution created what we consider capitalism today, I do believe. That was also what Marx was reacting to, and Hegel and the rest of them.

What industry did was create a both tremendous energy of creation and freedom and wealth, and also terrible exploitation and destruction. On one hand, industry – which we have in our brains converted into technology, but if we lived in China, we would understand is also industry, where everything is manufactured still – has led to longer lives, has led to tremendous advances in technology that liberates and connects. The creation of simple things like washing machines was essential to the liberation of women, who were traditionally stuck washing clothes literally all day.

But without regulation, almost every single time, what ends up happening is terrible pollution, the abuse of children, the underpayment of labor, extremist slavery, and then monopolization, which undoes what you call price seeking and freedom and actually begins to destroy creativity, and it kills itself. Capitalism is like bacteria that works well in our body until it runs rampant and then it can kill us.

**John:** A term I hear used a lot is late-stage capitalism. I wasn’t even quite clear what people are trying to refer to with it. It’s basically this moment that we’re in right now that has not just giant corporations, but multinational corporations, where you can’t even point to a center of them. They’re harder to control and regulate because they exist beyond national boundaries.

A thing that we’re both agreeing on here is that capitalism relies on a government system to enforce contracts and do certain things, and yet as individuals, we rely on the government to protect us from the worst abuses that these companies are going to enforce upon us. That is a real challenge when companies exist beyond all conceivable boundaries. It requires multinational government agreement on how to deal with these corporations. That’s not a thing that we really have a good structure for at this moment.

**Craig:** No. The closest we have is the United States government, which is being held hostage by one political party that at this point seems to only have, “We don’t like government,” as a purpose. And then there is the European economic community, which does represent itself fairly well as a large corporation of companies. It is in fact Europe that seems to be doing the only holding companies to accountability action. Now, they are not a particularly efficient group. Government is notorious for being inefficient. It’s why capitalism is also necessary. If government is in charge of creation, production, and payment, in general, you end up with a bureaucratic sludge.

Capitalism, to me, is really just the expression of human nature in economic form. But just like human nature, we need law. What we do see is Europe, representing a very large market, can say to, for instance, Google or Amazon, “No, you can’t do that anymore. We don’t like that anymore. Stop it.” The United States used to do that. It’s been quite some time, and these companies seem to be just flouting all of the rules. But the United States still represents an enormous marketplace. If the United States, for instance, said to Amazon or Netflix, “You can’t do these things anymore,” then it would have to stop.

That said, some of the things that Europe has done, particularly vis a vis technology to try and curb late-stage capitalistic companies, just is ineffectual nuisance. For instance, the constant asking me if I want to accept the cookies. Okay. Sure.

**John:** Yeah, or like, you must use USB-C. Sure, great. There’s the concern that they will tend to favor European companies over American companies. Yeah, we get all that. I think what it comes down to is – I say people’s complaints are really about capitalism. The second part of that answer is, and the solutions to these things are demanding of your government to address these concerns, because you’re not going to be able to address these concerns. You can’t yell at the corporation to do better. You actually have to – it requires action to make any of these changes.

**Craig:** Yes. Corporations, by charter, are designed to maximize profits for their shareholders. That is their sole purpose. What that means is that if they could get away with paying their workers five cents an hour, including hiring children, they would, because that satisfies their charter, to maximize profits. That’s where we need regulation.

The people that are angry about capitalism probably, almost certainly, are reasonably angry, because they’re probably being underpaid. Most people are. Wages have not progressed as they should. And if the United States government were functional and mandated a healthy minimum wage, I think people would be complaining less, because that’s a huge problem. They don’t get paid enough.

Also, companies – particularly, the financial industry has become so complicated and so disconnected from creation that this concept of too big to fail is real. We’re now on the system where capitalism – some companies simply cannot lose. If they lose, society falls apart, because they’re too integrated into our backbone. That’s a huge problem.

**John:** I think a previous One Cool Thing on an earlier episode was a book I was reading on the history of corporations. Corporations have existed before capitalism. They were originally designed to do sailing expeditions to different places, basically how you’d raise enough money to do a thing. Importantly, corporations had to get a charter that was literally from the royals. The imperial state had to give them the charter.

The argument is basically that government should basically have that same kind of charter thing, saying you actually have to serve the public in what your corporation does. There has to be a purpose beyond just making money. That’s an idea that we’ve completely lost. That seems insane, but that was the idea.

**Craig:** That was the idea. Just as certain concepts like copyright have become abused or weaponized, so too has the notion of corporatism and the idea that corporation now begins to shield all human beings from accountability. The creation of corporations is something that, at least in the state of Delaware, appears to be a hand wave. You and I both made corporations for ourselves, loan-out corporations.

**John:** Scriptnotes is an LLC.

**Craig:** There you go. Those corporations required a whole lot of one page of paperwork.

**John:** Yes, indeed.

**Craig:** They exist to take advantage of certain business things and certain tax things, so the tax code, all of it. Think about that, that the tax code – that’s the oxygen that government breathes to live – is in and of itself interwoven into corporate creation and corporate function. The economists argue with each other constantly over how this all works. I suppose if we step back really, really far and boil it down to its simplest, simplest version, it’s that there needs to be a balance, and we are out of balance.

**John:** We’re out of balance. We’re simplifying, yet it’s actually accurate, because we recognize that all the good things about capitalism and corporations, in terms of price finding and all that stuff, there is an efficiency there that you cannot replace. But without the acknowledgement of the individual value of people and societies and the environment, you’re going to end up in a terrible, dark place.

**Craig:** If you only value profit, you will die. You have to also value things that will diminish profit, like the health and welfare of human beings, because in the end, that’s what the economy is for. What our economy has turned into is an economy that exists to hyper-enrich an incredibly small amount of people. It’s just not going to work. We’ve been here before. I think the richest person ever in terms of dollars out of the amount of dollars that existed on the planet was Rockefeller perhaps or maybe Getty.

**John:** Perhaps, yeah.

**Craig:** The original oil barons, the robber barons. That’s why it changed. There was that period in the earlier part of the 20th century where America corrected what had been an out-of-control corporatization in our country. We are so clearly in need of that now.

Part of what we struggle with is that all of the messaging and discussion and the politics and the way politics functions as – these campaigns are corporations – the corporations themselves are sitting there, including the ones you and I work for, guiding the discussion. The people who want to not return balance to the system are the ones that have their finger on the play button.

**John:** At least we’ve solved it. That’s the good news. We talked it through. We figured it out. So problems resolved.

**Craig:** Problem solved. There’s something counterfactual where Rupert Murdoch isn’t born or decides to learn guitar and be in a band, a lovely band in Australia.

**John:** Or he has some sort of Christmas Carol kind of visiting by three ghosts, and things turn out very differently.

**Craig:** Where are the ghosts when you need them?

**John:** That’s the question. Never the ghosts when you want one. Craig, Drew, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [What If?](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/406281) by Robert Cowley
* [Thomas Edison: The Unintentional Founder of Hollywood](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/) by Garrett O’Brien for the Saturday Evening Post
* [United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.) on Wikipedia
* [George Lucas: The Car Wreck That Changed His Life and Led Him to ‘Star Wars’](https://www.biography.com/movies-tv/george-lucas-car-crash-star-wars) by Tim Ott for Biography
* [When ‘Titanic’ Was Expected to Be a Huge Flop](https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/titanic-movie-flop-history-facts) by Jake Rossen for Mental Floss
* [‘John Carter’ Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/john-carter-bombed-1235109193/) by Richard Newby for THR
* [Financial Interest and Syndication Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Interest_and_Syndication_Rules)
* [Post-Quantum Cryptography](https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/)
* [S’more! S’more! His artisanal marshmallows were the greatest. Then he tried to scale them.](https://www.businessinsider.com/smashmallow-lawsuit-marshmallow-failure-silicon-valley-business-growth-2024-1) by Adam Rogers
* [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/634standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/reviving-a-dormant-project).

**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, and this is Episode 633 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Any screenwriter who’s been working for a few years likely has projects that have stalled out or otherwise gone dormant. Today on the show, what happens when you revive one of those projects and actually get it made 20 years later. We’ll talk with a writer who’s done just that.

John Gatins is a screenwriter and producer whose credits include Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel, Power Rangers, and Flight, for which he received the Academy Award nomination. He’s also an actor you can see in movies including The Nines. Welcome, John Gatins.

**John Gatins:** Thank you.

**John August:** This is not your first time on Scriptnotes. We often see you and hear you at our live shows, because you are the person who is introducing us to Hollywood Heart, a fantastic charity.

**John Gatins:** I thank you both, all of you. You’ve done such great things for us and that really cool, cool, cool organization.

**John August:** We love doing our live shows with you guys, so thank you for that.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** We’re not here to talk about those organizations today. We’re going to instead talk about your new movie, Little Wing, which kind of falls into a general genre I’d also love to talk with you about, which is sports movies or sports competition kinds of movies, because you have quite a few of those on your resume. I want to talk about how we construct and execute sports movies. Then we’ll also answer some listener questions about compartmentalization, mid-credit scenes, work ethics.

And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, kind of a grab bag. After a long solo career, you’re starting to work with a partner now, so I want to talk about the shift of partners. You’re also one of the people I think who is smartest and savviest about figuring out credits. When there’s a bunch of writers who have worked on a movie together, you are the person who figures out, “Hey, can we all figure out a good deal on this?” I want to talk through that process with you.

**John Gatins:** Sure.

**John August:** Cool.

**John Gatins:** Great.

**John August:** We’ll start with some news. John Gatins, have you ever heard this term? This came to me in an email I got from one of my agents, talking about what this one studio was looking for. One of the terms was “bro soaps.” What do you think a bro soap is?

**John Gatins:** A bro soap?

**John August:** Uh-huh.

**John Gatins:** I don’t know. It’s a two-handed movie with two guys who are endeavoring to do something. I failed, right?

**John August:** It’s a series. They’re looking at it like a soap opera. The definition in this email was, “A muscular drama that appeals to men.” Sons of Anarchy.

**John Gatins:** Would Suits be a bro soap?

**John August:** Yeah, exactly.

**John Gatins:** Because those two guys are kind of in love with each other.

**John August:** Yeah, I think that would be a bro soap. I think it’s not so specifically broey. Sons of Anarchy is broey.

**John Gatins:** That show I don’t know.

**John August:** Or Ray Donovan. It’s very masculine energy. Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Last week, John, you had the flu. You were saying we don’t have flu tests in the U.S. Travis wrote in to say at-home flu tests are available in the USA. Lucira by Pfizer is the one that is available. They’re about $50 each.

**John August:** I looked at this one. John, do you remember early on in the pandemic, we had those at-home tests, and some of them were electronic, or sort of electronic, where you’d put the little sample, and you’d put it into a base, and then it gave a red or a green light? Do you remember any of those? Did you ever do any of those?

**John Gatins:** I don’t. I don’t remember.

**John August:** It was a thing that was happening for a while. This looks like one of those. It’s great that it exists. It’s 50 bucks, which is really expensive for an at-home test. It also just feels like so much extra waste to do this electronic thing, because it should just be… We know how to do a test now. You just stick the little thing in. You look for the little lines. Apparently, these electronic ones, they really are just creating a line. They have a little sensor that reads whether the line is there or not. I’m glad this exists, I guess, but I want those cheap European tests that you swab and you see, do I have the flu, do I have COVID, do I have RSV. That’s what I want.

**John Gatins:** Look. I had COVID before anybody.

**John August:** You’ve always been a pioneer.

**John Gatins:** I had COVID, didn’t know it. Nobody knew what COVID was. It was the sickest I’ve ever been. I had a night in my kitchen by myself at 4:00 in the morning where I had a 105 fever. I was like, “I might need to call 911. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Then I recovered slowly. Then I started reading about the symptoms when it was finally a thing. Then my doc said, “Does anybody want a test for the antibodies?” I said, “I do.” Ling was like, “You’re nuts.” I was like, “I’m telling you I had this.” He was like, “I’ve tested so many people. You’re the one guy with antibodies, so you’ve had it.”

**John August:** I’d never had the flu as an adult until this last week, and it was the sickest I’ve been.

**John Gatins:** The flu is no joke. Flu kills lots of people, friends.

**John August:** It does kill a lot of people. It was bad. I had, again, a 105 fever. It was like, “Do I go to the emergency room?”

**John Gatins:** I know. I was literally googling “dangerous fever for old men.”

**John August:** We’re both alive to talk about it, so that’s the real victory. More follow-up on the Tiffany Problem. Explanation, Tiffany Problem is that Tiffany was actually a pretty common old name, but if you’d name a character in a period movie Tiffany, everyone’s like, “That feels wrong.”

**John Gatins:** Really?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** Why? Because they think of the pop star?

**John August:** It seems like a modern name, but it’s actually an old name.

**Drew:** It goes back to the medieval times. Jake from Pandora wrote in to say, “I’m a VFX artist on the Avatar sequels over at Lightstorm Entertainment, which P.S., we just voted to unionize.”

**John August:** Congratulations.

**Drew:** “A major problem we face is that on Pandora, gravity is two thirds of Earth’s gravity. Presumably, this was decided to make an 8 to 10-foot-tall Na’vi seemingly move as a human does, so our perception of physics would be similar to that on Earth. But the Tiffany Problem of it all is that if we show someone jumping, it looks like they’re floating, if we multiply gravity times 0.667, which is the correct math according to Jim and the Oscar winners. Also, fires, water, and basically all physics simulations look fake at two thirds gravity. This would make absolutely everything we perceive to be so different, more so than a casual moviegoer would realize.”

**John August:** That’s a great point. You want to be realistic and truthful as much as you can in a movie and follow the rules of the world that you’re setting, but sometimes you have to bend those rules, because otherwise it just doesn’t seem plausible.

**John Gatins:** I remember working on Behind Enemy Lines, and we had a retired admiral. We kept trying to do things in the script that were like, “The master sergeant comes in and says this to the… ” It’s like, “He would never say… That just doesn’t happen.” We’re like, “It has to happen, because we need a problem in the movie.” It’s like, “No, that just doesn’t… They would never say that to that guy.” He was like, “That’s so disrespectful.” It’s like, “We’re going to have to though.”

**John August:** I remember calling Jack Warner, the dinosaur expert for the Jurassic Park movies. I needed to say, “Could this thing plausibly do this?” This point, it’s a couple of movies. It’s like, “I’d say that’s plausible. I think it’s defensible that this thing could happen.” You reach a point where it’s like, okay, I can understand that this feels right within the context of this movie, whether it’s actually supported by-

**John Gatins:** Berloff and I are working on a black hole movie, and we talked to this black hole scientist, and we pitched them a bunch of things, until we got to, “But you’re saying there’s a… I mean, you could.” He was like, “I guess.” You just look for one kernel of some sort of scientist tiny little something to hang onto and be like, “That’s the thing.”

**John August:** Going back to Pandora and the Avatar movies, literally, they’re after unobtainium. There are moments there which are clearly fantasy moments, which give them latitude to do some things that are useful for what they need to do. Finally, my favorite kind of follow-up is Arlo Finch follow-up.

**Drew:** Yes. Ethan wrote, “Couldn’t help but write in when I heard you and Craig talking about Arlo Finch the dog. My dear cat and erstwhile writing companion is named Arlo after Arlo Finch. His shelter name was Largo, which is not his personality, so that had to go. We adopted him in October 2017, and at that time, John had mentioned working on the Arlo Finch novels, and I loved the name. Something about it is adventurous and a touch anachronistic. As you mentioned, it’s also an easy name to howl across the apartment to get his attention.”

**John August:** We have a picture here of Arlo Finch the cat. So handsome. Look at this cat.

**John Gatins:** That’s a handsome cat.

**John August:** That’s a handsome cat. I’m not even a huge cat person, but I would say that’s a handsome cat. Then we were also talking about two-syllable dog names, because the best dog names are two syllables, and for reasons we’re going to get into in this email.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “Listening to you mention dog names generally being two syllables struck a chord. When I was a child, my father was a breeder of German shepherds. I always remember him saying that whether you were naming a dog or a child, the name had to yell good. English wasn’t his first language. I definitely took that into consideration when naming my kids Marcus and Ian.”

**John Gatins:** We have two dogs, named Riri and Farley.

**John August:** Exactly, you can yell.

**John Gatins:** We can yell those. They get that.

**John August:** Arlo. It yells out well. It’s a good dog name, a good kid name. John Gatins, talk to us about why you’re here. I want to get into a general sense of reviving old projects and what that’s like. Before we get into yours specifically, Drew has been doing research here. A bunch of recent movies are actually really old scripts that have been rejuvenated. Drive Away Dolls, the new Ethan Cohen movie, is an old script. Mad Max: Fury Road sat around for a long time. Unforgiven notoriously sat around for 20 years. Dallas Buyers Club. Beau is Afraid. A lot of times, things will sit around.

**John Gatins:** I’m going to ask you this question, but I’ll share this first. I can’t think of a movie that I’ve worked on, that got made, that didn’t take… I can’t even think of the fastest one, because I don’t think it’s inside five years, to be honest.

**John August:** The rare exceptions would be things where it felt like there was just huge movement towards… The Charlie’s Angels movies happened pretty quickly. But yeah, in most cases, stuff did take a long-

**John Gatins:** Stuff takes a long time.

**John August:** Yeah, but there’s a difference between stuff takes a long time, it’s slowly churning along, to there was no movement and then you came in with EMT paddles and zapped it back into life, which sounds like what happened to Little Wing. Can you give us the backstory on Little Wing?

**John Gatins:** Yeah. In around 2004, I wrote and directed a movie for Dreamworks called Dreamer. Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell horse-racing movie. I had a great experience at Dreamworks. They were so cool and collaborative. It was great to have a studio run by Stacy Snyder and Steven Spielberg, who’s a filmmaker. It’s like a different thing, because when he says things to you, what he’s saying, it’s like, “Hey, I’d do this,” and so it’s a little bit different. It was interesting, because I really liked working there. It’s a cool little campus. You know it. They have lunch every day in a courtyard. It’s just collegial and kind of fun.

I got this call from my agent that said, “Steven wants to send you this article that he bought, that he loves, called Little Wing.” Susan Orlean wrote this really beautiful piece for the New Yorker. As you know, she wrote The Orchid Thief, which became adaptation, which is famously about someone trying to adapt a book that they don’t know how to adapt. They wrote a script about how, “I don’t know how to adapt this movie,” which was brilliant. And it’s such a cool movie. I thought that was kind of funny.

I read the article. It was great. It was about her when she was spending time in Boston and walking her dog at this dog park. She encountered this girl, who was a 12-year-old girl who had racing pigeons, which she just thought was fascinating. So she befriended the girl and her mom and had this relationship, and she wrote this really elegant piece about it. Steven, it just really struck him. So I get called to Steven’s office. I’m like, “Oh, cool.” I go up there. It’s so cool to sit in his office.

**John August:** I have been in his office. Yeah, for sure.

**John Gatins:** He has the Rosebud sled in a Lucite box on his wall. There’s a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s incredible. You’re just mesmerized. You’re in this thing. Steven was so chatty and fun. Dakota Fanning was in my movie, but I had to go to five-day weeks with her, to get her out in time to go do War of the Worlds. We were sharing this actor, and it was just kind of interesting. He was watching all my dailies and everything else. We talked about his movie. We talked about my movie.

**John August:** That’s so great.

**John Gatins:** They’re both kind of 9/11 movies. We had this whole connective, great, soulful chat. Then he starts talking about the article. I was like, “Yeah, so I was thinking, the article’s amazing, but I don’t know what a movie is based on this. I have no idea.” I left the meeting feeling like, oh my god, I had this great time I got to spend with Steven Spielberg, and I’ll tell this story forever, and blah blah blah, and that’s that.

I get to my car. My agent calls and says, “Look, they’re making this deal.” I was like, “What deal?” She was like, “Steven really wants you to write the movie.” I was like, “What is the movie? I don’t know what the… ” But then how do you say no to the guy and his partner, Stacy, who let me make this movie there, my first movie as a first-time director, on a script that I’d wrote? I was like, “Okay,” but I was terrified, that sweat of like, I have to figure out how to create something around this thing of this girl and whatever. I agreed, and I was in such a panic about it.

I met Susan Orlean, who was super cool. We chatted a bit, and she said, “You should really meet the girl.” I flew to Boston, and I met the girl and her mom, who worked in police. They were super nice. We spent a couple hours chatting in this hotel lobby. Then I went to the Red Sox-Yankees game. I’m a huge Yankees fan. The Yankees destroyed the Red Sox. It was super fun. Then I still was totally off the planet with like, “What do I do?”

**John August:** Let me stop you there, because I can anticipate what you were going through, because you have maybe a protagonist. You have a central character, but there’s not an arc there. There’s not a confrontation. There’s not an obstacle in the face of her. There’s no villain. There’s no urgency for why does the story start and end.

**John Gatins:** The other thing that was in this young person’s life was that her parents had gone through a divorce. There was a little bit of that. So I was like, “Maybe it’s a divorce movie. Maybe it’s like whatever.” I just started, as we do as a writer, just making shit up and just trying to figure some things out and adding characters to it and having this girl go through this moment. Then it became about, maybe they’re losing their house, and they have to move, and she’s upset about that, and she doesn’t want to leave.

Then I started researching racing pigeons, which I knew nothing about. I was like, “Wow, that’s a really fascinating world.” I was like, “Some of these pigeons are worth a lot of money. Who knew that racing pigeons brought all this money?” Then I think that’s where the thread of the idea of, what if she, in an attempt to save her house, goes and steals some racing pigeon from some famous old racing pigeon guy. It becomes a heist. There’s a little heist in the middle.

There’s a boy across the street who was her friend, but now they’re of an age where it’s like that coming-of-age story of, like, are we friends, or is there more? Is there something to it? How is school? Is school hard? How do people treat you? How do you see yourself? I love writing about teenagers, because they’re such curious characters. You kind of love them, but I always say teenagers have been sneaking out of their window since the dawn of time.

**John August:** Romeo and Juliet, yeah.

**John Gatins:** It’s just to make bad decisions. We love them, and we forgive them, but they really can be unpredictable and fun as movie characters.

**John August:** You’re starting to figure out the pieces of this. Are you going back to pitch Steven and Stacy, or are you just writing a script and delivering?

**John Gatins:** Literally, they left me alone, which was the great and awful news at the same time, because it was like, “I need some help.” I was terrified. Honestly, it’s one of those experiences where I wrote the script and I turned it in and I flew to New York. I have family in New York, and we were on a family vacation. We went there. I was just terrified. Clicking send was like, “This is the end. They’re going to look at this and say, ‘What the fuck did you do? What is it?'”

Steven Spielberg called me, and he was like, “I love this. I want to make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. Sure. What do you need from me?” kind of thing. It was such a small movie too that I was like, “Why would Steven Spielberg-”

**John August:** Because this was made for Universal?

**John Gatins:** I think, yeah, their output was Universal at that time, I think. But Steven was really enthralled with the movie. It’s funny, because I feel like some of the only other Irish guys in the movie business are the Burns brothers. Brian was a good friend of my brother’s. He called my brother, and he said, “Eddie,” – his brother, Ed Burns – he said, “was with Steven Spielberg this weekend. Steven kept talking about this bird script that your brother wrote,” and blah blah blah. I was like, “Wow, it’s genuine. It’s really on Steven’s mind.”

Steven was so supportive of it, because it was just kind of unique. It was just kind of this strange, unique coming-of-age story of this girl and has a heist and a little bit of a love story. She meets this older character guy, and they smash into each other. Y’all have seen the movie.

Steven was a really supporter of it. But the business changes all the time. We’re talking about scripts that die. Part of the reason the script dies is because these producers’ deals ended, and the studio owns the movie, so then it moves on, and then someone finds it, or a new executive comes in and says, “Hey, there’s this John August script on the shelf. Let’s take a look at that. Maybe we should breathe some life into this,” get the paddles, as you say. And maybe another writer has an approach. It’s like, “Read it. You read it. See what you think.” It went to Paramount, because they had this split, so it was dead, basically, for Dreamworks.

But what was cool about it was that Steven, I think, really lobbied for me to work on Real Steel. Now it’s 2007, and I get brought into the Peter Berg world of, they’re going to make this movie, Real Steel, which is one of the properties they kept. And I went on the whole ride with that movie for two years or whatever. Little Wing was dead and gone.

**John August:** Dead and gone after a draft? Had you gotten a draft set and polished?

**John Gatins:** I probably had done a rewrite based on some notes, because when it went to Paramount, they pulled it out and said, “Hey, we should make this for Nick.” It was Nickelodeon. It was like, “This could fit for them. It could be a small movie,” whatever. I think I did a draft with them. The Nickelodeon movie people there were cool. I think there was a moment of trying to make it whatever, and then it went quiet.

Then it was years and years later. I don’t even remember. Donald DeLine called me. He was at Warner Bros. He said, “Susan and these guys came in, and they wanted to do an animated version of this Little Wing story.” He said, “I started looking through the rights and realized you’d written a script, so then I went and got the script. I think the script is great. Let’s make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. I don’t know how to do that.”

Paramount Players was in existence then. They took a shot. We talked about it. We met some directors and whatever else. But we’re trying to make the movie for literally $5 million or less. It was like, “I don’t really know how to do… I’m here to help you guys, whatever.” It kind of died again.

Then I think the next thing along the line was, I had worked on Power Rangers with Dean Israelite, and I sent it to him. I said, “What do you think of this?” He was like, “I love this. I want to help make this movie.” Brian Robbins, who’d been a collaborator who I’d written movies for way in the past-

**John August:** And was running Paramount.

**John Gatins:** And now had just came in to run Paramount. And he started working with Dean. We said to him, “We want to do this.” He said, “I love this script. If you guys can get Brian Cox to play Jaan Vari,” who was my high school health teacher, by the way, who I worked for over the summer. He was a Vietnam vet. I worked for him as a lifeguard over the summer. I had a long relationship with Jaan, who was a really cool guy. Suddenly, he’s like, “If you guys can get this to happen, we’ll make the movie.” Through a lot of craziness, we got Brian Cox to agree to do the movie, so it made the movie kind of go.

**John August:** This was a few years into Succession?

**John Gatins:** It was right towards the tail end. I think they were working the last season or something. We were like, “Great.” Then they were like, “Can you get Kelly Reilly?” I’m like, “How do I get Kelly?” Yes, I knew her from Flight, loved her. She’s amazing. We actually lived next door to each other in the hotel that we were all staying in when we were making that movie in Georgia. I sent her an email. I was just like, “Hey, do you remember me?” I said, “Would you look at this script and whatever?” I also knew her agent, so I reached out to him as well, and we texted back and forth and whatever. She texted me, like, “I love this script.” I said, “Meet Dean.” Then Dean, the director, and she had a Zoom and whatever, and suddenly she wanted to do the movie.

**John August:** At what point were you actually producing? Functionally, what you’re doing is producing, but at what point were you actually a producer on this?

**John Gatins:** I think what was cool is that my partners in that were Donald, because it had come to him, and he breathed life into it. And then I had been working with Karen Rosenfelt on something else, and I said, “Hey,” I said, “Will you look at this?” She read it. She was like, “I’ll help you.” I said, “Okay.” I pulled Karen in. Then Karen and Donald know each other. Then the three of us were exchanging info to say, “I know so-and-so. I’ll call them,” whatever. It was a little bit like, “I got a washboard. I have a drum set. Let’s make a band.” It’s like, “Here we go.” I knew Dean. We just put this little thing together. Brian kept saying to us, “Okay.” Brian Robbins kept saying, “I trust you guys. Okay.”

**John August:** There was also a unique opportunity at a new channel to put it towards, because you could put it towards Paramount Plus, and so you didn’t have the expectation of like, this is a movie that has to open at a certain amount on a weekend. It doesn’t have to hit this metric or that metric. It can be its own thing.

**John Gatins:** We didn’t know what a streaming movie was. They have all these labels under Paramount. It’s Awesomeness and Nickelodeon, all these different things. I think, what I can tell from the birth of the streaming moment is that they need content. So what is a streaming movie? It’s like, “I don’t know. I guess this is a streaming movie.” So that’s what we did, basically.

**John August:** Looking at the final film, it’s the kind of thing that could’ve been made with outside money and sold at a festival. It’s one of those kind of things that could’ve happened.”

**John Gatins:** I kept saying that to Dean. I was like, “This is a movie from the 1990s.” I was like, “This is a movie that could’ve been a… ” I said exactly that, John. I was like, “This could’ve been one of those movies that people say, ‘I really like that movie. That movie’s got some soul. This is cool.'” I kept saying to Dean, “We don’t really make these movies anymore.” I was like, “This is kind of a rare thing.”

Interestingly, Dean really wanted to set it in 2007 with the mortgage crisis about to blow up and everything else. The studio was a little bit like, “We don’t really want to date the movie that way.” We were like, “We don’t want cellphones in the movie. We don’t want all this texting with teenagers and stuff.” We had to find the right middle ground where we make it a little bit just, you don’t really know. We’re not saying it’s this time or that time or whatever. We’re not trying to give timestamps of what moment you’re in.

The movie we would’ve liked to set in Boston, because that’s where this young person was from, but it ended up being Portland for budget reasons and lots of things. Portland was a perfect town.

**John August:** It feels right.

**John Gatins:** It’s such an interesting place, Portland, and is a little bit worn out in areas, and it felt right for this kind of story.

**John August:** Cool. In a very broad sense, this fits into, I would say, a sports competition movie, because even though we’re not seeing them racing per se, it’s not about the birds themselves racing, it fits into your general oeuvre of sports competitions. You did Summer Catch, Hardball, Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel. I want to talk a little bit about the broad shapes of sports movies, because in some cases, the sport is the focus, and we’re literally watching, like, “Will they win the game?” And sometimes sports is just the background. Summer Catch, I would say it’s a movie with baseball, but it’s not a movie about baseball. Is that fair?

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair.

**John August:** In all these kind of movies, we’re really talking about what is the POV? Is the POV of the player? Is it the coach? Is it the parents, like in The Blind Side? You can make a zillion different football movies. It really ultimately comes down to whose POV you’re trying to tell the story from.

**John Gatins:** Look. Sports culture in America is a really specific thing. We use those catchphrases all the time. People in the office are like, “Come on, guys. Bottom of the ninth. We got to hit it out of the park.” It’s part of who we are. Look how many people watch the Super Bowl. This year we had Taylor Swift. It’s crazy. I think that those stories are endlessly fascinating, like all the cool documentary series now about sports guys. And the Jordan documentary, that series that we watched, was incredible, that Mike Tollin made. I think that we’re enthralled by that because it’s dramatic. Are you going to win or lose? It’s personal.

Ling is my wife. John knows. I’m saying that, Drew, my wife’s name’s Ling. Ling always says to me she’ll watch sports with me because I do the background commentary. I’m like, “Oh, this guy actually had broken his leg. He’s on the comeback. He’s late 30s. He shouldn’t be this good. This is really amazing that this guy is able to do this thing.” Now she’s really interested. You hear the personal story, and it’s like, “Oh, now I’m in. Now I’m in.”

**John August:** The idea of the sports commentary behind the scenes, you’ll provide context in the room, but often one of the things you’re wrestling with in writing the movie is how much commentary are you providing, and are you actually providing a commentary character to help explain things.

I was talking to a friend with his script about esports. I said, “One of the things I really missed in this final competition sequence was the sense of live commentary happening to provide context for what I’m seeing, because that way it’s not beholden on my character’s doing it.” It’s nice to have some authoritative voice explaining what it is we’re actually watching.

**John Gatins:** Look. Remember Rocky, which created everything for sports movies in a way? There’s one crucial scene in Rocky that I try to put in every sports movie I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a few. He says to her, “I can’t win.” The guy is like, “I can’t win. That’s the problem here.” Guess what, guys? He doesn’t win. That’s not what the movie’s about, honestly. It’s that he did it. I think that that’s what we relate to as humans. I’d love to do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things I’m not ever going to do. I’m not going to win at things that I think that I would like to try to do. But I think we get inspired by those things, to say, “Wow, that’s heroic that this person is trying to do this thing.”

Guys, the Olympics are coming. We’re all going to get invested in the Olympics, about sports and people in that sport that I know nothing about. There’s some young female athlete that’s going to do some incredible thing that I don’t know anything about right now. But you catch me after the summer, I’m going to tell you everything there is to know about that person, because I’ve watched the journey, and I’ve seen the backstory now. It’s like, “Oh, she lived with her mom,” and this and that. It’s going to be some incredible, inspiring story. We just as humans have that kind of emotional connection to those things, because we put ourselves in those situations, like, “Oh my god, what would I do if I had one run left on the ski hill?” It’s like, “I got to go full out. I have to risk my life to try to win this medal.”

**John August:** We’re putting ourselves in their place. We’re performing this relationship with them. But equally crucial is the relationships happening inside the context of the movie and figuring out what those are early on, which is obviously a problem for Little Wing. It’s figuring what is the relationship here, who you’re going to try to follow.

Let’s talk about coach movies, so Hardball versus Coach Carter, figuring out who is the central relationship. Obviously, one part of that’s going to be the coach. But is it with a single player? Is it with multiple players? How do you work that through?

**John Gatins:** It’s tough, because – you know this from writing movies – you write a great scene, and you’re like, “That scene, along with every other scene, is going to fight for its life to get to the screen.” Sometimes you shoot, you write, they shoot, they perform amazing scenes, and they die, because it just doesn’t fit the ultimate quilt that is the movie.

When you have a sports movie, you’ve got five guys in the basketball team, but who are the ones who are going to pop? You try to give everybody a moment and everybody a story and a little bit of an arc and something that you’re rooting for for that specific character. You hope that you get it right enough that everybody is able to shine through in the movie and have their movie inside your movie.

**John August:** Exactly.

**John Gatins:** That’s really the idea is like, “Oh, it’s a story about this guy who played short stop.” That’s not really what the movie’s about, but he has a movie in the movie. Yeah, it’s tough.

**John August:** It’s tough, tough. Did you see Nyad?

**John Gatins:** I haven’t seen it yet.

**John August:** Nyad is fantastic. One of the things I really liked about the model of it is, the same filmmakers did a bunch of rock climbing movies, which are a similar dynamic, which is it’s one person against an obstacle. Within that context, you have, will they achieve the thing? Will she swim from Cuba to Florida? Will this guy ascend this impossible mountain face? You still have to find relationships. You still have to find moments of emotional stakes that are not just the will they or won’t they. I thought Nyad did a fantastic job doing that.

**John Gatins:** That’s cool. That’s on my list. I’m going to see that.

**John August:** Again, making a choice of what is the central relationship, which is, of course, in this one, her friendship with Jodie Foster’s character and all the permutations and struggles they’re in.

**John Gatins:** Plus, I love those actors. That’s the thing too is you’re going to see it because of them.

**John August:** Let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s start with David here.

**Drew:** David in London sent in an audio question. We’ll play that now.

**David:** I’m a few weeks away from being on set for my first production as a writer, feature film. And I’ve put in a lot of prep and spade work over the years. I know I’m the right person for this job right here and right now. But what I’m not prepared for is being public facing. You guys both demonstrate an incredible ability to talk about your work, to talk about your relationships in a proper and correct way. You never badmouth anyone, but you also feel very open and authentic as you speak to us. How? When I speak, I’m always telling anecdotes about people I work with and things that have happened. And I bet you guys have got great stories you share privately about Pedro Pascal or Guy Ritchie or whatever. I’m scared that I am going to make a terrible cockup on social media or in person when I’m speaking as a professional. So I guess my question is, how do you guys compartmentalize?

**John August:** Let’s talk about how you talk about the things you worked on, because you just brought up Steven Spielberg. In talking about Spielberg, you said all the positive things. You said how supportive he was and didn’t go into any frustrations there, which is I think part of the advice we have for David. You have to talk openly and honestly, but just talking about the good things.

**John Gatins:** Look, it’s funny, because before you started to roll, we were talking about credit stuff, which I think we’ll talk about later. I don’t know. It’s interesting, because y’all have done this podcast for a long time. I get texts sometimes. People say, “Mazin talked about you on him and John’s podcast today,” or whatever, which I always think is kind of funny. It’s hard, because screenwriters, we work really closely, we work right next to Pedro Pascal. We’re not Pedro Pascal. People want to talk to Pedro Pascal. They don’t really want to talk to the guy who wrote the thing that he’s going to say. But you guys have proven that a little bit wrong, because how many people listen to this podcast?

**John August:** Tens of thousands.

**John Gatins:** That’s a lot of people who are very fascinated by how the soup gets made. I’m going to use sports metaphors again.

**John August:** It’s fine.

**John Gatins:** [Crosstalk 00:31:07].

**John August:** Stick on theme.

**John Gatins:** Patrick Mahomes wins the Super Bowl. What does he say? He’s like, “The defense was amazing today.” He didn’t say, “I did that 40-yard run that basically won the Super Bowl,” which I watched. I was like, “Dude, you did that.” It’s a thing of, take less credit. People like people who take less credit. Bring people along. There’s a lot of people.

Naomi Despres made this movie, Little Wing. I invited her in. I said, “Can you help us? Because I can’t go to Portland and be on the ground every day.” She moved her world around to do it. She has so much hand in making this movie, even creatively. There’s a moment in the movie where she talks about Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hanna. That’s Naomi, who said to me, “There’s a band.” I’d heard of Bikini Kill, but I didn’t really know them. The woman’s story and the song and everything else really fit. I had written Tupac Shakur 15 years ago. This was a really relevant, local to Portland thing. It was genius. That was amazing. She doesn’t have writing credit on the movie. But she’s such an integral part of us making that movie that that’s an incredible thing.

Maybe an advice to this guy is to say, listen, remember how you got there. We don’t make this movie by ourselves. You’re God when you’re sitting by your computer by yourself and you’re creating a world. You’re on your own. You are the god and creator of that universe. As soon as I say to you, John, my friend, “Hey, can you read this for me? Can you help me? Do you want to produce this movie?” now I’m sharing godship. By the time you’re sitting on the set, there’s 200 people there doing all kinds of things. Now everybody’s a little bit God in their own piece of universe.

Realize that it is a collaborative thing. There is somebody who says, that’s the director, that’s that title, producer, executive producer, script supervisor. Everybody has a role in this thing. Just bear that in mind that we did this. Somebody gave us the opportunity to do this. Without Steven Spielberg, this movie doesn’t exist. That was the inception. Without Susan Orlean, who wrote this thing, that got Steven to do a thing, that got him to make me do this thing. You’re a piece of a really big thing I think is maybe the takeaway.

**John August:** I would also say, David, you’re asking about speaking professionally, and it really is the context that matters. If you’re doing the literal press junket for the movie, you’re going to have a very narrow list of things you’re going to say and talk about. You’re going to talk about what a great experience it was. What John is saying in terms of, be really generous giving credit out there. You can contextualize your part of the process. Always make sure that you speak up for the existence of the writer. That is so important.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** But you’re giving full credit. As you get into narrower groups, you can be a little bit more forthright about the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs, and you can avoid shitting on somebody, but also say this was a struggle for these reasons.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, exactly.

**John August:** I will talk about a filmmaker I’ve worked with and say, “Listen, he has this reputation,” and you’d go into it knowing that this is the kinds of things you’re going to be doing or not doing. That’s also fair. When you get into really small conversations, when it’s you and an executive, you can be much more open about, “These are the pros and the cons. This was the real struggle we had.” That bonds you a little bit closer, because you’re telling the truth there.

**John Gatins:** Look, I think I’ve had a unique experience, because as you know, I’m a failed actor who started trying to do that. I became a writer. I’ve produced. I’ve directed. I’ve now done a little bit of all of it. I’m very comfortable on a movie set. I think he’s asking a question about, he’s feeling a little bit like, “I don’t know that this is my world.” You have your place in that world. You’ll see how comfortable you are or aren’t vis a vis that. Those conversations, like you said, he may get specific questions that are like, “Why did you write this movie? What inspired you to do it? Did you write it every day? How many hours a day can you work? Do you outline?” All this stuff that people want to ask, specific questions about being a writer.

**John August:** Totally.

**John Gatins:** You’re going to answer those questions really honestly. They may also put a mic in his face and say, “What was it like meeting Pedro Pascal?”

**John August:** They will ask that, yeah.

**John Gatins:** They’ll ask that, and you’ll be like, “It’s amazing. He’s great. In my mind, I wrote for him. The whole time, I had his voice in my head.” Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s not. Maybe you say, “I wrote it for George Clooney, but Pedro Pascal is better.” I don’t know. It depends on the question and the situation.

It can be kind of overwhelming, because I’ve sat on stages with movie stars, and they ask me questions about specific script stuff. You’re always a little bit like, “Is this the forum to have this conversation?” because you realize you have these people here who people really want to hear from. I don’t know. That’s why I appreciate what y’all do. It’s talking to writers about writing. It’s really interesting.

**John August:** Great. Another question.

**Drew:** Leann from Burbank writes, “I’m writing a comedic feature script which has a proper ending, but after cutting to black, then has a couple scenes that play alongside the rolling end credits, like Principal Rooney getting on the school bus during the credits of Ferris Bueller. Have you seen a mid-credit roll sequence dictated in a script before? Any thoughts on best practices?”

**John August:** I absolutely have seen those. I think I might’ve put them in some of my scripts too. You do a cut to black, you do a fade out, and then a page break, and then mid-credits or a mid-credit roll or after credits, it’s an extra scene.

**John Gatins:** I’m trying to think. I’ve been asked to do things where it’s like, “Give us written summations of what happened to people a little bit.” The movie ends, but it’s like, “By the way, in 2010, this happened.” Seeing additional scenes, I don’t know, a lot of times they feel like they’re stuff that was shot in the movie that you kind of want to see, but it didn’t fit into the quilt. It’s like, this is cool stuff that didn’t get in there. That’s a square that didn’t make the quilt, but it’s cool, and I think you guys might ask about, “Whatever happened when he got on that bus? Did he get on the bus?”

**John August:** Remember the script is meant to encapsulate the experience of watching the movie. If part of watching the movie is those mid-credit scenes or after-credit scenes, they should be in the script.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, I guess so. I guess the task a lot of times is you’re trying to jam a bunch of shit inside a 120-page box, so good luck with that. The stuff that spills out the top, either you find a place and jam it in or take something out and jam it in.

**John August:** Would it be fair to mark those as pages 119A and 119B? Sure, maybe. They’re part of the running time, but other stuff’s happening at the same time. You’re not responsible for the credits in your script. I would say if they’re important to your story, then they should be in the script, because your script is the movie. Another question.

**Drew:** Old Bruce writes, “Have I officially become the old guy looking at all these youngsters who seem to struggle with the reality of what work is? Is there a universal and generational confusion that success is not a right but earned? And have people’s threshold of try become much lower than it used to be?”

**John August:** Old Bruce, you’re completely correct on every level.

**John Gatins:** The two Old Johns will collude with you, Old Bruce.

**John August:** These young people today have no idea. Of course, if you were to slide this conversation back 30 years, the equivalent of Bruce would say, “These young people have no sense of what it is to work.” You’ve reached a point where you are generationally appropriately complaining about the generation behind you.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, and I think that’s a rite of passage.

**John August:** I would say that a thing I notice about this younger generation is there can be that hustle and grindy culture. I guess we had some of that when we started in our 20s, but it’s more deliberate. It feels more calculated, more planned. People are willing to put themselves in uncomfortable, long situations to do stuff that I don’t know I necessarily was. But also, there’s the internet. Stuff is also just different.

**John Gatins:** I know. They just need to get off my lawn. Believe me. But it’s different. We’ve been doing it so long. It changes. You become a different writer along the way, because trust me, if we could go back in time, there’s moments that I would pick that would be embarrassing, where I would literally be the guy who’d be like, “I’m going to tell you why water’s wet, guys. I got this. I know all the answers, man. You want to talk about screenwriting? I know everything. I can do anything.” I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like I’ve earned it. I’ve earned the idea that I don’t know or I’m going to learn more or remain teachable and be like, “Let me see something else. A streaming movie? What television has become?” Television used to be like, we were screenwriters [unintelligible 00:39:30] TV. Now it’s like TV’s the greatest shit there is.

**John August:** One of the things I’m aware of increasingly is that I expect young writers today to actually understand the references that I had when I was in my 20s, but that’s not realistic. It’s not accurate. Why have you not seen Point Break? Of course you should’ve seen Point Break. Or a bunch of stuff where it’s like, of course it’s just my part of film history canon.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** They cannot have caught up on all of that stuff.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** That’s a thing I just have to get past and remind myself, of course you’re not going to see that, because that is the equivalent of Casablanca or something to them. It’s very far in the past.

**John Gatins:** I think the other thing too is there’s an immediacy to culture now because of cellphones. When I first started as a screenwriter, I remember faxing pages.

**John August:** Oh yeah, we faxed pages.

**John Gatins:** From Austin, Texas, when I was working on Varsity Blues, faxing pages. Being on location doing Behind Enemy Lines. There was only three hours a day where we could talk to the people at Fox. So we would just hide. We’d just be like, “If they don’t call us in this hour, we’re just going to keep shooting.”

**John August:** Yeah, totally.

**John Gatins:** “We’re going to just do what we’re doing.” But I think everything is so immediate. Good writing is rewriting. You don’t write a script and like, “That’s it. I’m done.” There’s a thousand drafts you’re going to do. I think that’s a little bit baked into that question. You got to realize, I know you think that’s the finish line. It really isn’t. There’s so much work to do beyond that finish line. You have no idea. In this world of boom, boom, the phone, click click click click, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not as immediate as you want it to be, because what we talked about before is movies take forever to get there. Movies don’t get made. They fight. They fight their way to life. Sometimes it takes 17 years. It’s just the truth.

**John August:** Could I challenge you on something you said about Little Wing? You said you clicked send to Steven Spielberg for the script, but you probably didn’t click send. You probably sent an actual script.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really good question.

**John August:** I remember distinctly, and you’ll have this memory too, you’d call the agent or the executive for them to send a messenger.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, to pick it up.

**John August:** You’d still be printing the script. Then you’d catch a typo and like, “Oh, no, I have to reprint that page.”

**John Gatins:** I had this stamp that my wife Ling’s parents had given me. It’s this jade thing that had the characters of my name, John, and then it had J-O-H-N underneath it, and it had a little ink pad. It was in red. I would put a stamp when I was done and I’d printed it. I’d stamp it. It was so silly. But I was superstitious then too. I was like, “That went well the first time, so I got to stamp it every time.”

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s printing the script and doing the stamp and the whole thing. It’s like, “I don’t have my stamp!” It was this whole crazy thing, printing the script and sending it. I think that that was email, but I still was in the world of printing it. I don’t know.

**John August:** The reason why I bring that up is because we talked about faxing pages, and I have this very distinct memory of being bunkered in this really bad hotel room in Kauai and having to fax pages from the front desk to Kathy Kennedy. That was the only way to get pages to her. It was crazy.

**John Gatins:** They were those thin, weird pages that after two days they were dust. You couldn’t even see what was-

**John August:** I had flown with my StyleWriter printer so I could print out my pages and then fax them through to Kathy Kennedy. It’s wild. These younger generations, they have no idea how we suffered to get them to where we are right now, now that it’s-

**John Gatins:** It’s true.

**John August:** … typing away and-

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** … emailing stuff through. Let’s answer one more question.

**Drew:** Under Wraps writes, “Right before the pandemic, I signed an option agreement with a production company. About a week or two after we signed, the strike was officially called. I assumed since we finalized everything before that, that it wouldn’t affect my getting paid. However, the producer let me know that he was instructed to hold all payments until after the strike was over.

“Fast-forward to the strike ending, and after not hearing anything from the producer for a few weeks, I shot him a message. I didn’t specifically bring up the money, but just asked about plans now that the strike was over. He informs me that he’s moving forward with production and is optimistic.

“Jump to now, months later, we haven’t spoken since. I know these things move slowly, but the difference here was that I was actually supposed to be getting a nice little chunk of cash. I don’t want to sound money-focused, just messaging the producer, ‘Yo, where my money at?’ But I really could use it right now. I don’t have any reps to handle this for me, and I’m at a loss for how to word this kind of message. How do I get what I’m owed without coming off like a money-hungry jerk writer who doesn’t care about the art of film development?”

**John August:** This could be a generational issue. I think I was much more direct about, “Need money. Need check now.” A couple things, Under Wraps. First off, if you sign an option agreement, the strike had nothing to do with that, and so you still needed to get paid. You get paid. They owe you the money. They’re shopping this thing around that they’ve optioned from you, but they haven’t actually really done the option, because they’ve not paid you the money. You need to be much more direct about, like, “You may have forgotten, but you never actually paid me for this thing.”

**John Gatins:** The not having reps thing is tough in that situation, because there’s somebody whose job it is, hopefully, to be the one that says, “We need the money,” because it is show business. So there is a business side to it. And it’s good to have partners, be they lawyers, agents, managers, that can have that conversation on your behalf.

**John August:** Absolutely. We had Aline on the show a couple weeks ago. We talked about being agentic, taking agency in your life. This is a situation where this guy needs to take agency and to say, “Oh, this thing needs to happen. I’m going to make it happen.” Pretend you are your own best friend and you’re going to go in and just do this thing for your friend, which is get your friend paid.

**John Gatins:** I would get the guy on the phone too. Email’s a little bit removed. Just say, “Hey, call me quick.”

**John August:** In that conversation you had about what was happening next, segueing from that into like, “Oh, it’s so great this is happening. Also, you haven’t paid me. You may have forgotten that you haven’t paid me.” You can [unintelligible 00:45:28] they forgot, but they have to pay you. Got to get paid.

It is time for our One Cool Things. John Gatins, what is your One Cool Thing?

**John Gatins:** It’s interesting. Ling’s uncle and aunt came to visit recently from Arkansas. They’re retired. They’re the coolest people. They were like, “We just have to tell you,” because they were staying in our guest area, and they said, “You have this kind of finch. You’ve got this kind of woodpecker,” and whatever. I was like, “What?” They were like, “There’s this app called Merlin, which you can download for free, and you can literally record singing birds, and it will tell you what the bird is, and it shows you a picture and this whole thing.” They showed us all of these pictures of these birds. They were excited, because they don’t live in this part of the world. They were like, “Check it out. You’ve got this short, blah blah blah woodpecker thing.” I was like, “Oh my god.” Pearl used to be so annoyed by this woodpecker outside her window. She’s like, “There’s this bird.” It’s this really beautiful looking bird. I just thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, “Oh my god.” Who knew there’s an app that can identify birds?

**John August:** That’s awesome. Just this morning, there was a bird who I remember hearing from before. It was a morning bird that can be really annoying. But we sleep with the white noise machine turned so high that I don’t hear it anymore. Sometimes in the bathroom early in the night I hear it.

**John Gatins:** Just download Merlin, and you can maybe understand where that bird’s coming from a little bit.

**John August:** Absolutely. 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That bird’s trying to tell you something, John.

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s like, “Listen.”

**John August:** It’s like when you have noisy neighbors, and you’re like, “I hate them,” and then you meet them, it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so bad.”

**John Gatins:** That bird might have notes on your scripts that you need.

**John August:** It might have notes.

**John Gatins:** You don’t know.

**John August:** My One Cool Thing is sort of a strange one. We were having a conversation a week or two ago about spinoffs and what is the longest show that’s been on the air if you include the spinoffs from the original show.

**John Gatins:** Whoa.

**John August:** That led me down a rabbit hole towards The Facts of Life. I loved the show The Facts of Life, which for people who are not familiar with it, it is about this girls’ school. You follow these four or five girls who get in trouble and they live in their own little part of the girls’ school with Mrs. Garrett, who’s the cook, and they often work for Mrs. Garrett. It was a shrunk down version of a bigger school. It was a strange situation where the first situation is actually very different than later seasons.

Anyway, they kept trying to spin shows off of The Facts of Life, which I think is great. They would do backdoor pilots. A backdoor pilot is one of the normal 22 episodes of a season, they would introduce new characters and set them up and see whether they would work right, and then the hope would be to spin them off of the original show into a new thing. The Facts of Life was a spin-off of Diff’rent Strokes, and so this is trying to spin off other things.

Here are some of the backdoor pilots attempted to come out of The Facts of Life: Brian and Sylvia, a Season Two episode in which Tootie and Natalie go to Buffalo, New York to visit Tootie’s Aunt Sylvia, who has recently married a white man. It’s about Brian and Sylvia, these other people. The situation, you’re bringing your protagonist to a new place and trying to spin off these characters.

The Academy was a Season Three episode set at Stone Academy, the all-boys military school that was located near the existing school, so basically a boys version of Facts of Life. Jo’s Cousin, another Season Three episode. Jo visits her family in the Bronx, including her cousin Terry, a 14-year-old girl going through adolescence in a family full of men, so just a completely different family show.

The Big Fight was a Season Four episode set at Stone Academy, that boys’ military school, so it was another attempt to get that going there. One called Graduation. They’re trying to spin off a show about Blair and Jo and their life in college.

There was a Big Apple Blues, a Season Nine episode in which Natalie spends the night with a group of eccentric young people living in a SoHo loft, so trying to create that show.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** Then The Beginning of the End/The Beginning of the Beginning, which is the two-part series finale, which they were trying to set up these two characters taking over Mrs. Garrett’s role at the school. It’s remarkable over the course of all these years, they just kept trying to spin other things out of it. It’s not a thing we get these days.

**John Gatins:** Wasn’t Clooney a recurring character?

**John August:** That feels right, yes.

**John Gatins:** As you were going through, I’m like, weren’t any of them trying to launch Clooney as a guy who was featured in one of those?

**John August:** You feel like he should. That was pre-ER. I was saying we don’t have spinoffs. I guess we do have spinoffs, because we have all those Yellowstone spinoffs.

**Drew:** There’s also Blackish. It has Brownish and all those.

**John August:** Blackish, yeah.

**John Gatins:** The Walking Dead has-

**John August:** You’re absolutely right.

**John Gatins:** … 15 million. Whatever. I got into watching The Walking Dead when I was on location in Georgia, and it used to freak me out, because it’s shot there.

**John August:** It’s Georgia.

**John Gatins:** I’m like, “That looks like the woods where the walkers are.” Now I just watched the first episode of Those That Lived or I don’t know what. When I was looking for it, 10 other spinoffs, the Daryl Dixon show and then this one and that one. I’m like, “Holy cow.” Fear the Walking Dead. The Walking Dead will never-

**John August:** They will never stop.

**John Gatins:** The zombies, they will never stop. The zombies will never go away.

**John August:** You’re completely right. I guess I’ve been thinking of a very specific, very deliberate, like, “Okay, we’re going to introduce new characters and try to spin them off in a new thing.” But franchisization of shows is really clear now. It’s not just the Cheers to Frasier to Frasier. There’s other ways to do it now. Sell a universe.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alee Karim. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send your questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s 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. I’m wearing both a T-shirt and a hoodie right at the moment. 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 John Gatins’s mastery of credits and partnership, I guess. John Gatins, congratulations on your movie, and thank you for coming on Scriptnotes.

**John Gatins:** Of course. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

**John August:** John Gatins, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a solo writer. You’re a person who comes in and brings your own pen. You do your work. Then you take off. But recently started working with Andrea Berloff, another friend of the show, and you guys have been writing as partners. Talk to us about that transition. How’d it all come about?

**John Gatins:** It was interesting, because Andrea and I knew of each other, and then we really met in the strike of 2008.

**John August:** We should say that you were a strike captain in 2008 and were always out there with your black parka, a big cheerleader.

**John Gatins:** It’s funny too, because I don’t know that I was ever officially penciled as such, but I think I emailed people and said, “I’m going to be at Universal,” and then friends of mine just started showing up. Then you were there. There was a lot of people that we knew there. I had the acapella group from UCLA come. We had fun. Whatever. Strikes are not fun. That’s not the idea.

But Andrea showed up there. She was like, “Hey.” She always tells the story, she’s like, “You’re the first person besides my husband to know that I was pregnant.” I was like, “Oh, okay,” because she was like, “Look, I’m going to be a little intermittent.” I was like, “Andrea, I’m not in charge.” I was like, “You do whatever. Trust me.” We were like the MASH unit of Strikeville. We became friendly there.

Then I can’t even remember the year it was. It was 2014. I don’t know. I’m making it up. But we both got invited to be in a room, quote unquote, for Activision Blizzard. Stacey Sher invited us to be writers in this room, because they were trying to figure out Call of Duty movies.

**John August:** Why has there not been a Call of Duty movie?

**John Gatins:** Why has there not been?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** I’ll give my own opinion.

**John August:** Please.

**John Gatins:** Again, it’s going to be very uneducated. But it was an incredible room. We heard so many military experts who came in. It was incredible. Guys who had really done… Will Staples was really integral in facilitating the intros to these people in the military world and politicians. It was incredible. I learned so much, because I really don’t know that much about the military.

I think at the end of the day, you realize when they release a Call of Duty, it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a weekend. To try to say that you would make a movie that would help that event, it would really have to be a movie that would be on a level that I think ultimately they never saw anything that led them to believe that this is going to in fact help their brand in a way.

That’s just, again, my take, because it was really a big aspirational attempt to try to launch three different series of movies, because there was Call of Duty, there was Modern Warfare, there was Black Ops. There was a bunch of different segments in the game world from that umbrella, and they tried to attack all fronts at the same time with lots of really smart people in a room. And there was lots of good ideas, but it just never full came together, I think.

**John August:** My hunch is they should’ve found the best military spec they could’ve found and called it Call of Duty.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really smart thing. Who knows? They may actually ultimately do that. But in that room, Andrea and I, we partnered up as producers, because they took six writers and made three teams of two to be producers that were assigned a screenwriter. Then we helped that person form an idea based on the franchise we were working on kind of thing.

Andrea and I were together every day for a month. Somewhere in the middle of it, we said, “We should write a movie together,” which as you said, I’ve never done that before. Neither had she, by the way. She has a great, thriving career all on her own. It was this weird thing of like, “Maybe.” We talked to our agents about it a little bit and whatever and said, “We’ll just try.” We didn’t think it was going to be like, “We’re going to do this forever.” It was this odd thing of like, “Oh my god, I’m actually going to write with another writer.”

We called Phil and Matt actually and said to them, “Hey, guys, how do you do it?” They gave us their thing of cards on a board of this scene, this scene, this scene, and then saying, “I want to write that one. Why don’t you do that? No, I want to do this one.” You divvy up the work and you do it and then you share and you back and forth and whatever.

We figured it out. It was interesting, because we’re at a point now where we don’t… I don’t think, anyway. She can speak for herself if you ask her. We joke all the time. It’s like, “You wrote that.” She’s like, “No, you wrote that.” I’m like, “Oh, I did?” It’s like, “No.” It’s a little bit seamless at this point, which I think is a good place to be. It’s great to have a lab partner. It’s such a solemn, weird thing that we do. Humans are social creatures. I don’t know. It’s been good. It’s actually been really fun.

**John August:** You’re the only writer I can think of who, at this stage in their career, partnered up, because it’s just much more generally people are splitting apart at this age. You guys, you’re holding each other accountable, but also you’re showing up to work in a way that is important.

**John Gatins:** We take meetings. We work for Netflix now, and have for over a year, in an exclusive kind of deal with them, which has been really fun and great. It’s just really nice. I think we were both at the perfect time in our lives that it was like, “This would be a cool thing to try to do together.” It’s been really awesome, honestly.

**John August:** The other thing I would love to talk to you about on mic a little bit is, of all the writers I’ve met over my career, you are the most savvy when it comes to, “Okay, six of us worked on a movie, and it’s now time to figure out credits.” It will go to arbitration or we can decide amongst ourselves and all agree on what the credits should be. You are very good at starting those conversations and figuring out ways to get everyone to agree on credits. Can you talk me through how that started and what your approach is for it?

**John Gatins:** To be honest, I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I’ve come to the place where a lot of times when I think back on the… There was a very long run in my career where I was a guy who would come in towards the end, and I’d do production rewrite work. I’ve also been fortunate that I am comfortable on a set, and directors I’ve been paired with, I’ve gotten along well with, who were like, “Hey, come help me.” I worked with a couple of first-time directors or younger directors, and it was great. It was like the Bull Durham relationship of like, I’m the old guy, and here’s a young person trying to do something. The studio liked me and felt like I could help. So I’d be on set and that kind of thing.

When it would come down to the credit thing, at some point maybe I knew one of the other writers initially and just reached out and said, “What are you thinking? They’re going to make a recommendation, and then we’re all going to go to our corners and try to write a manifesto that says, ‘This is what I think I deserve.’ Maybe we can have a conversation.”

I got to know the Guild people enough, having been through enough arbitrations and been an arbiter, that I would have a conversation with them. I would immediately come out and say, “Hey, can I have so-and-so’s number, or can you tell them here’s my number? If they want to chat with me, great, call me. If they don’t, that’s okay too.”

I would always start the conversation the same way and say, “Hey, listen. You worked on this, and I worked on this. If you’re open to a conversation, we can have it. I fully understand that there’s a really good chance this is going to arbitration, which is okay. We’ve all been through it. But because we’re in the soup together, is there anything you want to share?” or, “I feel this,” or, “I feel that,” or, “Maybe there’s a way that we can work it out.”

The Guild, I think that they would appreciate that, because it’s pitting writers against writers, which is never great, because as we said, it’s about resume, and there’s money and residuals, bonus residual. There’s all kinds of things about ownership of things and movie posters that don’t have your name on it that you feel like, “I deserve to have my name on it.” It’s very difficult.

Of course, the credits thing came up with additional writers at the end of the thing. It’s such a ballyhoo kind of thing that it’s difficult. It’s never perfect. It’s the best system we have. I know Craig’s worked hard on the manual, to try to say, listen, let’s revisit some of these things about what are the percentages and how do we mete this all out to make it make sense?

Look. My experiences vary. I’ve met some really cool writers that way. There’s been some things that have really gotten sorted, and it felt really fair and cool, and everyone walked away being like, “Hey, I appreciate you did that. This is cool,” and that kind of thing. Other times, it’s been not as good. It’s been like, “Look, we’ll just go to arbitration and see how it works out.”

**John August:** I’ve had both situations. I think, inspired by your example, I’ve reached out to writers on projects to see whether there’s a useful way for us to think about what the credits should be. Also, if I’ve come onto a project, I try to reach out to the original writer or writers to see where the bodies are buried. That almost starts the relationship a little bit earlier before it becomes figuring out the credits. Important to remember is that these writers can figure it out amongst themselves unless one of them is a production executive.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s a little different.

**John August:** If someone’s a director or a producer.

**John Gatins:** That’s different.

**John August:** Increasingly, if a director is going for credit, that’s off the table, because-

**John Gatins:** It’s an automatic arbitration.

**John August:** Automatic arbitration. And same if someone’s a producer. It makes sense why, because that person would have undue power and control over the situation and might have their fingers on the scale. Now, one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is that there is the credit you see on screen and the list of credits, but behind the scenes there’s also math about what percentages go to which writers. Those things don’t have to line up precisely. Is that accurate?

**John Gatins:** I think so. It’s such a difficult thing.

**John August:** Here’s what I’m getting to. You will actually have the conversation about, “Let’s talk about money,” because one of the reasons why you want to talk about money is that different writers would have different box office bonuses based on what credit they get.

**John Gatins:** That’s a conversation that people have. That can get into lawyer land, where you say, “Listen. I appreciate what they’ve done. I was in a different situation. I was on a weekly. I don’t have a bonus on this movie. But I’m probably going to get credit. You may have been diminished enough that you’re not going to get credit.” That person says, “Then let me inspire you to invite me in, because I think I deserve credit on the movie.” At times, there’s a financial deal to be made as well. Different things mean different things to different people.

If you asked me this question 15 years ago, I might’ve given you a different answer, because having my names on movies was going to change the trajectory of my career or my opportunities. I’m old now. I wish that maybe there was executives out there who haven’t met me or don’t have a preformed opinion of what I do or how I can do or what I’m right for or where I fit on any kind of list on any given day. But I think that there is a little bit of, I don’t know, I am who I am. I’m going to try to do what I do. It’s a fairly difficult thing to apply math to a creative event.

**John August:** 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That’s I think what you’re asking is to say, “Okay. Look at the script and tell me who did 33 percent of these four or five elements.”

**John August:** We’ve both been arbiters. It’s really tough.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really tough thing.

**John August:** Luckily, there’s the 33 percent math, but it’s really basically, did this person do so much work that they’ve crossed a threshold into getting this. It only gets down to 33 percents of stuff when there’s just too many names and too many people could be jockeying for that thing.

**John Gatins:** It’s hard. Derek Haas has been an arbiter, and he says his approach is he reads the shooting script and then he reads backwards. You try to figure, how do we get to this thing?

**John August:** [Crosstalk 01:03:17].

**John Gatins:** I was like, that’s a really smart way to say, because you may have written an amazing script, but it was set in 1914. The movie’s actually set in the 1980s now. You go, “What does that 1914 script have to do with the movie that actually got shot?”

**John August:** You may find that there’s a lot, but it may be-

**John Gatins:** It’s like, look, that 1914 script may be the reason the movie got made, but it doesn’t factor into the document that was actually filmed.

**John August:** That’s the crucial thing to remember about the credits process. It’s not about the process of making the movie. It’s literally about the final document. That’s why it can be so crucial, what is the final document? Does the final document actually reflect the movie? We’ve gotten into this before too, where this is the, quote unquote, final shooting script, but that’s not the movie that’s on the screen at all, so you have to go through that stuff too. It’s a challenging situation.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really challenging situation.

**John August:** I do feel like one of the changes from when we first started the business is if I worked really hard on a movie and didn’t get one of those top credits, I just disappeared, and it was like a year of my life just vanished. Additional literary material at least acknowledges, oh, that person, you existed. It’s a change for writers who otherwise might be completely forgotten. It’s proof that you did some work. There’s pros and cons to it.

**John Gatins:** It’s a tough one. It’s difficult. I’m not sure about the additional writing credit thing. I think I’ve probably been in that situation a little bit, because maybe I’ve done work on things where that was an opportunity.

**John August:** I can think of one movie you worked your ass off on, and I was so surprised that your name is not on that movie. You know what I’m talking about.

**John Gatins:** That’s where I learned a lot of lessons, because the statement that I wrote on my behalf was a ridiculous, embarrassing, emotional love letter to a college girlfriend, basically. It was like, “I gave my T-shirt on the day that Van Der Beek wore, and he wore it. I was there.” I’m like, no, you write a comparative literature paper that’s like, “Hey, I did these things,” and whatever. That one didn’t go my way for a lot of reasons. I didn’t help my cause on that one.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a different movie. That’s how many movies there are.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a much more recent movie, a sci-fi movie that you-

**John Gatins:** Look. That was a situation that was really difficult, because I got to know the other writers and had a conversation, because that was one that was very confusing. It was a little bit like, how did we actually get here? Look. We tried. That was one where it was a failure, and it was a little bit like, huh. It was heartbreaking. But it was what it was.

**John August:** You got paid the money during production.

**John Gatins:** I did, I did. I did have a sizable win on the other side that I was feeling like was going to come through and did not. That was not a great moment. It’s a little bit of the peril of doing what I do, which has been a guy who, “Look, I was the fourth writer,” or something. That’s not a very advantageous position to be in. You just said to me, knowing nothing, “John, come on. You’re this guy who came in.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I went through all this.” It’s like calling other writers and saying, “Dude, I know you wrote a great script, but guess what? I’m the one who had to listen to all the nuts-ness of all the craziness and deal with blah blah blah.”

**John August:** Yeah, you had to shoulder and bear so much. You had to body a lot of the problems.

**John Gatins:** It was what it was. Time helps. You get some distance from it and everything. I thought you were talking about Varsity Blues. My thing is, I owe everything to Varsity Blues. That movie did everything for me. My name appears nowhere in that universe, but they paid my bonus anyway. They felt that. How about that?

**John August:** Nice.

**John Gatins:** That executive, Don Granger, was like… My agent called and said, “There’s something here for him.” He goes, “I don’t know anything about that.” It was one of those great movie moment inside the movie business.

**John August:** Love it.

**John Gatins:** It was a really gracious thing that they did. It was very nice. It led to me doing Hardball for them and doing so much work at that studio. I can’t fault that movie. I didn’t help myself in the process. I really didn’t know. That’s the thing I think that upset me most as a really young writer in that moment, the first movie, was that there was nobody in the Writers Guild… I didn’t know a lot of screenwriters. If I’d met somebody who’d said to me, “Hey, listen, man. Why don’t you let me look at that statement?” That’s the point, John. If I’d been an arbiter and I’d gotten that statement…

You’ve read plenty of arbiter statements where you want to say, “Don’t ever write a statement like that. This is no help. Trust me. I know you think you’re going to appeal to some emotional whatever. No, no. That’s not an emotional document. This is a document that compares the work you did, compares to the shooting script and to the other documents. That’s what it is.” I shot myself in the foot in that situation. Like I said, that experience and that movie and the success of that movie, I owe so much to.

**John August:** I owe a lot of my success to movies that my names are not on. That’s the reality of this career. John Gatins, so great to talk with you.

**John Gatins:** Great to talk to you, man. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys let me coming on.

Links:

* [Little Wing – On Paramount+ March 13th](https://youtu.be/kZeaCkIgN3o?si=JWbnJrw1ATTayZcR)
* John Gatins on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gatins) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/?ref_=tt_ov_wr)
* [Little Wing by Susan Orlean](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/little-wing) for the New Yorker
* [LUCIRA by Pfizer COVID-19 & Flu Home Test](https://www.lucirabypfizer.com/)
* [Merlin Bird ID](https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/)
* [The Facts of Life – Attempted Spin-offs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_of_Life_(TV_series)#Attempted_spin-offs)
* [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 Alee Karim ([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/633standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 632 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is about mystery and suspense. It’s also a best of episode. To explain why we’re airing material from the vaults, I need to tell you a little story. So sit back, get comfortable.

Now, longtime listeners will recognize that in no fewer than three episodes of Scriptnotes, we have urged our listeners to get their flu shots. In fact, in the opening moments of Episode 5, back in 2011, Craig and I talked about it. Drew, let’s play a clip from that episode, right from the very start, because this is before we even had bloops as a (sings). Back then, I used to pick different theme music from the shows. Let’s play that now.

[Episode 5 clip]

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

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

**John:** Hello, Craig. How are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** You know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time, just because of the whole thing where there are so many different strains, and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s… Flu’s bad stuff.

[End of clip]

**Drew Marquardt:** Oh my gosh, you sound like babies.

**John:** We were so young, so naïve.

**Drew:** The 10 years of cigars hadn’t lowered your voice or anything like that.

**John:** The Trump administration, the bourbon, everything else that has happened. Here we have our first clue about what may be going on here. Craig and I were talking about the flu, so either one of the two of us or someone in our orb must have gotten the flu. And in fact, that has already happened on the show.

So back in Episode 434, January 2020, Craig talks about how he got the flu. He describes going to Urgent Care. And Craig asks me, “John, do you know how they test for the flu? They put a swab up your nose and swirl it around,” which is wild. That used to be a new thing. This is January 2020 he’s telling me this. We were just about to have COVID. We were just about to all have our noses swabbed endlessly for the rest of our lives, but this was a new thing for Craig.

**Drew:** No idea what was coming.

**John:** Nope, no idea, which brings us to 2024. Last week, it’s a Saturday evening. I am feeling a little bit achy, but I was just at the gym that morning. It’s nothing too big, nothing too pressing. We’re having friends over to play board games, so as a responsible host, I take a COVID test. I swab my nose, just as Craig had done back in 434. COVID test turns out negative, so hooray. Friends come over. We play Spyfall. We play Poetry for Neanderthals. We play Celebrity. A great time is had by all.

The guests leave, and suddenly I just feel awful. Everything comes crashing down. I’m guessing that what I was experiencing during that game night was essentially stage health, where you can feel good when you’re actually out on stage, when you’re actually performing, and then it all comes crashing down. Drew, you were an actor. You may have seen something like that in your orbit.

**Drew:** I’ve absolutely had that happen several times. Usually, the times when I was the lead, I would have full-blown laryngitis backstage and then get on and be able to project out and not know how I did it.

**John:** We were doing Big Fish in London. There was this cold that went through the entire cast. These people, they were basically invalids. They were so sick. Then you just shove them up on stage, and they could somehow do it. They’re belting, and then they can’t talk off stage. I think it was some bit of that. I just did not feel how bad I felt while people were there. But I am now so cold, I am shaking. I have a fever of 101. I take some Advil. I go to bed. I don’t sleep too well. I get too hot, too cold. I start sweating. I feel gross. I take my temperature throughout the night, and it gets up to 105.5.

**Drew:** Oh my god.

**John:** At that point, I genuinely don’t know what to do, because if I Google now, I see that over 105, you’re supposed to go to the emergency room, but it’s not like it was staying over 105. I don’t have any of the other emergency symptoms like that. I’m not convulsing. I’m not confused or delirious.

Anyway, first thing in the morning, Mike takes me to Urgent Care. I say, “I think I have the flu.” They swab my nose. They say, “You have the flu.” They send me home with Tamiflu. The doctor says, “Listen, you’re going to have three bad days, and then you’ll be okay.” The doctor was accurate, but I don’t know, he didn’t fully describe the experience. It was just horrible. I have friends who’ve had much more serious illnesses. I don’t want to downplay that. But for whatever reason and good fortune, I’ve never been this sick as an adult. I don’t want to just downplay how awful the flu was for me. It was just bad. Have you had the flu as a grown-up?

**Drew:** I don’t think I’ve had it as an adult. I’m sure I’ve had it as a kid, because kids get everything.

**John:** I’m sure I had it as a kid too. I remember things that felt like this as a kid. But your kid body is just so different. I felt like everything was just down and broken. I had fever, body aches, chills, diarrhea, but that’s it. I had none of the respiratory things. But what I had was enough. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t really sleep. I just laid there in this fugue state envisioning boxes being assembled. I couldn’t think any organized thoughts, other than just repetitive, simple thoughts. I felt like a video game that had crashed, and the screen was half pixelated, sort of broken. It was bad.

I eventually came back online. I’d have these moments where I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far,” and I still felt terrible, but it was better than I’d felt two hours before. Then a few hours later, I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far.” That was the gradual coming out of it. Now, we’re on the fifth day. Flu-wise, I feel like I’m basically through it. The last couple days I’ve been able to do some phone calls. For reasons we’ll get into, I’ve had so many phone calls. The flu sucks. That’s my takeaway from the flu.

To answer the mystery and suspense question I posed at the very start of this, the reason why this is a best of episode is because we had a bigger episode planned. We were going to have a guest host on. We had a menu of things we were going to go through. That’s going to be pushed back a week. But we have a lot of other things to talk through. This is a hybrid of old stuff and new stuff in one episode.

Takeaways, I guess, flu shot. Get your flu shot. It didn’t protect me this time. It’s protected me many other years, I’m sure. Tamiflu, sure, great. It’s not the magic bullet I hoped it would be. You see people who get the COVID drug, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I suddenly feel great.” It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just like, oh, suddenly, the lights came on. It is crazy that we don’t have an at-home test in the U.S. for flu. They exist in Europe. They exist in Asia.

**Drew:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, they have these tests where you can swab. It’s one test that swabs for flu, RSV, and COVID. If I’d had a test like that, I would’ve swabbed my nose, and I would’ve tested positive for flu. I would’ve not had friends come over. I probably could’ve gotten Tamiflu 12 hours earlier. It’s really frustrating we don’t have those here.

**Drew:** That feels so obvious that we would have them. Now I’m very frustrated.

**John:** Apparently, the reason why we don’t have them is it was proposed years ago, and they said, “Americans aren’t ready to handle at-home testing of things,” but we are now. So just get over it. We can do it. Of my board game party group, no one is sick yet, which is great. Some of them took Tamiflu, which is smart and great. Hopefully, they’ll all stay healthy.

**Drew:** Terrible for you, but it sounds like it worked out okay.

**John:** Drew, tell us about the mystery and suspense portions you have picked out for us this episode.

**Drew:** This is an episode about mystery and suspense, but it’s not just detectives and thrillers. This is how to use mystery and suspense techniques in every story, including comedies, so really helpful. We’re going to start with Episode 269. That’s Mystery Versus Confusion. It’s about using mystery to capture an audience’s curiosity, but making sure that doesn’t tip over into confusion or frustration or just making sure it’s all very deliberate. Then we’ll go to Episode 332, which is called Wait For It. It’s about suspense and the different types of suspense and how to craft it on the page.

**John:** Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, you and I are going to talk about the Apple Vision Pro, which we had in the office and got a chance to test out and play around with. But before we get into any of that, we have some news. We actually had a busy news week. First, we need to start with all the agent stuff that happened this week. Agencies are always going through changes. Agents move from one firm to another. Sometimes they take their clients with them. Sometimes they shutter, and that happened this past week with one of the smaller agencies.

**Drew:** That’s right. The first one was A3, which used to be Abrams Artists Agency. An email went out on Friday, February 9th, that the agency was shutting down on Monday. It sounds like the decision to pull the trigger was made completely by the chairman, Adam Bold. Bold has that power to make that unilateral move because of an operating agreement they signed last year, which the CEO Robert Attermann and President Brian Cho have been suing Bold over. It sounds like there’s quite a lot of drama here. They did that reportedly in attempt to block Bold from selling off A3’s digital and unscripted departments to Gersh, which happened in January. And now that agency’s completely dissolved.

**John:** My recollection is that A3 represented both… I know they represented some writers, because back in the WGA agency campaign, I remember them being one of the agencies that we had to negotiate with. But they also represented other talent as well.

It’s frustrating when your agency melts away, because then you don’t know, as a piece of talent, what are you supposed to do, where are you supposed to go. I also feel bad, of course, for the agents who are suddenly without a job. Those changes do happen. That is an agency shutting down. What’s more common to happen in Hollywood is that an agent will leave an agency either taking his or her clients to a different firm or setting up a new agency. That’s what happened this past week.

So the big news in my friend group this past week has been about Verve. On Tuesday, it was announced that Bill Weinstein, who’s one of the founders, partners, and the CEO of Verve Talent, had left the firm. And as longtime listeners will know, I actually moved to Verve during the WGA agency campaign, and Bill was my primary agent. The trades are reporting that three other agents are joining him on this new venture. There could be more.

We’re recording this on Thursday, so by the time this episode comes out on Tuesday, a lot more may have developed. But Drew, it’s fair to say that a ton of phone calls have happened in the office here over the last two or three days.

**Drew:** Yes, I would absolutely say that.

**John:** It’s weird. The phone doesn’t ring nearly as much as it used to, because everything is now emails or text messages. But when you need real-time information, you just pick up the phone and call a person, especially when they want to talk about advice. The reason why people were calling me were mostly friends of mine who were at Verve, and just to think about, “Do I stay at Verve? Do I go to this new place? Do I go to a third place?”

One of the things I tried to talk everybody through is not to fall into the false dichotomy of only two options. There’s a sense of you either have to choose A or B. You can choose A or B or neither of those and go to a different situation, different solution.

For some people, if they have a primary relationship with an agent who is staying at Verve, it probably makes sense to stay at Verse. If they have a primary relationship with an agent who’s moving to this new firm, it may make sense to move to the new firm. But in other cases, it may make sense to look around and see where is the right place to end up. That could be at a different agency. It could be with a manager.

For me personally, as we’re recording this, I don’t know where I’m going to go. I don’t know if I’m staying at Verve or going to the new agency or going someplace else. It will be a busy couple weeks as this all sorts itself out.

**Drew:** It’s mystery and suspense.

**John:** It is mystery and suspense, Drew.

**Drew:** It is.

**John:** The second bit of business we have not covered yet on the program is OpenAI announced Sora. Sora is this new video generation tool. We’ve seen tools before that do what Dall-E did for images that created videos, but they were terrible. They were just awful. You would not believe them to be real at all. Drew, you saw these demos. What’d you think?

**Drew:** I was blown away. The physics of it is amazing. Seeing things underwater videos are incredible. There’s one I was telling you about. It’s a drone shot from 1850s California or something like that. It’s both incredible and awe-inspiring and a little bit terrifying.

**John:** The first text message I got from a friend was, quote, “How petrified should I be?” I told them, don’t be petrified. It’s a long way from these little demo clips to typing a prompt in for, “Make me a biopic about Janis Joplin in the style of Baz Luhrmann. There’s a reason why writers and other film professionals are involved to get you from that notion to an actual film that people see.

All of that said, there are important things to consider with these technologies and the impact they could have on our business. First off, the demos they showed were largely about someone typing something into a box and it coming up with a little clip. But it can also take video’s input.

So you can feed it video of a film and say, “Replace Kevin Spacey,” because Kevin Spacey’s a problematic person right now, and it could probably do a very good job of replacing Kevin Spacey in a film. And so suddenly, you don’t have to re-shoot or do anything else. If you are the copyright holder on this film, and you want to make money off this, you might replace Kevin Spacey in a film, and it can do it pretty simply.

Likewise, if you are the holder of copyright on something in your vault, and you want to refresh it and make it more palatable to modern audiences, you could do certain things like up-ressing it or you could change the aspect ratio of it. If it’s shot more square and you want it to be more widescreen, you could fill in the edges there much better with AI. You can really figure out… It’s like the Photoshop’s generative fill. It’ll have a good sense of what should actually be in the spaces that are missing. That is really useful for that.

Is it transformative enough that it is covered by copyright? That’s an open question, and that’s a thing that’s going to be wrestled with. But it raises the question of, what is a refresh of an existing film versus what is a remake, because writers and directors and other folks, we get paid for when our material is remade. If someone wants to remake Go, I get paid for that, because that’s my original thing. But if you’re just constantly rejuvenating an existing property, that gets to be a little bit murkier.

I guess, what do we call the stuff that comes out of these engines? Because some of it can look like animation; some of it can look like live action, but it’s not really either of the above. There were no actors being filmed, so it’s not live action as we think of, but it’s also not animation and the animation process. It’s just a thing that’s being generated.

As WGA writers, we want to make sure that material that comes out of a process like this isn’t defaulted into animation, because the WGA does represent animation, but not exclusively. It could be a way for studios to run around protections that we have put in place for writers. We want to make sure that there’s no loophole here where using this technology gets them out of hiring WGA writers.

Finally, you talked about the physics of the stuff that you saw. The knock-on effect that these things have had is that they have become these reality engines. They’ve ingested so much material, so much video, that they create these pretty compelling drone shots. They have a sense of how things move in space. If a character was in front of another character and it clues it, there’s persistence of vision.

**Drew:** It has object permanence almost.

**John:** Object permanence, yeah, like a baby learns object permanence. It’s just much more sophisticated than things we’re used to coming out of this. Because of it, it can actually do things like, by watching a bunch of Minecraft videos, it gets Minecraft, and it can simulate Minecraft so well that it becomes basically just Minecraft. If you can do that with Minecraft, to what degree are you going to be able to simulate off of real-world video what reality is? That has troubling implications for – not troubling, but fascinating implications for the nature of reality and how it understands the world around it.

I think it’s just really interesting to watch this space. Obviously, we’re concerned about it, because it looks like it could replace the jobs of Hollywood workers, but it could actually have broader implications even beyond that. I think it’s nothing to panic about right now, but it’s something we should be mindful of, because as of this moment in 2024, it’s just interesting. It could be much more than interesting in a few years.

**Drew:** Do you feel like there’s a next step from it almost? Do you anticipate any of that or is it all just an unknown?

**John:** Right now, they’re showing the demos, but they’re not releasing the tool for people to use. That’s because there are obvious applications of this for disinformation, for deep fakes. All of that’s really troubling. Figuring out how you would even put this in the public’s hands is a big concern.

Some people pushed back against my blog post on it – we’ll put a link in the show notes to the blog post I put up about it – saying, like, “John, you ignored the fact that AI material can’t be copyrighted.” I think that’s naïve. It is a fact that right now, existing U.S. law suggests that material generated by AI by itself cannot be copyrighted, but there’s really no clear gradations there.

My example of using AI to do some film enhancements… The Zone of Interest, there are these really cool sequences which I originally thought were animation, but they turn out they were shot with this night vision camera that looked really surreal. Those cameras are not high enough resolution to create a good image on screen, but they could take that and then use AI to fix the issues in it. That’s still going to be copyrightable. You still were starting with something.

I think the degree to which you can use AI to do stuff in your film does not make it un-copyrightable. That’s all going to need to be figured out. We don’t know what the line is right now. I think, as people who are working in guilds, we need to be thinking about how do we make sure that we help draw the line, and it’s not just the studios who are drawing the line.

**Drew:** Cool.

**John:** Before we get to the new stuff, Drew, some things we need from our listeners. First off, we’re trying to do an episode that includes some counterfactual Hollywood history. I’ve been reading this great book on counterfactual military history, so like, what happens if this battle back in ancient times had gone differently and the other side had won? Would we be speaking Roman right now? Sometimes in history, small changes can lead to giant differences of outcome.

We’d love to do that for Hollywood, if we could, for a future episode. If you have suggestions for, if this one event had gone differently, what would the impact be. For example, if the movie Titanic had tanked and was a disaster, what would be the knock-on impacts of that? Or if Iron Man had failed, would we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

We’d love your questions about that. It doesn’t just have to be about movies. It could be about television. It could be about some other impact of technology or if another country had gotten to a certain thing first. But what we’d love is not too sci-fi-ish. It’s not about what if aliens had invaded at this point. It’s about flip of a coin, a thing that could’ve gone either way, could’ve gone the other way. It’s always fun to think about that. If you have suggestions for counterfactual Hollywood history, we’d love to hear those.

**Drew:** Email those to ask@johnaugust.com, and I’ll look at them all.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, let’s get started with our mystery and suspense. Which episode are we hearing first, and which one’s number two?

**Drew:** It’s Episode 269 first, and then Episode 332.

**John:** Great. We will be back here after that with some One Cool Things and to wrap stuff up.

[Episode 269 clip]

**John:** Craig, get it started. Why should we care about mystery?

**Craig Mazin:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers, we’re trying to do something, and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question, but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything? Well, because, oh, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things.

And we get maybe a little distracted by the word “mystery,” because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity, and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative.

The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story, because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them, but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?”

Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character?” or “Why did she say that?” or, “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more, because we want to see what’s happening. And so often, they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human. It’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious. We insist upon knowing certain things.

If you walk down the street, and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, there’s no decision to want to know. What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right?

So as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of the crowd outside the store and its blacked-out windows. If our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating. We would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing, which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient and sort of frustrated and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much.

That’s a thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story. Otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished, in general, because people are too busy staring at boobs, and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part. So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs, because then it’s like, “I’m confused. I’m distracted.”

So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction – and I know you’re distracted – I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery; it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story. And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then it’s not really mystery; then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows.

This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens – and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges – with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it. I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways.

I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t. So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something? Because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking.

I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening, and I don’t know why they’re happening, so now I’m getting really worried and distracted.

And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused. If I’m watching a David Lynch film and suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be… This is abstract. Okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think, “I’m not supposed to be confused right now, and I am so confused.”

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards, that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers, because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie. That can be a real thing. That can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved.

And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form, What moments were you confused in a bad way?” Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions, because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for, like, “This wasn’t intriguing; this was annoying that I didn’t know what was actually happening here.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away and that answers will be revealed, and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie. That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book, because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Every single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, “Okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful.” And what you said before about you feel like, “If I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion.”

And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery. And after you’ve seen one of these movies, you recognize, in the third act, they will confront the mystery, and there’ll be little tiny mysteries, but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour, you’re going to know who the killer is, and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long arc stories of an Alias or a Lost, where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling that you had a sense of, like, “Are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries, or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?”

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important, I think, to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies, that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that? And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment, and so very broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, “Okay, who’s her? Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do” Very simple, very easy, and then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” “Did you do it?” “I did it.” “And?” “It was hard.” What’s it? Oh, I have to know. What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun, and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our “pick a card, any card.” People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing. It’s a flashbulb. It’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that I will never solve for you.

Just like what does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because you will never know, and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to. And the situations where I see it is, you enter into two characters having a conversation, and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or how the actors actually changed some words, but it makes it seem like… They’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody, and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, “Wait. Are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is?”

So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery. But if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people… When you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious. Right? You are now involved. And that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved.

There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that, personally, I love this version when I see it. And every now and then, I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something, and the character lies. And we know they’re lying, because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions, and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like, “Wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here? I’m curious what that is.”

Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this, because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all. It’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just look at the lines and you’re like, “Oh, wait, he says this on this page but this and the other page.” If you don’t somehow single out that this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap.

I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will forget, like, “Oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there. That’s a lie there.” And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides, and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, “Oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.”

So this is a case where the slyly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores that she’s a terrific liar, something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, “Remember, this is not actually the truth here.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary. It’s later on when you want to think, “Okay, maybe somebody has forgotten.” Or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, “Okay, you’re a liar. Why? I need to know.” Right? So this is a good little mini mystery. Similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Or you got a camera looking. Here’s a little mystery.

At the end of Inglourious Basterds, it’s not much of mystery, because you can pretty much see it coming, but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak, actually. I think it’s a friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak. Looking up at them looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa, and they’re talking about it. And we are the perspective, so we don’t know what it is, but they’re talking about it, and then we reveal the answer to the mystery. Listen. It may seem inevitable to you, because that’s how you saw the movie. It was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do, and it’s what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information. So in this idea, someone asks someone a question, and they get an answer, and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us. And that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” And the person goes, “Yeah.” And the person asking the question says, “Thank you,” walks outside, and starts crying. Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations, and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point, that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment, like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that, because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectations. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” No. You’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means. We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do, we should do and must do everything we can to create that movie. And if that means that we are directing on the page, in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle. No. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions, because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen. So the short-term mystery. So there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?” Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person, which is okay, or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are, for some reason, slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in. Well, okay. Why are they doing that? And obviously, they’re going to light it up. But why are they going to light it on fire? And what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries, I kind of think of those as middle-of-the-movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on, and there are some characters with relationships, who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t. They know secret motivations. They know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it.

This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie, to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward. It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then. So these are good little middle-of-the-movie things.

The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident.” But typically they are slightly more interesting than that, and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term “hang a lantern on things” and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice, I’m doing something here, so yes, you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here, and I’m going to be doing something with it later on. You are marking this for follow-up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie, at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. You’ve done the right job there, because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful, and that’s a great way of… The mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie, right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or your main character has a scar, and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, “Mm.” And then maybe somebody else asks, “Where did you get that?” If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar. It won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing. If I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? They are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie, like, we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of, because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about a plot mystery, and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water, which in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it, but there’s a long-term mystery in it, which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it. Yes, they’re doing it to get money but there’s clearly a specific reason and there’s a plan, but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time, much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on what their actual plan is is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do, unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

[Episode 332 clip]

**John:** All right, let’s get to our feature marquee topic of this first episode of 2018, which is suspense.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Ooh, wait for it.

**Craig:** Wait for it.

**John:** So, suspense, actually, the word itself is fascinating. So, it’s from a French word “suspendre,” which is “pendre,” which is to hang, and “sus,” above. So, to hang above. What a great image that is. It’s like something is dangling above you and you’re waiting for it to fall. That is suspense. And that’s mostly what we’re talking about when we talk about suspense as a narrative device. It is that sense of there is something that is going to happen. You see it’s going to happen. And you are waiting for it. And attention builds because of that.

I would define it in a very general sense, suspense is any technique that involves prolonged anticipation. There is a thing that is going to happen. You see it. And you are waiting for it to happen.

**Craig:** The waiting.

**John:** Waiting for it. You usually think about suspense in a bad way, like there’s a bomb ticking under the table. But suspense can also be a good thing. If you are waiting for a surprise party, there’s a good suspense, too. So it’s not just thrillers. It’s not just sort of the big action movies that have suspense. It’s a technique that we can use in all of our scripts. And so I thought we’d dig in on that today.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a great idea. I believe this topic was proposed by somebody on Twitter, so thank you for that. And it’s a very crafty thing, and I like talking about these. You know, a lot of times when we discuss writing, and I think a lot of times when we go through Three Page Challenges, we’re looking for truth. We’re looking for verisimilitude. We’re talking about how as writers we can create these moments, these people, their words and their actions that ring true to us. This is not that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** In general, life does not have suspense at all. This is a very artificial thing. It’s as artificial in my mind as a montage, which simply does not exist in life. And yet we find it incredibly gratifying when we experience it. And because it is this technique, a craft, it’s good for us to talk I think about how the nuts and bolts of it actually work, because it’s one of the few times as writers we get to be mathematicians. And I like that.

**John:** I think it’s also important to focus on this as a writing technique, because so often you see Hitchcock is a master of suspense, and you think about it as being a director’s tool. And it’s absolutely true that the way a director is choosing to frame shots, to edit a sequence, to build out the world of the film or the TV show, there’s a lot of craft and technique that is a director’s focus in building suspense. But none of it would be there unless the writer had planned for that sequence to be suspenseful and really laid out the structure that’s going to create a sequence that is suspenseful.

And suspense, I should point out, really is generally a sequence kind of technique. Within a scene maybe there will be some suspense, but generally it’s a course of a couple of scenes together that build a rising sense of suspense. And so that’s going to happen on the page. So, let’s dig into how you might do it.

**Craig:** Great. Well, I guess to start with, I divide suspense roughly into two categories. Suspense of the unknown and suspense of the known. Because they’re very different kinds of suspense. When I think about suspense of the unknown, I think about information that is being withheld either from the audience or from a character. Do you know what I mean by those distinctions?

**John:** I think I do. So, the unknown is like we are curious. We’re leaning in to see what is going to happen. Or in some cases, we have more information than the character who we’re watching has. So, we know there’s something dangerous in that room, and so we’re yelling at the screen like, “Don’t go in that room.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But the other broad category you’re leaving out there is suspense of the known. Because of the nature of the genre, because of the nature of the kind of story that you’re setting up, we kind of know where it’s going to go. We just don’t know how we’re going to get there. We don’t know what the actual mechanics are. And that is what has us leaning in, has us curious. It’s a question we want answered. And I think almost all cases of suspense, there is that question that we want to see answered.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think suspense of the known is far more common, and it’s also applicable across every genre, comedy, romance, everything. When we hear suspense, at least initially, we think of that Hitchcockian mode, which is more of the suspense of the unknown. Or it’s a kind of a whodunit suspense. The key for me when you look inside, for instance, there is information that you, the writer…

And by the way, let me just take a step back for a second. You’re so right in saying that this is something that is important for writers to understand. We think suspense, like we think all technical aspects of cinema, like for instance, montage, is from the director. And I argue, as I often do, that that is not true. It’s not that it’s not from them. It’s that it’s from us.

The writer must lay out the montage so that it has a purpose, that it has a beginning and an end, that it makes sense for the characters. It’s there for a reason. You don’t just haphazardly decide one day on set, “I think, you know what, let’s have a montage.” It doesn’t work that way. It is intentional. And it is from the script.

Similarly, we must plan our suspense. Otherwise, there’s no opportunity for it. How the director creates it visually, we can even put some clues ourselves into the script. But, yes, certainly directors have an enormous role to play in that. So let’s talk a little bit about that situation where there is information that you, the writer, have, the director has, but the audience doesn’t have, and also the characters don’t have.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the most classic example of this is the whodunit, where the character is trying to figure out who killed the person, who is the villain in this situation. There’s a fundamental thing which you as the writer know and the audience and the lead character does not know.

So, in order to build that suspense, you’re probably laying out some clues that will help that person get closer. You will have some misdirects. You’ll have some sort of near misses. You are trying to lead the character and the audience on a path that will take them towards it, but a really fascinating path that will take them towards the answer, with a lot of frustrations and delays that are ultimately gratifying.

I mean, the best kind of suspenses are kind of like beautiful agony. It’s that moment of delayed gratificatio,n and so when you finally get there, aha, it’s there. Other cases, you know, the suspense might be you’re trying to get away from that thing, and will you get away from that villain. In those situations, you as the audience might have more information about how close the other person is than the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also another classic kind of suspense of the unknown, what I’ll call, for lack of a better phrase, mystery of circumstance. For instance, Lost. Or I don’t know if you ever saw that old show from the ‘60s, The Prisoner.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which Lost is basically riffing on.

**John:** Yeah. What is the nature of this world? What the hell is going on? And you’re waiting for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so now everyone is confused and you’re confused, and you’re confused with them. But they’re making discoveries. And episodic television has this wonderful tool of suspense, which is, “Show’s over. What will happen next week?” That’s the cliffhanger. I mean, when you talk about cliffhangers, that is literal suspense. I am suspended over a chasm.

But figuratively, these sorts of moments of suspense are happening all the time, and all of it is creating this ache to understand, because what suspense is playing on is a human fact. And the human fact is that we naturally seek to make sense of and order the world around us. So suspense is playing with that natural desire that every human… Babies have it. So, this is something that’s going right to this primal need that the audience has.

Then on the other hand, we have the other kind of suspense, which I think is more common and very useful, even if it’s not always thought of as suspense, which is suspense of the known.

**John:** So these are situations where because of the nature of the genre, because of the kind of story that you’re telling, we have a sense of where things are going. We just don’t know how. We don’t know what the path is that is going to lead them there. And we are looking for clues that will get us to that conclusion.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name yet. But you start watching Call Me By Your Name and you have a good sense of some of the things that are going to happen, but you just have no idea how you’re going to get those things to connect. And that is the thrill of the movie is watching those things happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think that the point of suspense is not knowing. And yet when we sit down and someone says, “Oh, here’s a movie from 1998. It stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez. And they bump into each other on the street. And he’s getting married and she’s the wedding planner for the marriage.” And you’re like, “Well, I know how that ends.” And you do. You know exactly how it ends. In fact, you know roughly how the whole movie is going to go, don’t you? Yes. And yet if you sit down and watch it, you will begin to feel great suspense.

And this kind of suspense to me is really anticipation more than suspense. It’s a slightly different feeling. It’s the feeling from the old ketchup commercials. Well, the ketchup is going to come out of the bottle. Don’t know when. Don’t know how. Is it going to come out in a big blob? Right? So, this is like watching somebody continually pulling a slingshot back. You know they’re going to let it go, but when? When? And you start to need it. You start to need it.

So, even though we know inside of these movies, like for instance, friend of the podcast Tess Morris’s Man Up. Is she going to get him in time? Is he going to get to her in time? Is she going to believe him? Is he going to believe her? Of course. Of course. But how? And will they? And is it going to go the way that we think?

This all creates this enormous suspense. And all of it really – I think you hit upon it earlier in a beautiful way – is kind of sweetly torturing the audience. That’s the point.

**John:** Yes. And so I will say that even the examples of the rom-coms where we as the audience know they’re going to eventually connect at the end – we can see what the template basically is that’s going to take us to that place – within those beats there will be moments in which we as the audience have more information than the characters do. And that is part of the joy. Within sequences, we might know something about the other guy that she doesn’t know yet, and that is important. Or we know that there’s a secret that’s going to come out and we’re wondering when will that secret come out.

So it’s not just one kind of suspense. There’s going to be little moments of suspense during the whole time. And even in action sequences, you know, will he get past that part of the cliff before the boulder falls? There’s always going to be little small moments of suspense within the bigger moments of suspense.

**Craig:** Correct. And this kind of suspense fuels genres that we don’t necessarily think of as suspenseful, but definitely are, and in fact require suspense. For instance, comedies of error. A comedy of errors is entirely based on suspense. Someone overhears something, misinterprets it, and then what ensues is a comedy that really is about us going, “Oh my god, would you just ask him the right question? Would you just say what you want to say and then it will… Oh, do it, do it, do it.” And then they finally do it. Every episode of Three’s Company was a suspenseful episode in its own way.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s take a look at some of the techniques a writer uses in order to build suspense, both on a scene or a sequence level, but also on a more macro level for the entire course of the story.

The thing I think we’re talking about sort of fundamentally is delay. And in most of these cases, the ball could drop immediately. The bomb under the table could just go off. But suspense is the ticking. Suspense is delaying the bomb going off, or having some other obstacle get in the way that is keeping the thing from happening, which you know is going to have to happen next. So those two characters finally meeting. The explosion finally happening. The asteroid blowing up. There’s going to be something that has to happen, and you’re delaying that. And you’re finding good reasons to delay that, that are reasonable for the course of the story that you’re telling, but also provide a jolt of energy for the narrative and for the audience.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in order to create delay, we have to do things purposefully. We have to use our story and find circumstances to frustrate the characters. And we have to use our craft to obstruct. And there are different ways of doing this.

The most common way and perhaps the easiest way, but oftentimes the least satisfying way, is coincidence. Coincidence is used all the time to frustrate and obstruct people. Instead of walking into the room and seeing somebody do something, they do it, walk out just as you’re walking in, and you just miss seeing them do it. And the audience goes, “Oh!” Well, that’s coincidence.

There’s a classic axiom. You’re allowed to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble or make things harder for them. You’re not allowed to use it to make things easier for them. And that’s true. But when we’re creating suspense and we’re trying to delay things, the less you can use coincidence, the better. Because no matter how you employ coincidence, the audience will always subconsciously understand you moved pieces on the chessboard in order to achieve an effect. It didn’t happen sort of naturally or for reasons that were human or understandable. And therefore, we’re just a little less excited by the outcome.

**John:** Absolutely. If we’re talking about two events, if it’s A and then B, if A causes B, we’re generally going to be happier. If we can see that there is a causal relationship between those two things, we’re going to be happier. But coincidence, I agree, can be really, really helpful. And the coincidences that get in the way of your character achieving the thing he wants, that’s great.

And it’s always nice when the bad guy catches a lucky break, because that’s just great. And so we’re used to having our hero suddenly have this big stroke of luck. So having the hero not get that stroke, or having the villain who you despise just really be lucky, or start to tumble but then save himself, that’s great. It’s surprising. And so it’s not what we expect. It’s going to be a helpful kind of way to keep that suspense going, to keep the sequence running along.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you can subvert your coincidences, all the better. For instance, there’s a famous and wonderful moment in Die Hard where our hero coincidentally catches the bad guy. He just catches him. He doesn’t know he’s the bad guy, but he catches him. And we’re like, “Oh my god, the coincidence of that just made life so much easier for our hero.” And then the bad guy pretends, in a way that is very surprising and shocking to us, to not be the bad guy at all, but to be a hostage. And our hero believes him. And now a terrible suspense is created because now we don’t know what will happen. We know the bad guy is going to use this to his benefit. And we know that our hero is now in terrible danger. We know it. The hero doesn’t know it.

Oh, suspense of the unknown. Wonderful. So in that case, you’re actually taking coincidence and using it in your favor in a way that isn’t even coincidental. So I love that sort of thing.

**John:** Over the course of Die Hard, which is a suspenseful movie from the core, you have this moment of intense micro suspense. Because we know at some point the gig is going to be up and Bruce Willis is going to recognize what’s really going on. But will it be in time? There can even be moments with Ian, just really small, second-by-second suspense, like, does he still have a bullet left in his gun? That is a question that you don’t know, he doesn’t know. What is the choice going to be? And as long as you can sort of juggle all of those things, you are going to make a much tighter, stronger sequence.

**Craig:** As a writer, you are looking for opportunities. You are looking for targets in which to create suspense. All the time, in every genre, again, every single genre, don’t think of suspense only as when will the bomb go off or who shot Mrs. McGillicuddy. And when you find those opportunities, it’s really important for you to use them. Exploit them, because they’re little gifts.

When you have a moment of suspense – for instance, the hero doesn’t know that he’s even caught the villain, he thinks the villain is a victim – wonderful. Use it. And inside of that, now you have free rein to just torture the audience. Do not be afraid to torture the audience. Be afraid of not torturing them. This is where you want to tease them. You want to tantalize them. You want to almost have the hero figure it out and then take it away from the hero. You want to drive them crazy.

This is sort of the closest thing writers have to sexual interaction with an audience. Sorry, Sexy Craig. I’m going to be unsexy about this. But it is a bizarre, flirtatious, sweet kind of torture, all of which is designed to delay release. It is a bit like saying, “I’m going to give you an itch and I am not going to scratch it. I almost scratched it. Almost did. Oh, you thought I scratched it, but I didn’t,” until you finally do it. And in this way, something that is as expected an outcome as “itch is scratched” becomes remarkably satisfying. It is a release. And in that sense, it is a catharsis.

**John:** It is a catharsis. And so I think it’s also important to keep in mind – we talk about the victory lap, and we talk about sort of the success at the end of that – when you finally do let that person have their success, make sure you give them enough of a scene to celebrate that success. Because there’s nothing more frustrating to me when I see a movie where the character finally does it and then it immediately cuts away to the next thing. Let them actually enjoy it for a moment, because we as the audience need that moment of release as well. We need that moment of celebration, like okay, we finally got to that thing.

You know, throughout this whole sequence, maybe we’ve seen that door in the distance, or we’re running into it and we get there and it just shuts. And the thing we’ve been going to that whole time is no longer an option. Aliens is a movie of tremendous success, where there’s always a plan, and the plan is always getting frustrated. And it finally gives us those moments at the very, very end where like, okay, we’re safe, everything is down, and we can sort of go off, quote unquote, “safely into the distance.”

So, make sure that in those teases and all the misdirects, the red herrings, everything you’re doing to set that up, make sure that by the time you get them through that sequence, you do get that moment of release.

**Craig:** And to guide you on this journey, dear writer, is your best tool: your empathy with the audience. Suspense really needs to be a function of your empathy with an audience. You already know the movie. You’ve seen it. You know everything. Now put yourself in their shoes. Do it over and over and over. Weirdly, they’re the most important character in your movie, even though they’re not in the movie. You’re thinking about them all the time. And it is especially important to think about the audience when we are talking about these, let’s call them artifices, because that’s what these kinds of craft works are.

If you do, then you’ll know, okay, in the moment where you finally do the reveal and you release the tension and the ketchup comes out of the bottle, well, again, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What do I want here?” And, of course, what you want to do is just wallow in the joy of it. Just let them wallow.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by talking about what does this actually look like on the page. Because we say like, okay, obviously film and TV directors are responsible for a lot of the visuals we’re seeing on screen, but the choice of what we’re overall going to be seeing there is the writer’s choice. And so let’s look at what those techniques look like on the page, because so much of successful suspense really is the scene description. Those are the words that are going to give you the feeling of what it’s going to feel like when you see it visually.

And so it’s cross-cutting. We’re with this character, and then we cross-cut to the other person who is getting close. It’s finding honestly the adverbs and the short, clipped sentences that gives us a sense of like how close they are to each other. Or like, he’s almost at the door. But then, no, it slams shut.

These are the cases where you may want to break out that sort of heavy artillery of the underlines, the boldfaced words, the exclamation points. Maybe even double exclamation points when it really is a stopper. So that we as the reader get a real sense of what it’s going to feel like to be the audience in the seat watching that up on the screen.

And that’s also why I’m so conservative with using those big guns when I don’t need them in action and writing. Because when you really do need them, they need to be fresh. You got to have some dry powder for when you really need to sell those big moments. Like, hey, pay attention to this thing because this is what it’s going to feel like.

**Craig:** 100%. And I also think the great weapon in our arsenal when we are creating suspense on the page – and you’re absolutely right; it has to be done with action – well, if suspense is delay, and suspense is waiting, delay and waiting for us in terms of text and page is white space.

When I want people to feel as if it’s an agonizing wait, I use a lot of white space. Burn it up, because that’s what it tells you. Sometimes I’ll do three, four, five things in a row. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Boom. It’s amazing how cinematic that can be when 99% of the script is just line, line, line, line, line, you know, double space, line, line, line, line.

So white space becomes essentially your timeline. It’s your way of expanding that moment to agony. And it’s not something that you can get away with more than I think once in a script. And you may not need to do it at all. But if you do have that moment where it’s the big reveal, burn up some space and let people feel it on the page.

[End of clips]

**John:** All right. That was nice to travel back in time for a moment. We’re here in 2024 with some recommendations. Earlier, I was talking about Sora, the new OpenAI thing and potential negative implications of that. My One Cool Thing is GOODY-2, which will not do anything bad for the world. Drew, I know you like GOODY-2 as well.

**Drew:** I love GOODY-2.

**John:** It is the world’s most responsible chat bot. If you haven’t played with it, it’s really fun. It looks like ChatGPT or any of the other ones. You can ask it a question. It understands what you’re asking. It will not help you out at all. It will find a way to avoid answering it. It’ll give you detailed reasons for why it’s not answering it. I think what impresses me is you could think that it would have a canned list of responses, but no. It’s clearly doing a lot of AI work to really parse what the meaning of the question is and why it’s not going to answer you. I just thought it was really, really smart.

**Drew:** I’m dying to know how they built that model, because it’s really adaptive to anything you can throw it at. That’s really fun.

**John:** My guess is that they did not have to train a whole new thing. I think they just were able to find the right parameters, so peeling under the hood here a little bit, because we’ve had to do some of this work in our own experiments. When you send in a query to OpenAI or any of the open-source models, you get the string that the user types, but you can of course change that string to be whatever you want to get the model to say back. It may be wrapping whatever you’re saying in a bunch of stuff around it that says, “But make sure that you’re not giving them anything useful or dangerous, and pad it in a lot of really protective language.” They may have found a way to do that without having to actually train their own model. It’s just really smart like that.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a wider article about the chat bot and the reason why they made it, because they’re trying to point out the importance of safeties on chat bots, but also how difficult it is to do this and how you think locking this down would be the way to solve it. If you over-lock these things down, they become parodies of themselves, which is what this is.

**Drew:** There’s also something lovely about, at least feels like a different type of large language model. The way you’re interacting with it, it feels like it expands the possibilities of what these could be.

**John:** You were saying that you and Heather were playing around with it, trying to get it to do something.

**Drew:** Heather’s like, “What’s five steps towards world peace?” It won’t get you any of that. It’ll tell you why you’re in the wrong for even trying, basically.

**John:** Good stuff. What do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Drew:** I have a much more old-school One Cool Thing. I have books. I have an author that I love. Her name is Claire Keegan. In the last probably six to eight months, I have just devoured everything she’s ever written. She writes mostly novellas, really quick books. They’re small. You can read them in an afternoon. She’s got Foster and Small Things Like These are both incredible. She’s got lots of short stories. I just love her. She’s an Irish author. A lot of it has to do with rural Ireland. It sounds like it could be a little too quaint or a little too maudlin, but they’re not. They’re perfect. Claire Keegan is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Excellent. Wonderful. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Drew:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. Drew looks through all those questions, so please send them through. Send through your counterfactual Hollywood history scenarios. We’d love both your, what if this happened, and some things you think might be the outcomes of that.

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 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 the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Apple Vision Pro. Drew, thank you so much for chatting through this with me.

**Drew:** Absolutely. John, I hope you feel better.

**John:** Thank you very much. Matthew Chilelli, god bless you for cutting this down to make me sound somewhat coherent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Apple Vision Pro. As everybody on Earth knows, I’m sure, Apple came out with this new mixed-reality headset. It’s complete goggles that cover your face, but it still looks like you’re looking through, because it has cameras that let the video pass through. It’s super expensive. It’s indulgent. My company makes software that runs on it, so we bought one. We have it here at the house. Drew, I would love your honest first opinion of using it, not whether anyone should buy it, but what is the experience of using it like?

**Drew:** The eye tracking is pretty amazing. The way it works out is it has its primary user, which it perfectly calibrates to, and then it has a guest mode. I was in the guest mode. Even that, its eye tracking is outstanding. A lot of it feels intuitive. The clicking your fingers to click the buttons feels intuitive. I had trouble moving some stuff or figuring out placing windows and that kind of thing. But it just feels like a new language in a lot of ways.

I don’t know. It’s hard not to be optimistic when you put one of the headsets on. When you’re outside of people wearing those headsets, it looks ridiculous. But when you’re inside and you’re playing with it, I’m wrestling with whether it’s going to be useful immediately. But it’s hard not to be excited. I don’t know.

**John:** I’m excited and also temper my expectations, just because I think it’s going to be a ramp up, and we just don’t know how steep the ramp up is to get to widespread use of these kind of things or if it’ll even ever be widespread use. In terms of the UI and how they do stuff, it reminded me a lot of the first Macintoshes, because the metaphors were just so different. You had to learn how to use the mouse and the abstraction of doing this. Putting on the Vision Pro and then using your hand to do stuff, they really walk you through that quickly. I was surprised how quickly I got up to speed on doing a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges comparing it to early computers is that computers were clearly just so useful for doing things we had to do other ways before. If you needed to write a paper, man, it was so much better to write a paper on a computer than it was to write it by hand or write it on a typewriter. It was just a complete game changer. It’s not a game changer for doing a lot of the productivity stuff that we do right now on our computers or on our phones or iPads. It doesn’t change that. Some of the immersive stuff it does is really just incredible and has no parallel. It’s like being there, but it’s also like being there in a way you couldn’t possibly be there.

If you have a chance to go into an Apple Store, if they’re still doing demos, you can sign up for a half-hour demo, even if you have no intention of buying it, it’s worth seeing it, I think just because you get a sense, like, oh, this is where the puck is headed. We can do this stuff now. You have to think about what impacts does that have for you. How does it change the ways we write things?

Some of the immersive demos they have, Drew, you did the dinosaurs one, where it’s like Jurassic Park, but you’re inside Jurassic Park, and dinosaurs are coming over, butterflies are landing on your finger. It was really impressive, right?

**Drew:** It’s incredibly impressive. I think you can do that because it’s 3D models, because it’s CG, basically. They can place those around you so you’re interacting with it in a really immersive way. I guess that’s really the only word for it. I’m really curious to know what human beings and storytelling is going to be like with that on. I’m not sure what that’s going to be or how that would work, other than it just being a presentation.

**John:** I’ve gone through some of the other demos. They have Alicia Keys in the rehearsal room. They also have one where you’re at this rhino sanctuary. They’re both incredibly impressive, because there are cameras that are there, and it’s like having a wide angle lens, but you’re right up in there, and so these rhinos are eating out of your hands. You’re just much closer than you probably ever would even be as a human being to one of these things.

In the case of Alicia Keys, it’s really easy to envision a play where you’re watching it in this space, because it’s not just in 3D; it’s like it’s around you. It’s like being in a theater in the round. Amazing, but also it changes how you would write and stage something like that, because you can’t perform the same way to a camera when there’s multiple cameras, when the viewer can actually move inside the space with you.

It’s really fascinating. I think there will be incredible things built for this. We just don’t know what they’re going to look like. It may be the wrong assumption to think we’re going to adapt existing media to fit this. It may be a different kind of thing that only makes sense in these spaces.

**Drew:** That’s fair. I also think it’s got to be really hard to light for a 360 video. How do you hide that?

**John:** You put the lights up high. That’s what they clearly did for the Alicia Keys thing. Also, the cameras, they are in these white towers that feel kind of 2001. They look like maybe they’re humidifiers, and you ultimately figure out those were the cameras, because they’re in the space too, and you can see where the cameras are. For sporting events, it’s going to be incredible, because you could literally put the camera in places where you could never otherwise see, which feels great and real. That’s going to be fascinating.

All the entertainment parts of it are compelling. I’ve watched some television. I’ve watched parts of movies in there. It really is great when you want to just shut the whole world out and just focus on a thing. That’s really nice, because it’s increasingly difficult to do that in these times. I was watching an episode of television, and I wasn’t also looking at my phone or also doing something else. I was just focused on the episode. That can be really nice.

**Drew:** One thing I do really like about it, that it doesn’t have those hiccups, those visual hiccups that the other VR/AR headsets have, because I remember using the Quest for the first time and then taking that off, and even in my dreams, I was starting to have that visual latency. It was really strange. But this doesn’t do that at all, which really helps.

**John:** Also, I get super motion sick, and I’ve had no issues with that at all with this. Now, the essential reason why we bought this was because we make Highland and Weekend Read and other apps that can work on the Vision Pro.

We already have Weekend Read for the Vision Pro. It’s absurd but actually kind of cool on that. I can open up the script for Anatomy of a Fall, and it can be bigger than I am. I could scale that one to be bigger. You’re scrolling through, and the fonts scale perfectly. That letter G is as big as my hand, which doesn’t seem useful, but in a weird way, you can study a text closely, because you can literally come up closer to the text.

The version of Weekend Read we have for Apple Vision Pro is the iPad version, and so all the iPad stuff basically works in there. You can highlight stuff. You can have characters read stuff aloud. It’s amazing that it just works. Is it optimized for it? No, not at all. You can envision a better way to do it. But it’s fine for what it is.

What I’ll be curious to see is whether apps like Highland, whether it really makes sense to build special versions for Apple Vision Pro, because there could be something very nice about the sense of just, you have these on, just like you’re watching a movie. You can put all the distractions away, and it’s just you and the words. You’re in your writing space. You’re in your little writers’ room, and you’re writing the script. There’s something compelling about that, because it can use an external keyboard, so you’re not typing with the little weird, floaty keyboard. You can actually type real, full-speed stuff inside it.

**Drew:** We had a listener write in who shared an article about someone who has a whole setup in the Yosemite Valley setting of the Vision Pro and writes essentially in a little snowy cabin, but they’re in their chair at home.

**John:** That makes sense. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That’s David Sparks, who does a Mac podcast I think I was on many, many years ago. It’s true, I can envision you build your own space, and that just becomes your writers’ room. When I was writing the first Arlo Finch, I needed to finish that first book while we were living in France. We moved to Paris during a heatwave. We had no air conditioning. I’m writing all these snowy scenes. I have to ponder this wintery valley. I would find these videos on YouTube that are just 12 hours of snowstorms and just the sound of snowstorms.

**Drew:** I love those.

**John:** Put those on my headphones, and that would be my space. Even though it was 100 degrees in the apartment, I would channel myself there. If I’d had the Apple Vision Pro at this point, it would’ve been really nice to just, again, pull up that snowy Yosemite Valley and write the scene in that place. There’s something nice about conjuring that. It could be really great.

Anyway, I’m not recommending listeners go out and buy one of these things, but if you have a chance to try it, it’s really worth trying it, because they really are some fascinating directions in which it can move us, thinking about the future. We’re definitely going to put some more stuff on it. People who do have it, we’ll announce when we’re putting out stuff that could be useful for it. I don’t know. It’s fun to see something new that’s really well designed and yet you also sense is going to change completely.

One of the things it reminded me about too was the Apple Watch was introduced. It looks like the Apple Watch of today. But if you actually go back and look at the features that were in it and what they thought was important, it was completely different. It was all about sending your heartbeat to your friend or staying in touch with your closest buddies. It was completely different. They didn’t realize this is mostly a fitness tracker that also keeps notifications. That’s what the Apple Watch is now. I think we’ll figure out in the next couple years what the Apple Vision Pro really is for and what the use cases are, and a lot of what we talk about now will seem a little bit silly.

**Drew:** I wonder if that has been the barrier for most of the VR/AR stuff is just that people don’t have the headsets. I think like you were saying, having computers in your home let people experiment with computers and figure out what that is.

**John:** Also, I will say there are much cheaper headsets out there. For a certain thing, I’m sure they’re great and probably better than the Apple Vision Pro. The rock stability of the illusion that you’re actually in that space is so good that that’s why I’m saying even if you’ve tried other headsets and been under-impressed, it’s worth it to go into guest mode on somebody else’s and just see what the world is like.

**Drew:** Yeah, definitely.

**John:** Drew, thanks so much.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 269 – Mystery vs. Confusion](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion)
* [Scriptnotes 332 – Wait for It](https://johnaugust.com/2018/wait-for-it-2)
* [A3 Artists Agency Shuts Down](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/a3-artists-agency-shuts-down-1235821430/) by Aaron Couch and Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Verve CEO and Co-Founder Bill Weinstein Leaves Agency After 14 Years](https://variety.com/2024/biz/news/bill-weinstein-verve-talent-agency-out-1235916578/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [A few thoughts on Sora](https://johnaugust.com/2024/a-few-thoughts-on-sora) by John August
* [GOODY-2](https://www.goody2.ai/)
* [Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot](https://www.wired.com/story/goody-2-worlds-most-responsible-ai-chatbot/) by Will Knight for Wired
* [Claire Keegan](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/274817.Claire_Keegan)
* [Contextual computing with Vision Pro: My Writing Cabin](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2024/02/contextual-computing-with-vision-pro-my-writing-cabin/) by David Sparks
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
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* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Segments originally produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. 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/632standardV2.mp3).