The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/rollo-tomasi).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 597 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, producer Drew Marquardt has assembled a vast number of listener questions, which we will tackle to the best of our ability. Craig and I have not looked at these questions at all. We are going in completely cold.
**Craig:** I love that.
**John:** Which can be good. It’ll be fun.
**Craig:** It’ll be fun. Hey, we’ve done it 596 times. If we can’t get this right, what good are we at this point?
**John:** Not so good. Craig, for a bonus topic I was thinking, this is top of my head, which fantasy guest, living or dead, we would love to have on the program. We’ll talk about that. Cool. Drew, I see you’re on the Workflowy. We have some follow-up. It looks like this was follow-up from people who are experts in things that we are not experts in, which is my favorite kind of follow-up.
**Drew Marquardt:** Ethan in Medford, Oregon writes, “I’m not a screenwriter, but I’ve been listening to the show since pre-pandemic, and listening to Episode 594, I feel seen. I happen to sell gold pans on the internet and have since 2006.”
**Craig:** Wow.
**Drew:** “John’s question is spot-on. Gold panning is practiced all over the world but is rarely seen on screen. Gold is the literal treasure sought in nearly every fantasy story, but the characters would rather fight a dragon than dip a pan in the water. Gold panning has been relegated to cartoons and cowboy movies, same with bindles, and that’s weird. Personally, I think the reason we don’t see more people panning for gold in the movies is down to a fundamental misunderstanding of panning. Panning is only part of the process. It means it’s a means of narrowing in on the original source.
“Placer gold, spelled like placer [PLAY-sr] but sounds like [PLA-sr], the stuff you pan for, is gold that that’s moved from its original source. If there’s gold in the stream, it came from a lode deposit somewhere upstream, and panning helps the prospector find where. Finding the lode is the eureka moment.”
**Craig:** That’s a eureka moment for me, because I don’t know about you, John, but I thought the whole point was like, “Oh my god, I found a nugget.”
**John:** You did find a nugget, but I think it was partly because our recollection of panning comes from the 1849ers, the miners up in the mountains. That was a time when we’d just started mining these places, so it would make sense that those streams had gold in them, because upstream was some place where there was veins of gold and they should build mines. It does make sense. Both that prospector did find some gold in that moment, which made him happy, but more importantly, it made the miners happy, because it means that there was some gold up there in the hills.
**Craig:** I like that Ethan is crafting and selling gold panners. I like that better than gold pans, even though they’re called gold pans, just because that could be just a super flex by a chef, like oh, gold pans, which obviously would-
**John:** Oh, those copper pans? I spit on your copper pans. These are gold pans.
**Craig:** These are gold pans. They will melt very quickly. They will scratch instantly. I just wonder, in my brain, when I imagine someone panning for gold and finding some, here’s what I imagine: a short, potbellied man wearing britches, a dirty shirt, and suspenders. He’s got a big beard. He’s got a floppy hat. When he sees the gold, he starts dancing by hopping back and forth on either foot and going, “I found gold. I found gold.” Why? What is that?
**John:** I have the exact same image in my head, so there must be some oor [ph] prospector image. What was that?
**Craig:** Where is that? Where is it from?
**John:** Is it Looney Tunes? It’s gotta be something like that.
**Craig:** It feels cartoony to me, but where? Is this a Mandela effect thing or did that happen?
**John:** No, it happened. There’s some original source. Because we have the best listeners on the planet, they may be able to point us to that source. It’s going to be like the tying someone to the railroad tracks. There was some place where this all started, where we got that image of who this prospector was. As you describe it, I see exactly the same person in my head.
**Craig:** You see it, right?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** You know that it must exist, because the folks at Pixar imagined the same thing, because that’s what they made the old prospector look like in Toy Story 2.
**John:** Exactly. I had that image well before that.
**Craig:** Exactly, as did they.
**John:** Maybe we need to track down the writers of Toy Story 2 and see if they can tell us where that came from. Drew, find those writers and ask them where it came from.
**Craig:** I think maybe Rita Hsiao. Rita Hsiao might be one of them. We know Rita.
**John:** We know Rita. Of course we know Rita.
**Craig:** We’ll check with Rita. Rita, what’s up with that?
**John:** That’s somewhere, so we’d have an answer to the question of what happened to gold panning, why do we not see gold panning in fantasy universes. I think what Ethan is telling us is that it would exist in those universes, but it would be helping to find where the sources of those minerals are. We should put it back in our fantasy movies, because it is appropriate.
**Craig:** I’m not going to do it.
**John:** You’re not going to do it?
**Craig:** No, I’m just saying right out, I’m not doing it.
**John:** You’re not doing it.
**Craig:** You’re not going to see that.
**John:** Here’s the thing. In The Last of Us, the golds aren’t even panned. No one needs the gold.
**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know. Gold actually has utility as a conductor. It’s a fantastic conductor. Gold plating and gold teeth and all sorts of interesting… Gold if still useful. I think if you have time to pan for gold, I don’t know where you are in our world. Plus, if you start digging around in The Last of Us, it’s going to go bad.
**John:** You could come across some bad things, some fungal things.
**Craig:** You’re going to hit a patch.
**John:** Yeah, patches.
**Craig:** I wouldn’t recommend it.
**John:** More follow-up from people who know more than we do.
**Craig:** Oh, good.
**John:** Help us out, Drew.
**Drew:** The next one is on estate planning. Attorney Brian in Texas writes, “After all these years of listening, I finally have some insight to offer. Like Drew’s mother, I’m an estate planning attorney, board certified in Texas. One of my law partners is Craig’s childhood friend, Keith Jaasma.”
**Craig:** Oh my word. Keith Jaasma as a… Just to insert here, Keith Jaasma, a friend of mine from high school who we called the tall kid, because he was tall, because you could tell from his last name he’s of Dutch extract, and the Dutch are the tallest people in the world, Keith was and is a fantastic guy. That’s a fun little connection.
**John:** He is apparently an attorney.
**Craig:** He’s allowed to be a good guy and an attorney.
**Drew:** “Unlike Drew’s mother, Brian is not retired, and probably won’t be for many years, so just follow-up comments I thought might be helpful. Number one, you can hire someone to do most of the administration and probate work after someone dies. This would typically be a trust company or the trust department of a bank. They are usually referred to as a corporate executor or corporate trustee. The obvious downside is that they do not work for free, but many of my wealthier clients or clients who want to spare their loved ones the burden of doing this work will name a bank or trust company to serve as executor or trustee in their will or trust.
“Number two, I may have misunderstood Craig, but I wanted to make it clear that heirs and beneficiaries are not generally liable for the debts of a decedent. Creditors are almost always limited to going after the estate assets and not the heirs or beneficiaries, for payment of debts.”
**Craig:** You know what? He didn’t misunderstand me. I just wasn’t clear. What I meant there was, let’s say you, Drew, are left a bunch of stuff. You’re the executor of an estate. You have to handle all of the claims and things and hand it out. What you’ve been left is a house. If the amount you have to put out is greater than the amount of cash that there is, my understanding is then yes, the creditors have to go after the estate, which means what’s left, the house, which means you are effectively paying for it, because that’s what was left to you. Now, that may also be wrong, but that was what I meant. Maybe Brian can give some follow-up on that.
**John:** Let me restate what you’re saying, Craig, because I think we’re all probably in agreement. They can’t go after Drew individually for things he doesn’t own. They can’t garnish Drew’s wages. If he inherited the house as part of the estate, that’s still part of the estate. The house could need to be sold or liquidated in order to pay off the debts of the estate.
**Craig:** Right, so then when all’s said and done, everybody gets what they’re supposed to get. Drew, simply by being the executor, gets nothing, even though he was meant to get something. That’s what I meant. Maybe Brian can give us a little follow-up, but not before he gives Keith Jaasma a solid punch in the arm. Brian, lie in wait. Don’t come up to him and be like, “I’ve got to do this.” No, I want you to nail him hard, boom, in the arm, out of nowhere. High school.
**Drew:** “Three, finally, when Craig mentioned that everyone should have a trust, it might be helpful for people to understand that he’s referring to a revocable trust, often referred to as a living trust. These are extremely common to avoid probate, since probate in certain states like California can be an expensive and time-consuming process to go through after someone dies. The revocable trust would be your main estate planning document. While it would often create irrevocable trusts for a surviving spouse, children, or other beneficiaries after your death, the revocable trust is the main document that most people need.”
**John:** That’s what you were describing there, Craig. I’m sure as you bought your house, that went into the trust, rather than going into you and your individual [crosstalk 00:09:30].
**Craig:** Yes. This is where I hope people weren’t listening to the podcast in their car, because a number of them have fallen asleep and crashed.
**John:** What I was fascinated by is Drew said revocable [ree-VOH-kuh-bl], but irrevocable [ih-REH-vuh-kuh-bl].
**Craig:** I think it might be revocable [REH-vuh-kuh-bl].
**John:** I think I would say revocable [REH-vuh-kuh-bl] for the first one too.
**Craig:** Let’s take a look. REH-vuh-kuh-bl. REH-vuh-kuh-bl. This is live, guys. It’s happening live. It is also rih-VOH-kuh-bl, but that is less common. The common version is REH-vuh-kuh-bl.
**Drew:** That totally makes sense.
**John:** Someone like Drew, who’s studied in Scotland of course, he’s going to say it differently because of his Scottish tradition.
**Drew:** That’s being very generous for me just not saying a word right.
**John:** Words in English.
**Craig:** What you just said is not correct.
**Drew:** Thank you.
**John:** Let’s do one last bit of follow-up here. We talked about Replika. This was during our How Would This Be a Movie. Replika was that service where people are falling in love with the chat bots.
**Drew:** Jane writes, “A note on Replika AI movie discussion from Episode 594. I’m 25, so when I was a kid, there was a Disney Channel original movie that came out in 1999 that was replayed all the time. It was called Smart House. Drew might remember it, actually. It fundamentally shaped my concept of AI, women’s roles in the home, the gendered division of labor, and what scholars call the second shift. It’s about a family that wins a smart house in a competition and basically the Alexa becomes an overbearing, controlling human mom in a family where the mom’s passed away. It’s a great movie and way ahead of its time and probably more profound than its kid viewers had capacity to digest.”
**John:** Drew, do you know Smart House, the movie?
**Drew:** I do know Smart House, because Megana Rao loves Smart House.
**John:** I thought I remembered her talking about Smart House.
**Drew:** In my first week working was like, “You have to watch Smart House.”
**Craig:** My goodness. Here’s what interesting. The writers are William Hudson and Stu Krieger. The director’s LeVar Burton.
**John:** This all makes sense. LeVar Burton, of course, Geordi on Star Trek, also great Jeopardy fill-in host.
**Craig:** Let us not fail to mention Roots, the greatest mini series of all time.
**John:** Stu Krieger is a friend of our own Stuart Friedel and also a professor, I think teaching screenwriting at USC, so lots of connections there.
**Craig:** You don’t say. How about that? Fascinating.
**John:** Craig, you have no recollection of Disney Channel original movies. I kind of remember after-school specials a little bit, but I basically missed the whole, this is a movie made for kids that shows on TV. That was never a thing for me.
**Craig:** Yeah, because we didn’t have that. It just wasn’t there. When did the Disney Channel even start?
**John:** Disney and Nickelodeon were earlier than you think. We didn’t have cable though for a long time, so I missed all that.
**Craig:** Same. I think maybe when we finally got cable, I was already in high school. Disney Channel was founded in 1983. That was when it was founded. “Since 1997, as just Disney Channel, its programming has shifted focus to target mainly children and adolescents.” What the hell were they targeting before then? Wait a second. What? Bizarre. Regardless, we were already in high school and not watching the Disney Channel.
**John:** That’s why we didn’t see that. Nickelodeon, I’m just looking it up, 1979.
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** That’s really early.
**Craig:** We really didn’t have cable then.
**John:** No, definitely not. We didn’t really have TV. We just had a little box we stuck a candle in and watched the shadows dance around.
**Craig:** The first film released under the Disney Channel Premiere Films was something called Tiger Town in 1983. Oh my god, what kid wouldn’t want to watch this? “The film stars Roy Scheider as Billy Young, an aging baseball player for the Detroit Tigers.” That is not at all what children want to see out there winning one for the Detroit 9. I don’t think so. No.
**John:** Kids were different back then, Craig. It’s hard to remember. Children were fundamentally different. Kids loved baseball and retired players.
**Craig:** If you look at paintings from the 1700s, typically children are portrayed as just very small adults.
**John:** It’s the best.
**Craig:** That’s what this is. It’s like, what do kids like? They love aging baseball players.
**Drew:** Dames.
**Craig:** They like dames, and they Roy Scheider. We got Scheider. Let’s do it. Oh my god, this is incredible. In the show, there is a woman, a pop star comes to sing the National Anthem. This is 1983. What pop star do you think they got there? What current pop star did they trot out in 1983?
**John:** I’m stumped. Who would it be?
**Craig:** Of course, it’s Mary Wilson, a former Supreme.
**John:** That’s who you want.
**Craig:** The one that isn’t Diana Ross, let’s get her and trot her out there, because kids love the Supremes.
**John:** Did Roy Scheider and Mary Wilson have a romance in the film?
**Craig:** No. She just shows up to sing the National Anthem. They thought, “They’ll get it.” Also, the audio format, what do you think? Was this is Dolby, or what do you think?
**John:** I’m going to guess just stereo.
**Drew:** I’m going mono.
**Craig:** You’re right, it’s mono.
**John:** It is mono. Love it.
**Craig:** The thing is in mono.
**John:** Why would you put it in stereo when TVs only had one speaker?
**Craig:** I get it. 1983 TVs. Speaker is almost overstating what we had in televisions in 1983. It was like the thing in your phone, basically, this little, tiny thing. It’s even worse than your phone. They just did it in mono, like, “Screw it. Tiger Town. Let’s go. Kids will love it.” They’ve come a long way.
**John:** My dad built our TV. He built it out of a kit. The TV I grew up with, he could fix it because he built it himself.
**Craig:** I gotta say, the genetic connection there is strong.
**John:** I do feel a little spark there when I think of my dad, because it’s just like, yeah, that’s right.
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** The nerdiness came from there.
**Craig:** He was an engineer?
**John:** He was an engineer for Bell Labs.
**Craig:** Oh my gosh. Everything is coming together. Everything.
**John:** Everything.
**Craig:** Everything. Fun.
**John:** That was follow-up on previous things. Now there’s brand new stuff that we’ve not ever experienced before. Drew, help us out with some of these listener questions.
**Drew:** Sarah from Montreal writes, “I was reading an article in The Guardian, and I could use some decoding on what actually happens contractually when a star like Phoebe Waller-Bridge secures a deal that she doesn’t deliver on or delays in delivering? The article implies that she and other mega stars are being paid to do nothing, but is that really the case?”
**Craig:** No.
**John:** No.
**Craig:** Let me also just challenge the premise of the question here, which is that somebody like Phoebe Waller-Bridge secured a deal that she, quote, “doesn’t deliver on.” There are all sorts of ways to structure overall deals. Sometimes a company like Amazon, in their zeal to lock down certain people… I’m pretty sure that they gave her that deal just following Fleabag. Fleabag was on Amazon. It’s a huge hit for them. Season Two was a huge hit for them, and they wanted to keep her there.
When that happens, sometimes talent can successfully negotiate a deal that says basically, “Look, if you want to hold me here so that I am exclusive to you, I can’t work for anybody else, I can’t make TV for anybody else, then you have to pay me this much.” If you have a lot of leverage, you can also say, “You also can’t not pay me if I don’t come up with something.” What you have to do is work in good faith to figure out something that everybody wants to do.
What happened here, and I think it was rather unfair to Phoebe, is that during that time, the things that she wanted to do or the things they wanted her to do just didn’t match up, but not to the extent, by the way, that Amazon wasn’t very happy to just make another deal with her to continue to keep her there. No, they’re not being paid to do nothing at all.
I want to also say, when you are somebody like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, your exclusivity is valuable, very valuable. Overall deals traditionally have worked like this. I think modern ones do require, in many cases, something a little bit more, but they can’t really guarantee. My overall deal is connected to making The Last of Us. That’s how HBO tends to do things. They build overalls around shows. If you make an overall deal with somebody, you’re really saying, “I hope you come up with something that everybody wants to make in the next three years, but we can’t guarantee you will.” That’s priced in.
This whole brouhaha over this was, I thought, unfair. There have been scads of people, and I’d like to point out men, who have had overall deals, done nothing, and no one’s written an article like this about them. I am firmly in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge camp.
**John:** Late in the article they talk about JJ Abrams’s overall deal and like, oh, nothing’s come out of that, but a lot came out of that for a long time. Other shows came out of that. This is a person who had a track record creating shows and then movies that did really well for these places. Has he been doing nothing in this meantime? Absolutely not. He’s been developing other things. Some stuff goes to pilots. Some stuff doesn’t go to pilot. Things happen. Things don’t happen. He had a giant show that was on the starting line that didn’t go forward. That happens. That’s what’s you’re paying for. You’re paying for the exclusive right to make JJ Abrams’s next thing, and that’s worth a lot to people.
**Craig:** Exactly. If the company decides, and I think in that case it was maybe HBO Max, which now doesn’t exist, I think they just looked at the budget of what that was, “All things considered, we don’t want to spend this money for this show.” That happens all the time. That was their choice.
No, people are not being paid to do nothing. The companies clearly have the money to spend, and they are well aware that they are taking a risk. They make that gamble. Sometimes it pays off for them in exciting ways, and sometimes it doesn’t pay off for them in ways they wish it would. Sometimes they’re saying no to things that they ought to have said yes to. In alternate universes, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has seven shows on the air on Amazon. Who knows? That’s the thing. We just don’t know. No, Sarah from Montreal, Phoebe and other mega stars are not being paid to do nothing.
**John:** I agree. What do you got for us, Drew?
**Drew:** Tom in Warwickshire writes, “I’m writing a Christmas movie and want to know if I can have a character say the word Grinch. I know that the Dr. Seuss estate is pretty hard on its trademark, but am I safe to have a character refer to someone as a Grinch? It seems so present in our Christmas language that it feels like this should be fair use scenario, but I’m from the UK, and we don’t seem to have as strong of a fair use defense here as you do in the US. If there is going to be a cliché moment of newspaper clippings on a wall, that’s something that happened in the past, can I use the word in a headline? This is probably the most succinct language for the headline to get the point across but also probably the most testing in terms of copyright. Is there a good resource out there for finding things like these out?”
**John:** That good resource will be the legal affairs department of the studio that makes your feature when they decide this is a Christmas movie we have to make. Then they will have to prove artwork and clearances for things that go on the wall in this cliched newspaper headline moment. They may flag Grinch as a subject of concern. I think you’re absolutely clear. I think it’s ridiculous to try to trademark that out of existence in terms of showing up or a character saying that, but lawyers may disagree. I can tell you, Tom of Warwickshire, you are absolutely free to include that in your script, because it’s your script. No one’s going to come after your script at this point for using the word Grinch.
**Craig:** The last point maybe is the most salient, Tom. You yourself will never be liable here. You’re going to write a script, and you’re going to have somebody say the word Grinch. Then part of your contract with your studio, at least it ought to be, is that you are indemnified from lawsuits about things like that because the studio itself… As long as you write things without absolute knowledge that you are ripping somebody off, like plagiarism that they wouldn’t know about, the studio is responsible to clear these things.
The trademark stuff really turns on marketplace confusion and damages. I think it is unlikely that the way you’re using Grinch here would cause any marketplace confusion. It has become a bit of a generic word, like Xerox or Kleenex. I think the Dr. Seuss estate is probably more concerned about people selling shirts with the Grinch on Etsy than they are maybe about somebody using the word Grinch. I don’t think the word Grinch is copyrightable.
For instance, I know that in a script I can describe something as Mickey Mouse. I can refer to Mickey Mouse. I can say, “Oh, she loves Mickey Mouse,” or, “Look at this Mickey Mouse arrangement of so-and-so.” I can’t get sued by Disney. No.
**John:** Full agreement here. I think if you are going to title your movie Grinch or something or do something that would cause marketplace confusion with the Grinch, you are going to have all those people swarming over you. Referring to a Grinch, a character referring to a Grinch or something that passes by in a headline, I truly doubt you’re going to have a problem. I guarantee it is not a problem for it to be in your script at this point for the thing you’re trying to sell.
**Craig:** (singing)
**John:** Drew, what do you got for us?
**Craig:** Drew passed out.
**Drew:** Richard in the UK writes, “I wanted to ask you about something that I call a non sequitur character dump. I’ll give you an example. Character 2 says, ‘Why won’t you just sign the papers?’ And Character 1 gives Character 2 a long, searching look, and after a lengthy pause, Character 1 says, ‘My father used to make me come with him to the abattoir. He told me to look in the eyes of the animals, examine their panic,’ yada yada yada. I feel it’s cheating a little bit. The writer now has an infinite amount of anecdotes that they can arm their character with that perfectly justify his or her actions at that moment. What do you guys think? Is there a way to make these backstory monologues a little more camouflaged, or are they absolutely fine?”
**John:** It sounds like Richard’s not trying to go for the joke version of this. The joke version of this is like, you see, oh, suddenly now we’re going to just have a backstory with no motivation. This kind of moment, to me, Craig, you can disagree, I think it’ll work as long as you believe that the character might him or herself be thinking that the moment I carry them to that past recollection, they might say something.
There’s some work there, to get there, that they would actually be speaking aloud, this thing that they’re going to be saying for the next little bit to fill in this backstory here. Real-life people don’t do that a lot. Real-life people often have to be pressed to reveal those moments. What do you think?
**Craig:** Yeah, completely agree. The test here, Richard, is is there a reason for this person to say this story? There has to be a reason. The reason has to be so compelling that the character is willing to withstand the social awkwardness of starting to tell this weird, irrelevant story, because they know that when they get to the end of it, the other person will go, “Oh, actually that was a really helpful story for me. I understand something now.” The story has to be appropriate. The moment has to be appropriate.
Ideally, Character 1, who’s going to deliver the story, should be aware in their mind that Character 2 would find this odd. That is the biggest problem I have with scenes like that. When a character begins to monologue about their past in a weird moment and the other character just sits there listening like, “The hell is going on?” Character 1 is unaware that a human would have that reaction to this bizarre story.
Make your characters aware. Make sure the moment calls for the story. Most importantly, the story has to make you go, “Oh, okay, yeah, got it. That was a helpful story.”
**John:** Richard, you’re trying to do two things at once. You’ve picked this backstory moment because it makes narrative sense in your story, so that there’s a reason why it’s great for the audience to know this specific information at this point. It also has to make sense for it to be exposed in this moment, in this scene, with the reality of the space the characters are in, that if Character 1 and Character 2 would actually get to this moment.
That’s honestly 90% of what screenwriting is, is making sure that these moments that you as a writer need to happen really feel like they can happen right now in the space where the story has landed. Potentially it’s cliché. How you get through it is really finding ways for this speech, this monologue, this dialog to be present and to be the necessary thing for the character to be saying next.
**Craig:** In my mind, the one of these that’s burbling up, and I can’t remember it well enough, but I seem to recall that in LA Confidential, there is a story, and I don’t even remember which character says it to which character, about Rolo Tomasi and the idea that Rolo Tomasi was a name that I think his father came up with to describe an unknown perpetrator who gets away with murder. You’re always looking for this impossible Rolo Tomasi. That comes into play in terms of the plot later. In my mind, that’s what happens. I’ll have to go back and look. I seem to recall that it was a good example, perhaps, of this sort of thing.
**John:** Where a character is giving out a little bit more information than you suspect they would give in that moment, and yet you as an audience enjoy it because you just know that it’s going to be important later on? Is that what you’re feeling?
**Craig:** You know what? I’m about to search for it right now. Let me see if I can find it. It’s between Jack and Exley. Exley is questioning whether or not the correct three people are being blamed for killings at a diner. Jack walks away from Exley, and then Exley cryptically says Rolo Tomasi. Jack says, “Is there more to that, or do I have to guess?” which is important, because that means Jack is aware this is weird.
Then Exley says, “Rolo is a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty. He shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I made the name up to give him some personality.” Jack says, “What’s the point?” Exley says, “Rolo’s the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It was supposed to be about truth and justice and Rolo, but somewhere along the way, I forgot all that. How about you, Jack? Why’d you become a cop?”
The point is, he tells this story about who killed his dad and the fact that he made this name up to describe the person that gets away with it. This is a great example actually I think of what he’s talking about. The point is, it was motivated by the conversation they were having. The other person was like, “What?” which is the exact correct reaction. Then when you got to the end of it and literally to the point of challenging him, saying, “What’s the point?” Then Exley gets to the point, which is relevant to the argument they’re having, which is, “Did we or did we not get the right Rolo Tomasi?”
**John:** What’s crucial here is that that first character who says Rolo Tomasi, he knows the other character is going to… He’s betting on the other character’s going to ask the question. He’s setting the bait for him to ask. If the other person didn’t ask, it would just be a dead moment. The character wants to tell this moment to this other character and not just to the audience.
**Craig:** Rolo Tomasi.
**John:** Rolo Tomasi.
**Craig:** God, I love that movie.
**John:** I think we have the name for our episode. It’s Rolo Tomasi.
**Craig:** Maybe so. Brian Helgeland of course we must give credit to, the fantastic screenwriter who wrote that film.
**John:** Drew, what else you got for us?
**Drew:** Luke in New York City writes, “My writing partner and I are having our first meeting with a literary manager soon. We wrote a pilot script that we really like and were able to get it to a few different management companies through a connection that she had in the industry. My question is, what are the most important things we should try to get out of a preliminary meeting? Should it be sharing our career goals, showing that we’re aligned as writing partners, proving that we’re serious about writing? I don’t want to go into a meeting that should just be a casual meet and greet and come on too strongly. Any advice about how to prepare and how we should be aligned before our first meetings would be greatly appreciated.”
**John:** What’s your first instinct, Craig?
**Craig:** My first instinct, Luke, is to imagine that you are a literary manager, and you are stuck in a meeting with a couple of ding-dongs that haven’t earned a dime, and you have all sorts of people that want you to represent them, and every client you take on dilutes your time and energy and takes you away from the other things that matter to you and may never turn into anything at all, and that in fact, if you take these guys on, it’s going to be a lot of hard work.
What sort of meeting would that person like to have? My guess is they would like to be somewhat entertained. They would like to enjoy it. It shouldn’t feel forced. It shouldn’t feel like an act. It should just be a great conversation. I want to feel like these two kids are leaning forward, that they’re excited and enthusiastic and ambitious, that they’re not entitled, that they’re ready to write more, that they’re open to feedback, that they’re passionate, and that if send them into a meeting with somebody that trusts me, that trust won’t be damaged when that person calls me and says, “Why did you send those two weirdos to me?”
It’s really just about being likable and energetic and ambitious and open and ready to be go-getters and do what needs to be done on your end of things to make the manager’s leap of faith worth it.
**John:** Don’t be fake. Be yourself, but be the best versions of yourselves. Be the people you are when you’re at a hundred, so they can see, oh, these are people who I can send out to meet with producers, meet with other executives, and they’ll be able to work in that room the same way they’re working with me.
In terms of what you’re working on, they’ll have read something of yours, but make sure you’re talking about the other stuff you’re working on, what’s interesting to you, what you’ve seen that you like. Help them figure out how they can market you if they were going to sign you with a client, so they can think about, oh yeah, I can send them on this type of thing, these types of open writing assignments, these are things that would be good people for me to put you in front of. Just help them visualize you as a client, and you’ll see if that works.
The other thing I would want to say, Luke, is this manager is your first meeting, great. This may be a bad fit for you too. Make sure you’re also watching and listening and just getting a sense of would you want to get emails from this person, would you want to talk to this person on the phone, or do they give you a bad vibe? If they give you a bad vibe, don’t sign with them. Just keep looking for a different manager, because the first person who says yes to you isn’t necessarily the right person for you.
**Craig:** That is a great point to consider. The last thing I would add is, if you are interested as you’re going along or even if you’re not, just a good general practice for situations like this is at some point to present an interesting question that you guys have, you’re wondering should you do this or should you do this, even if you’re not necessarily wondering, and say, “We would love to ask your advice, because you would be helpful.”
People like to know that they’re needed, and they like to hear that their advice matters. These little things go so much further than you can imagine. You might think they’re established, they don’t need to feel good about themselves. Everybody needs to feel good about themselves, no matter who they are, at any level.
**John:** Something that’s generally good advice for anybody you’re trying to bring into your world, it could be a business manager or a lawyer or anybody, your best clients, what do they do that make them your best clients? What is it in your relationship that makes it work so well? Then they can talk about how they see that business relationship working.
Are they the kind of manager who wants to read every draft and give you lots of notes, or do they read it once and then they send it out? Both can work, but you’ll get a sense of what they’re looking for in their clients and how they envision this working relationship going. It’s a smart question to ask middle to end of the conversation, so you can both see, is this a thing that’s going to maybe click, or was it just a meeting.
**Craig:** Another thing that comes to mind, there are two of you. Luke, you have a partner. I don’t know if it’s a guy or a girl. Let’s just imagine it’s a lady. Let’s call Luke and Laura. Right, John? Luke and Laura.
**John:** Yeah, General Hospital.
**Craig:** Bingo. Drew’s like, “Huh? What?” Luke and Laura go in there. It is much better for you, Luke, at some point to talk about what Laura is great at and for Laura to talk about what you, Luke, are great at.
**John:** I love that.
**Craig:** Much better than you going on about yourselves or feeling like that the two of you are the same, there’s a Luke and a Luke 2. Who needs two Lukes? There’s something about this partnership that’s great, and if you complement each other, it’s also a sign of stability. It indicates to the manager that the two of you aren’t going to be beating the crap out of each other within three months, and then this whole thing falls apart, which happens all the time.
**John:** It does.
**Craig:** Praise each other. Be generous and humble, and that will also, I think, do quite a bit to impress.
**John:** That’s correct.
**Drew:** I have another manager question from An Extremely Anonymous Listener. They write, “I’m an emerging writer in Los Angeles with several years of experience as support staff and a staffing credit. I have a manager at one of the well-known management companies. For context, I don’t have an agent. I like my manager, but I have doubts about their work style. They’re extremely honest, and I appreciate that, but I feel like it verges on defeatism. Their most common response is, ‘That’s hard. Staffing is hard. Selling is hard. IP is hard at my level.’ Sometimes even asking for generals ‘is hard.’ I agree, but it would help to hear some optimism once in a while.
“This also led to a development relationship that I think is a bad fit. I feel my manager encouraged it because this producer was the only one to say yes. The producer is asking for a lot of free work before going out for pitches, and my manager is enabling them. I feel stuck, but I want to keep my manager and push them to be more proactive after the contract is resolved. Do you have any advice about how to communicate with them and get some more support? How can I manage my manager?”
**John:** Extremely Anonymous, their premise is that they don’t want to change managers, and yet we have to talk about the fact that they should probably change managers, because it’s not your job to make them more optimistic about the industry that they’ve chosen to work in.
Yes, it’s hard. It’s always hard. It’s always been hard. Some things are harder now than they’ve been before, but it’s their job to break through that hard stuff to get you in to meet the people you need to meet so you can get a job.
I’m concerned that you as an emerging writer are not going to be the person who can change them. You’re in a not-great relationship, and I don’t think you’re going to change that person.
**Craig:** There is another possibility. If we could have Extremely Anonymous’s manager on here, I wonder what their honest version of this would be, because sometimes the people that we think are defeatist are not constitutionally defeatist. They’re defeatist with us, because it is hard with us, and they’re having trouble explaining why.
Before I would leave this manager, I would consider sitting down with them and saying, “Listen, here’s what I hear a lot. I don’t know if it’s just that you focus on the hardness of things or if the work that I have, the way I’m doing meetings, my writing, whatever it is, is challenging for you. If that’s the case, let’s have a completely open and honest discussion about that, because I need to hear that, and I need to hear your opinion about it. After that, I may choose to agree or disagree.”
It’s important to know what’s underneath all of this defeatism. It is rare for people to start defeated. It is common for people to get defeatist when they’ve been defeated a lot. When they send your stuff out, if they’re getting a hundred nos is kind of hard. That’s hard. If you’re like, “Hey, can you send it to 10 more people? Don’t you think they’ll like it?” they might say, “That’s hard.” That’s the honest, difficult discussion I would have before hitting the fire button.
**John:** Wow, if Craig’s default response is not the fire one, then you should really listen.
**Craig:** Yeah, because normally I’m all about firing, but the truth is that they may be being polite rather than defeatist. Also, a little bit of a red flag here about this producer. You have a development relationship. “I feel my manager encouraged it because this producer was the only one to say yes.” Yeah, that’s kind of their job. Everyone said no. One person said yes. Do you want to try or not? Yes, of course they encouraged that.
This is the red flag. “The producer’s asking for a lot of free work before going out for pitches, and my manager’s enabling them.” No, that’s not free work. Here’s what free work is. We talk about free work all the time. Free work is when you are hired to write something and you are hired to write a draft, a script, and you do, and then the producer says, “Whoa, before you turn this in, to get your delivery money, do it again. Do it again. Do it again.”
You’re not in that position. You’re in a speculative position. You own the copyright. No one’s paid for it. No one owns it. The producer isn’t asking for a lot of free work. The producer is asking for you to work. If you feel like you’re done, then you could say, “I’m done. I don’t want to do any more work.”
This isn’t a situation where it’s free work. This is a situation where somebody’s saying to you, like anybody, a producer, a friend, your mom, “I don’t really think it’s good enough.” Now you have to make that decision. When you say, “My manager is enabling them,” maybe your manager agrees with them. This is what I’m concerned about.
I think that maybe it’s time for you and your manager to have a little bit of a couples therapy session to figure out what’s really going on. If after that couples therapy session you think, “Oh, what’s really going on is they actually are just defeatist, and they don’t know anybody other than this producer, and this producer doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing,” oh my god, then hit the eject button as hard as you can.
**John:** Going back to the question of whether what the producer is asking for is free work, here’s a situation where it could be free work. Let’s say this producer has some piece of IP, some obscure Japanese toy that they want you to come up with a pitch for, and then you guys are going to take it out to the town. I have seen situations where that producer is asking for draft after draft after draft of this pitch, and they’re always refining and they’re always redoing this thing, and they’re basically having you write up a bunch of shit to prepare for this pitch. That borders on free work in the sense of you should really be paying a person to do this kind of development work on a thing. We don’t know what this situation is.
Craig’s right though. If this is entirely your idea, you have this idea for this space opera, and this producer has partnered up with you, that’s actually genuinely collaboration. If it’s not good collaboration, then you need to move on. It should be considered collaboration, not free work. It’s when you don’t control these things. That’s where it can become abusive free work. You have to make decisions. Your instinct is right. Your manager should be on your side about doing enough to get this project set up, but not doing so much that you’re just spinning your wheels with this producer.
**Craig:** That’s an outstanding distinction, yes, because when there is anything that the producer owns, then everything that you do, Extremely Anonymous, is considered derivative of that copyright, which means you don’t own it, which means they can say to you at any point, “You know what? I don’t love the 20 drafts I made you do of Slinky the movie, so beat it. I’m going to hire somebody else to do Slinky the movie.” Then you’re like, “What about all the stuff I wrote?” They’ll say, “We won’t use any of it.” Then enjoy.
The point is, they’re in control. They own it. Therefore it is like work. In fact, really they should be hiring you. I could be wrong, but I’m presuming in this case, this is an original idea of yours, in which case the copyright is wholly owned by you, you control it completely, and therefore, as John says, this is a collaboration. The producer in fact is the one doing the free work. The producer is the one who is being speculative here more than you are.
**John:** Last thing, I want to come back to the manager himself. Yes, people have different communication styles. I think we should also be mindful of that. Some people just have that defeatist affect to their voice. It’s just how they frame things. I like that you say this manager is extremely honest. That’s a thing you want out of a manager. I wouldn’t dismiss them just for that. They could also be a good, honest manager but just not the manager for you, so allow yourself the opportunity to say, “This isn’t a bad person, but this is not what I need right now, because my career is not advancing.”
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** Maybe it is time to move on.
**Craig:** That’s right, all true. It’s up to you.
**John:** Drew, I think we have time for one more question. We leave it in your capable hands to decide which question that will be.
**Drew:** Oh my gosh.
**Craig:** Oh god. Sophie’s choice. Sophie’s choice.
**Drew:** Sophie’s choice. Let’s do this. Maria in Denver writes, “I’m part of a group of screenwriters in Denver at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and there are many of us who are serious about breaking into the industry. A good chunk of us are middle-aged or older. I’m in my 40s. I plan to move to LA in the next year or so, and my goal is to be in a writers’ room. We recently had a workshop event, and the panel was all young writers. A couple of them said, ‘I’ve anecdotally heard about older people being in writers’ rooms.’ I think it was meant to be encouraging. What is the ageism like in this industry really?”
**John:** It’s hard. I’ll be that manager.
**Craig:** The manager. It’s hard.
**John:** It’s hard. Is ageism a thing in this town? Yes. I’m sure I’ve told this story on this podcast before, so I apologize. I was out to lunch with a producer. She’s a talented producer who’s done a lot of amazing projects. She was describing this thing she was working on. I’m like, “Oh, wow, that sounds really great. I’d love to read more.” She’s like, “Oh no, I’m looking for a younger writer.” At the time I was 30.
Sometimes age is meant to mean a newer person, a younger person, but it really often means a cheaper person. In this case, she did not really mean someone who was actually younger, but just less expensive, less seasoned, because she didn’t think it was the kind of thing that they’d be spending my dollars on.
For Maria in Denver, there are writers who start in this industry in their 30s, in their 40s. It does happen. I have friends who’ve come into this industry from other industries, and it works, but I think I know those stories because they are a little bit more the exception than the rule.
It is going to be a challenge, because so many of the people who are going to be starting in these writers’ rooms have worked their way up from being showrunners’ assistants, from being script coordinators, from finding other ways into this business. Coming in in your 40s, it’s less likely to be your path in. Craig, what’s your instinct?
**Craig:** It’s hard. Here’s the issue, Maria. There is ageism in Hollywood, of course, but it is not quite what you would think, in that what happens is, honestly in both, in features and in television I would say, the writers who are at the top of the food chain and who are there for the most highly paid and highly sought-after writers for features or the most highly paid and highly sought after writer/producers for television, are almost exclusively in their 40s and 50s, and sometimes in their 60s. To that extent, there’s no ageism at all. We’re an exemplary industry.
On the other hand, when people are putting together rooms, and that seems like that’s what you’re going for is a writers’ room, in fact you state so explicitly, the search for diversity tends to not focus on people in their 40s and 50s because they’re already represented in the room by the higher-ups.
Therefore, the focus on filling up the room tends to concentrate more on gender and sexual orientation and race, ethnicity, cultural background, disability, a lot of other metrics of things to help expand the palette of who is in the room and whose voices are being heard, because, unfortunately for you, the 40s and 50s voice is almost always already there in the room.
Therefore, the way you’re going to be getting into a room is by writing something outstanding. Not that other people aren’t, but when I say outstanding, I mean even outstanding among the outstanding. It’s gotta be really, really good.
I don’t think you should be encouraged, and I don’t want you to be discouraged, because here’s the thing, Maria. Either you’re supposed to make it or you’re not. Most people are not. I’ve said this a million times. Most people are not mean to be make it in Hollywood, because most people don’t, but there are some who are. It doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. It doesn’t matter how old or young. It doesn’t matter if their race is this or that or anything. If you write something undeniable like that, it’s undeniable. There’s a lot of space in a lot of rooms these days, not particularly these days.
**John:** Not at these moments.
**Craig:** Not at this moment. There’s literally zero spaces for anyone. However, hopefully not too long from now we’ll all be back to work. There’s a lot of television being made and a lot of opportunities to be had. You just need to stand out in a serious way, but you will not be kept from a room because of your age, nor will you be admitted to a room because of your age.
**John:** Agreed. Everyone is going to read your script first. That’s really the first threshold. We’ve talked about this on the podcast a bunch. They may read the first five pages of your script, and if they love those first five pages, they’ll keep reading. If they don’t, they won’t. That’s true for writers of every age and every background.
Then if they love your script, then they’ll want to see what other experience you have but also want to meet with you. I think that’s a situation where in those meetings, you’ll be able to hopefully match your experience to what they need in that room. It may be that they’re not looking for a writer in their 40s or 50s at the top of their head, but you have some specific experience that is actually exactly appropriate for what they need.
They’re doing a show set in a school, and you are a high school teacher, you know things that the people don’t know. My friend who made it in, who broke in in his mid-30s, was hired onto a legal show. He’s a lawyer. He knows these things. It’s totally possible. Zoanne Clack, who was a guest on our show, she was a damn doctor, and that’s how she got into Grey’s Anatomy. Now she’s running those shows.
It is entirely possible, but I think you’re going to need to… With the extra life and time you’ve had, hopefully you’re bringing something into that room that no one else can.
**Craig:** The most important thing you can bring into a room is your specific writing voice. I think there’s probably an overemphasis on what I would call the non-writing factors. People think, “What I’m bringing to the room is my parents are immigrants,” or, “English is my second language,” or, “I have a disability,” or this or that.
All of those things are things that can contribute to specific knowledge and awareness, which is important, and that’s why we look for those things. Those things must be attended by a specific voice, a talent for writing. The writing talent comes first. Your specificity as a writer, your voice. People pick up a script, and they go, “Oh yeah, I didn’t need a cover page. This is a Maria script.” That’s what you want.
**John:** For sure. It has come time for our One Cool Things. It’s been a minute since we’ve had a One Cool Thing, so I’m excited to do it. Mine is a comic book, I guess it’s actually a trade paperback of a bunch of comic books put together, that I picked up this last week called Not All Robots. It’s written by Mark Russell. Artist is Mike Deodato Jr.
I just picked it up because I liked the cover, and I flipped through the pages like, “Oh, this sounds great.” I’d never heard of it before. There was a Patton Oswalt rave on the back of it. It was an appropriate rave.
It’s a really smart near-future satire of the United States. All the disasters have happened to the United States. There are these mobile cities. These robots are doing all the work of these places. Every human family has a robot assigned to them to actually earn their living. There’s resentment from the humans. There’s resentment from the robots. There’s a whole new class of robots coming online.
It’s about toxic masculinity and a lot of other class stuff, but also really funny and really smart, one of the books that I immediately started to think about, okay, how could you do this as a series or a movie or some other form. I think it probably is best in its current form, because it can do anything, because it’s just being drawn on the page. It doesn’t have to cost $300 billion. I just really loved it. I think you’d love it too, Craig.
**Craig:** I’ve been flipping through while you were talking. This looks awesome. I didn’t understand. Just by flipping through and catching some panels here and there, I suddenly went, “Oh, not all robots like not all men. Okay, I get it.” It’s very clear. I’ll check that out. That does sound like One Cool Thing.
**John:** What have you got for us?
**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is actually an individual person that I met, a friend of a friend. I’m not going to use his real name, because I don’t know if he wants me to use his real name. I’m just going to call him Dan. Dan works for TSA. Nobody likes TSA. They’re annoying. We go to the airport. They’re annoying. They look through our stuff. They yell at us. We didn’t move fast enough. We didn’t move slow enough.
**John:** We try to do the right thing, and then they tell us we didn’t do the right thing.
**Craig:** You can’t make them happy. Dan doesn’t work at the airport. He works for central TSA. Dan was on the team that created and implement TSA PreCheck.
**John:** God bless PreCheck.
**Craig:** God bless PreCheck. We were in a group. We were in a large group of people. It’s a friend of a friend. It’s like, we know our friend, “And who are you? What’s your deal?” He was like, “Oh, I work for TSA.” Like, “Okay, like what?” “Oh, I’m part of the team that invented PreCheck.” It was like he said, “Oh, I’m the guitarist for Blondie,” which maybe is an old reference that young people wouldn’t like but I care about because I love Chris Stein. Anyway, the point is, rockstar. We were all like, “Oh my god. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
PreCheck is a wonderful thing. The fact that the government thought, “You know what? What if we made some people’s lives easier if they qualify, if they haven’t been arrested and whatever? If they qualify, what if we just gave them a little bit of a break?” By the way, it’s not that much of a break, to be clear. Here’s what you get out of PreCheck. You don’t have to take your shoes off, and you can leave your laptop in your bag. Man, that saves up a bunch of time. The line is shorter, generally. I love PreCheck. Love it.
**John:** I love PreCheck too. I would only say that you can get PreCheck if you do Global Entry. If you’re ever going to travel internationally more than once a year, get Global Entry. You have to go to the airport. You have to do a whole interview thing. Global Entry will get you PreCheck, but also it lets you cut the line at Immigration. You just go through, yu scan your little card, and you’re in.
**Craig:** You don’t even have to scan your card anymore.
**John:** Your passport just goes through a thing.
**Craig:** Now they just look at your face. They’ve even gone past the passport. Now they just take a picture of your face and like, “Oh yeah, we know you.” By the way, do you know what trumps even Global Entry?
**John:** Oh, tell me.
**Craig:** I just got NEXUS. NEXUS is the version of Global Entry that works for obviously both entering the United States, which Global Entry does, but also entering Canada. I can enter Canada like a Canadian citizen now, which for me is kind of a big deal.
Now, the interesting thing about NEXUS is you need to have an interview, just like you do with Global Entry, and when the pandemic hit, they just shut down all the interviews. They’ve been slowly bringing them back. Because NEXUS is a joint operation between the United States and Canada, you pretty much need to do it at border spots.
I went up and did a little scout a few weeks ago and took a little side trip with my producing partner, and we drove for a couple of hours to the Washington state Canada border and met with a lovely Canadian representative and an American representative. The Canadian representative, big fan of the show. The American, no clue. No clue. Actually, so then the Canadian, she’s like, “Look,” and she pulled me up on the screen and showed the American. The American was like, “Oh, Identity Thief, that’s awesome.”
**John:** Amazing.
**Craig:** She loved Identity Thief, had no clue about The Last of Us. Either way, they were both very nice, and I got my NEXUS, not because of that, but because I qualify. NEXUS now trumps Global Entry. If you do find yourself going back and forth between the US and Canada quite a bit, NEXUS is I think essential.
**John:** That’s the one you want?
**Craig:** Essential, yes.
**John:** Love it. That is our show for this week.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nora Beyer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. I love to see this out on the picket line, by the way. They’re great. I saw a guy wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt. It turned out it was Adam Pineless, who has often written outros for us. Adam, thank you for this.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and the bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on our fantasy guests. Craig, Drew, thank you for a fun show.
**Craig:** Thank you guys.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig, we may have talked about this a little bit before, but I want to dig into any living person, living or dead, and maybe even besides the dead people, because the living people we could still get, who would we want to have on the show as a guest.
This last week I’ve been talking a lot about Nora Ephron and her unique voice, so she would be very, very high on my list. I can’t think of anyone more than Nora Ephron just in terms of what she was able to bring to the romantic comedy and just her skill as a screenwriter.
**Craig:** Interesting.
**John:** Who’s on your list there?
**Craig:** Do I get more than one?
**John:** You get plenty of people.
**Craig:** I would go way, way back to Aristotle, because I think poetics did a great job of just laying the foundation for what we do. I’d love to talk with Aristotle about all sorts of things, but mostly like, “Hey, look at what became of drama. Look at how it does branch out from the things you wrote. What are the parts of this that surprise you? What are the parts of this that you did not expect? What are the parts that you think are good, bad? What are your comments? What do you like?” I think that’d be really interesting to just hear from the original drama critic about how things have turned out.
**John:** It’s always fascinating to think back that people who have no experience with the form that we’re actually doing, would they recognize this as being the same kind of stuff as the dramas and, quote, unquote, comedies of classic times, given the form and just how different things are structured. I suspect they would, but I’m not sure they would, because would they recognize the universal aspects of that?
**Craig:** That would just be fascinating, I think. Plus also, I think a lot of people would be very angry at me if all I did was talk about that with Aristotle and not other things.
**John:** It’s our show, so we can talk about what we want.
**Craig:** Our show’s about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
**John:** You’re a screenwriter.
**Craig:** Yeah, I’m a screenwriter. The other person I would love to talk to would be Frances Marion, who was kind of the… I don’t know, you mentioned oor [ph] as a wonderful prefix for original things. She was an oor screenwriter. In a time when you would imagine all the screenwriters were men, because everyone was men, in fact, Frances Marion was right there with them.
Let’s see. Her first credit is 1912, The New York Hat, starring Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish. She has a gazillion credits, all the way up through to 1940. Oh, selected filmography. It’s probably even longer than that. In fact, yeah, it says years active 1912-1972. She died in 1973.
**John:** 1912 you just barely have figured out what movies are. Those are the first movie studios are right around that time. You look at those original scripts, and they are progressing from just a shot list really to something that has a little bit more form, a little bit more shape, and so you’re moving up through the advent of sound and synced sound. It’s a huge change.
**Craig:** I’m loading her IMDb page, and oh my sweet lord. It’s just shocking. She wrote the story to The Champ. The Champ in 1979. I don’t know quite how that happened. I don’t know if that was from a story. I don’t know how that happened.
**John:** It could’ve been it’s based on something that she did earlier.
**Craig:** Perhaps, because her last continuous credit is in 1953, a story for something called The Clown. She has so many credits. Really when you look at somebody like this, who started writing at the very beginning of cinema in 1912, when it’s not even just silent, it’s barely working, all the way into the ‘10s, ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, that’s just mind-blowing. I would love to talk with her also to just get her sense of writing across these wild changes of technology and modes of storytelling. She’s a hall of famer, first [inaudible 01:02:07] hall of famer.
**John:** High on my list would be Orson Welles. I know we had the Fincher movie that was some of Orson Welles and his whole issues. I think if we could somehow resurrect Orson Welles at a specific moment in time, and just as he saw cinema and he saw cinematic storytelling. We go back to his movies again and again for this is how stuff started. Did he know as he was doing it what he was doing? What would he make of the films we make now and Auteur Theory? How would he treat the cinematic television we do right now? It’d be a great conversation.
**Craig:** That does sound great. You would be yelled at or just scorned. “Your question is stupid. I think your question is stupid.”
**John:** I want to pick a certain age where he’s not just the grumpy old drunk. That’s why I want to pick an earlier moment.
**Craig:** He’s fresh.
**John:** I’ve done some, I’ll say, hostile interviews along the way, and I still learn something out of those.
**Craig:** That’s good. By the way, just to clarify, and I should’ve known this, and I didn’t, The Champ, the one that we know with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder, both of who have taken interesting turns, it was in fact based on an earlier film from 1931 written by, of course, Frances Marion and also Wanda Tuchock and Don Marquis, called The Champ, a Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper. Now when you hear Wallace Beery, does that bring anything to mind, John?
**John:** Nothing. I don’t know who that is.
**Drew:** Barton Fink.
**Craig:** Bingo. Thank you, Drew.
**John:** Oh, wow.
**Craig:** It’s a Wally Beery picture. It’s a Wally Beery picture.
**Drew:** Wally Beery wrestling picture. What do you need, a roadmap?
**Craig:** Big men, tights. There you go. You know what? Also, since we’re saying we can get anybody, I want the Coen brothers on, and I want to make them tell me exactly what the hell all that means, or at least I want them to hear my theory of Barton Fink and then either tell me warm, cold, everybody’s allowed to have their own theory, it means a lot of different things. I want to know. I just want to know.
**John:** We have some bigger guests coming in future sessions, and equivalent of Coen brothers coming on the show, so I don’t think it’s too much of a reach. At some point we need one or both Coen brothers on the show.
I would love to have Spike Lee at some point, because I just think Do the Right Thing was one of the first scripts I ever read. I love the movie. Steven Soderbergh, of course, was the very first script I ever read. There are living people who we can come on to talk about how they see this world in cinema. Yet if I had my fantasy, I would love to pull younger versions up to see what they were thinking at those moments.
**Craig:** I hear you.
**John:** Some of this will come to pass. Most of it will not, but it’s always fun to speculate. Drew and Craig, thanks so much.
**Craig:** Thank you guys.
**Drew:** Thanks.
Links:
* [The biggest new moneymaking scheme for Hollywood stars? Doing nothing](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/apr/14/phoebe-waller-bridge-amazon-deal-fleabag) by Arwa Mahdawi for The Guardian
* [Rollo Tomasi scene](https://youtu.be/ajgjhmh-_q4)
* [L.A. Confidential screenplay](https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/l-a-confidential-1997.pdf) by Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson
* [Not All Robots](https://awastudios.net/series/not-all-robots/) by Mark Russell and Mike Deodato Jr.
* [TSA Precheck](https://www.tsa.gov/precheck)
* NEXUS Program for [US Citizens](https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/nexus) and [Canadian Citizens](https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/services/travel-voyage/prog/nexus/menu-eng.html).
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