Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Okay. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 718 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, you may have heard us discuss industry euphemisms, but really, no worries if not. At the end of the day, we’re bumping this just in case you got buried. Whether you’re coming up for air after the holidays or just getting your ducks in a row, we want to be respectful of everyone’s time as we discuss stock phrases that are endemic to Hollywood. We’ll also run down the numbers on Scriptnotes, both the podcast and the book. We’ll answer listener questions, including what’s the deal with video podcasts?

Craig: What is the deal?

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you deal with a difficult collaborator? We’ll talk about that. We have no experience. In theory, what would it be like to deal with a difficult collaborator, Craig? In theory, in theory.

Craig: No, it’s entirely theoretical.

John: It’s all entirely theoretical. This episode, we’re recording on December 14th, but it’s coming out enough later that there was news, but the news is going to be so outdated by the time we actually air this episode. Disney made a deal with OpenAI to license characters and give OpenAI $1 billion.

Craig: Yes, notice that.

John: Notice that. Paramount is now doing a hostile bid for Warner Bros. We don’t know how this is all going to sort out.

Craig: That won’t have changed by the time this episode comes out. That’s going to take a while, yes.

John: It’s going to take a while. Everything’s going to take a while.

Craig: Everything will take some time.

John: Yes, I’m not delighted by any of this news, frankly.

Craig: No. In general, we don’t want fewer entities that pay for our work, but it’s happening.

John: It’s happening. On the whole, I’m not excited by companies that distribute our product, making deals with AI companies to train models on our stuff. Don’t love that.

Craig: I really don’t like that. It’s interesting. I was reading about this. Disney, I think, probably is looking and saying, “Hey, people are going to be using this to take Iron Man and do stuff. We want to just get paid for it. What we’ll do is we’ll just let you have Iron Man.” It’s a little bit like the music industry saying to Spotify, “Okay, we’ll let you have it if you just give us $0.04 a track.” That feels like what’s going on here.

Now, one thing that I thought was amusing was Disney said, and OpenAI said, that there will be, of course, restrictions on the kinds of things you can do with their characters. No, there won’t. No, there won’t. People are going to get around that, and there’s going to be some pretty messed up Rule 34-type stuff out there. That’s just inevitable.

John: Inevitably, like the non-licensed versions, that stuff that’s not on Sora, there’s going to be wild stuff that’s happening there, too. I can understand if Disney wants to have some sort of walled garden where they can theoretically control a little bit of it all, but I just don’t think it’s great for the business at all. I think it’s too early in this process for people to start making these giant deals on their licensed characters. It’s the fact that OpenAI and these companies already stole a bunch of this stuff and adjusted it, and we’re spitting stuff out.

It’s complicated, and we won’t get into it today. Instead, we’ll do some actual follow-up on something we have a definitive answer on, which was way back in Episode 620, we talked about this producer named Carl Rinsch.

Craig: Oh, my God, Carl Rinsch. I remember this guy.

John: Yes. Basically, he was a filmmaker who had done other movies beforehand, and basically was making a movie for Netflix, and basically kept asking for more money and more money and more money. Sorry, it was a series, not a movie. We talked about this guy who was just like, they were now suing him for all this money they’d taken from Netflix without actually delivering a movie. Now, there was a verdict. Drew, talk us through what we learned.

Craig: Yes. I assume the verdict is true.

Drew Marquardt: He’s guilty-

Craig: Of course, he’s guilty. Of course.

Drew: -for scamming Netflix out of over $11 million over this series, and he faces up to 90 years behind bars.

Craig: Oh, my God. [laughs]

John: He won’t serve 90 years.

[laughter]

John: That’s crazy.

Craig: I don’t know how old this guy is, but he’s probably, what, 40 or something? 45?

Drew: Probably somewhere in there.

Craig: I just like the idea of this dude being that 90-year-old in prison, and people are like, “This guy’s been here forever. Why?”

John: He must have done something absolutely horrendous. He took a bunch of money from Netflix.

Craig: Yes, he just didn’t– he did not do–

John: He didn’t deliver.

Craig: He didn’t deliver on a series. [chuckles] What do we think he’s going to serve? Two years? One?

John: Yes, it’s tough. Trump can’t commute this because it is a civil suit.

Craig: Well, is this something that was on his radar? [laughs]

John: No, but things are often not on his radar. He’s often trying to pardon people he has no ability to pardon, so we’ll see. It’ll be much less than that. He did a bad thing. You should pay money if you did a bad thing.

Craig: The last time somebody with a name like Carl Rinsch was sentenced to 90 years, it was at the Nuremberg trials.

[laughter]

Craig: This guy’s got the most German name. Carl Rinsch.

John: Carl Rinsch.

Craig: Yes, Carl Rinsch. You shouldn’t have done that, Carl. I don’t know what to say. It’s not like Netflix is going to miss that money or anything, but you can’t do that.

John: You can’t do that. No, it’s bad. I guess the interesting angle on this story is every producer, every filmmaker is selling smoke for a long time. It’s that delusional ability to say, “Oh, no, this is really going to happen.” You respect that. That’s the chutzpah. That’s the ability to hustle and get things made. You cross a line at some point. Where is that line is an interesting thing to explore.

Craig: I think the general magic trick is to get somebody to give you money. All the tricks are there. Once the money comes, then if you are a producer, you have to then mush everybody together to get the next thing, to get the script, to get the green light. If you do nothing, which is not normal, [chuckles] then you go to prison, apparently, or give the money back. I don’t know.

John: Famously, the producers is about that. That’s the funny comedy version of this is this was not a comedy, apparently. You can imagine the comedy version of this.

Craig: Even the producers put a show on.

John: They did. They put on a show.

Craig: They just wanted it to be a failure. This guy didn’t even do that. He apparently–

John: He represented himself, which is always–

Craig: Oh, no.

John: That’s also the comedy.

Craig: Our good friend, Ken White, who is a former federal prosecutor, now a defense attorney, shows up on all sorts of podcasts and things.

John: He came on our show to talk through legal stuff.

Craig: Exactly. There are a couple of things that just make his eyes roll in the back of his head in anger. One of them is people representing themselves. His feeling is like 90% of the lawyers you get can barely represent you. [laughs] You need a good lawyer.

John: A doctor shouldn’t perform surgery on himself either.

Craig: No, no.

John: You hear stories of the doctor who was isolated in Antarctica that had to do surgery to himself. That’s why it’s so rare because there’s talented people around you who should do that.

Craig: This guy isn’t even a doctor. This is a patient doing surgery on himself. [chuckles] It’s just idiotic. Don’t do that. No pro se, please.

John: No. We have two bits of feedback and follow-up on the Scriptnotes book, including a mistake that we made that none of our many readers caught that made it through into the book. What did Anthony say?

Drew: Anthony said, “Loving the book, such a wonderful distillation of your show. This is such a silly quibble. I almost didn’t send it, but as a lifelong Trekkie, I couldn’t let it go. On page 32, in the section at the bottom titled, Does This Story Travel or Stay Put, you illustrate your point with several iconic sets around which several popular shows are anchored. For Star Trek, however, you call it the ‘deck’ when it should more accurately read the ‘bridge’ of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.”

Craig: Oh, yes. The Enterprise does have decks, but that space is the bridge.

John: It’s the bridge, absolutely.

Craig: Well, I don’t know about you, John, but I think it’s time to end it all. That is so embarrassing that we need to just–

John: We need to call back every issue-

Craig: Or die.

John: -or every volume that has been sold of the Scriptnotes book, and just bring it back.

Craig: Hey, second edition, right?

John: There will be a second edition at some point. We can probably fix that in the second edition. What I’ll say is that if you have the book in front of you, flip to page 32. Please carefully cross out the word “deck,” write in “bridge,” and then at least you fixed your one personal copy.

Craig: Anthony, I appreciate this. You’re absolutely right. The good news is people who love Star Trek are notoriously flexible. These things–

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Anthony is the nicest person in the world, by the way, because I feel like 90% of people would have just thrown the book across the room in anger. Thank you, Anthony, and we’re sorry.

John: It has sharp corners. It’s not that heavy, but it has sharp corners. You could have hurt somebody.

Craig: Oh, absolutely.

John: Another bit of follow-up from Charles.

Drew: “I heard Craig speculate that the new Scriptnotes book is maybe the only book that exists about how to write screenplays for movies or TV that is written by two people or a person who’s repeatedly done that job for decades. While he’s correct that most are by people who have never repeatedly held the job, there is a book on screenwriting written by not one, but two people who have repeatedly done the job for decades. Might I bring your attention to Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant.”

Craig: Absolutely right. Lennon and Garant are great.

John: Yes, they’re really lovely people.

Craig: That’s true. I forgot. I forgot. It’s a great book, though. That’s a really funny book, too. It’s different.

John: It’s a very different book.

Craig: It’s a very different book, but it’s very funny. Everything that–

John: It’s much more memoir-y than ours is.

Craig: Yes, but those guys are hysterical. Love those guys. That’s awesome.

John: Cool. All right. Let’s move on to our marquee topic. This was suggested by none other than Megana Rao.

Craig: Then it’s going to be good.

John: Our beloved producer from the past. The framing for this is sometimes in Hollywood, in this industry, you say a thing that covers over for what you actually want. It’s a euphemism or it’s a stock phrase that everyone knows the meaning of, but it gets away from saying the actual harder thing that you don’t want to say. Megana’s first suggestion for this was, “No worries if not,” which is a thing you say in an email which gives the other person out because it’s the end, so you don’t come across as too demanding.

Craig: It’s not passive-aggressive. It’s just–

John: It’s just submissive. It’s like a dog rolling over on your back.

Craig: It’s weasel-wording because “yes worries if not,” really. Yes worries. Why would I have asked you? “Yes worries if not,” it’s actually a very useful phrase if you’re asking somebody that works for you to not come off as too pushy about something. They understand if you’re asking for it and you do it. “No worries if not” is a nice way of just saying, “But I’m nice.” [chuckles]

John: I probably used versions of this for something with Drew saying, “This would be my preference, but if the other thing happened, that’s also okay.”

Craig: That is much clearer than this. This is, yes, “No worries if not” is, “I worry.” I immediately start worrying if someone tells me to not worry.

John: “No worries at all,” I think, is an Australian phrase that came over to California. The “no worries if not” probably is a morphed version of that, which is a specialized version. Drew, I proposed this to you on Thursday or Friday, and then you came up with a whole list of– I think you crowdsourced from your friends, a whole list of these industry terms.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Drew, if you could read us the term, and then we’ll have a little discussion about what it actually really means and what the use of it is.

Drew: We’re playing phone tag.

John: Yes. Sometimes you’re just actually calling what it is. Basically, we keep going back and forth, but also there’s sometimes a little bit of a password. I feel like, I think you’re dodging me or there’s a reason why we’re not connecting here. Because we’re playing phone tag, I’m now just going to tell you in an email what it is I actually want.

Craig: I only use we’re playing phone tag so that the other person knows that I called them back because sometimes I just wonder, okay, I get a call from somebody, I miss it. I call them back, they miss it. They call me the next day, I miss it. Now, I’m like, “Did they know, or is this a second call because somebody didn’t tell them?”

John: Sometimes you forget like, “Did I initiate this? Did they initiate this? Did you already have your answer?”

Craig: I just want them to know I was trying. That’s all. I tried.

John: Next up.

Drew: “Bumping this.” These first ones are for emails, so “bumping this.”

Craig: “Bumping this.”

John: I had to do a “bumping this” this week when I’ve not gotten a response back on a thing, and I do need a response, and so, like, “Hey, bumping this because I need to know this thing.”

Craig: Bump has become this multi-purpose word. It wasn’t around when I started, but then somewhere along the line, this “bumped me” became a thing in notes, like meaning I was reading, and then, suddenly, I was jarred and did not like something or did not understand something. It bumped me. Then “bumping this” also became– I think it might come from programming or something, like bumping something.

John: Like push and pop. It’s like if we’re at the top of the stack.

Craig: Exactly. You’re bumping the stack. This then became like, “I’m bumping this,” and I will get bumping this– I receive bumps constantly like just, “Remember the thing?” It’s actually a nice way of saying, “You never answered my question.”

John: Which is related to the next euphemism here.

Drew: “In case this got buried.”

[laughter]

John: There’s a little more passive-aggressive about that. It’s like, “Here’s the thing you didn’t see.” Actually, though, just today, Craig and I, you had an exchange. You’d send a long email with stuff for the next D&D campaign. Had I actually read the email fully and carefully, I wouldn’t have made the mistake that I made.

Craig: You know what? It got buried. [laughs] No, but that’s why “in case this got buried” is definitely passive-aggressive. That is just saying, “Oh, I’m sure you have so many emails, but–”

John: What’s fascinating about it is it’s passive-aggressive, but it’s also giving them an out.

Craig: That’s the passive part.

John: That is the passive part, yes.

Craig: Yes, but it’s aggressive.

John: Yes.

Drew: “Got caught in my outbox.”

Craig: Oh, please. I’ve never heard that one. If I ever do, I’ll be like, “Oh, please.”

John: This has happened to me once or twice in real life where it’s like, I see a draft that I actually just never sent. I did reply to them, and I realized like, “Oh, no, it actually never went through because it’s just how stuff got threaded.”

Craig: I would believe, I guess, if somebody phrased it as, “I literally never hit send.” It’s been the emails behind a window, another thing. I would get that “caught in my outbox” sounds a little fishy.

Drew: “Coming up for air” after Sundance, holidays, whatever.

Craig: Yes, “coming up for air.” I use that one constantly. Constantly. “I’ll be coming up for air.” When did that start? I don’t even know.

John: I don’t know. I’m sure we could do a Google Ngram search for when stuff actually started appearing in texts. It’s related to a concept of submarining for me, which is submarining where you just immerse yourself so completely in a project, in a relationship, or whatever. It’s just like you just disappeared off the face of the earth. You do come back up for like, “Oh, wow, the rest of the world is still out there. I haven’t dealt with all these things.”

Craig: Yes, there are these times where you are plunged into some process. Sometimes it’s production, but sometimes you’re doing promotion stuff or you’re writing a draft. You have to just focus on that thing, but you tell somebody, “At this time, I’ll be coming up for air, and then we can sit down. It’s just not a great time now because I’m stuck doing all this stuff.” That’s a perfectly fine euphemism. It’s not even a euphemism.

John: It’s a stock phrase. It’s a thingy.

Craig: Yes, it’s a stock phrase, yes.

John: I remember, I think back when I was in Stark. I was interning for somebody, and another friend was interning someplace. We’re talking about this filmmaker who said, “Oh, I won’t be able to do any of that stuff because I’ll be doing award season promotion stuff.” I’m like, “Really? You really think you’re going to be busy doing that?”

Craig: It’s presumptuous.

John: It’s presumptuous, yes. That filmmaker was actually correct, and I just had no sense of, like, “Oh, you’re going to lose multiple weeks just doing that promotional stuff.”

Craig: It’s insane. It’s a job. It’s a job. Oh, boy. I can’t say that I enjoy the job, but I’m not supposed to. The actors, I think, are better at it. Also, just more people want to talk to them because they’re actors, and it’s fun, and they have more practice with it. It does blow my mind how busy it is. I am often reminded by the women that I work with that it is busier for them because these events, like hair and makeup, which I always– There’s a lovely woman named Sue, who does my makeup for these things. That means just take the massive shine off his bald head and try and help his eye bags a little. It’s hours in makeup, hours in hair sometimes for the women–

John: For these women, not for you.

Craig: Correct.

John: You’re not spending hours to make that up.

Craig: No, and I have no hair.

John: Exactly. Makes life easy.

Craig: Yes, so they’re waking up early, and then there’s four hours of this stuff. Then they go to do the event, then they got to take it all off. It is a job. It’s nuts.

Drew: “Just needed to get ducks in a row on our side.”

John: “Here’s why you have not heard back from us. We know we need to respond to this thing, but we have not responded to this thing. We’re acknowledging that it’s taken a while.” Likely, in my experience, it’s just like there’s a higher-level person. There’s a boss who hadn’t read it. The lower people knew what their opinion was, but they couldn’t actually say that until the higher-level person did this. I just turned in a project last week, which I know I will not hear anything back from until after New Year’s, which is great and normal, but it’s all waiting on the big boss to read it.

Craig: I will typically hear people say, “Just give us a few weeks to get our ducks in a row.” “Our ducks in a row” means get the sign-offs from the people that need to sign off. I don’t know why “ducks in a row” is the euphemism we use, but it’s better than saying, “Just give me a few weeks. I’m not powerful enough to say yes.”

Drew: This next one’s a very assistant one. When you’re sending avails out, you say, “Let me know if any of these don’t work, and I’ll see what I can open up.”

John: I love that embedded in there, Drew used the word “avails,” which is, I think, a specific LA term as well, which is availability. It’s like when are there openings in a person’s schedule. Craig’s avails are very limited. Drew is always checking with Craig’s assistant for when he’s available to do things. I get busier at times, too, and so my availabilities are limited.

Specifically, the phrase that you’re putting out here, “Let me know if any of these avails don’t work. I’ll see what I can open up.” What are you really covering for when you say that?

Drew: It’s basically, “My boss has more free time than I’m telling you that they do, but I’m just giving you limited windows to make us seem busy.”

Craig: Yes, there are these three moments that work for next week or literally any other moment, yes.

John: Sometimes you open with misleading specificity, like, “How about 3:30 on Wednesday?” It turns out, really, the whole day is free.

Craig: This also may be code for, “My boss is busy. These are the times he is available, but your boss is more powerful than my boss, and he will move stuff for you.” It’s a nice way of indicating, “Okay.” I like this whole quiet assistant code. It’s interesting.

Drew: Along those lines, “Something came up that won’t be able to move.”

Craig: Oh, yes. No, that’s a a court case, probably.

[laughter]

John: Also, it’s vague enough. It’s like, “Oh, my God, is it the person having surgery?”

Craig: I went to the personal immediately. I’m like, “Okay, this is not work stuff.” That’s the end of that. Won’t be able to move. Okay, that’s not happening there. Oh, this next one.

Drew: “We’re waiting to hear what the team thought.”

Craig: I’ll tell you what the team thought. The team thought, “No.”

John: Drew has written down here, “Slow motion pass,” and that’s what it is. It’s just like, “We’re passing, but,” duh-duh-duh.

Craig: “We’re waiting to hear what the team thought.” Either you have no idea because you’re so low on the totem pole, and that means that they don’t care what you think, or you’re pretty high up on the totem pole and you just want to blame your team for passing. Either way, it’s not good.

Drew: “Let’s keep in touch in the context of a pass.”

Craig: Oh, no.

John: It’s no.

Craig: We can still be friends.

John: Yes, absolutely. We don’t hate you. It’s just that it’s not for us.

Drew: “It’s not quite right for us at the moment.”

Craig: I love the “quite.” “It’s not quite right for us at the moment.”

John: We all know what it means. Again, it’s a kind pass.

Craig: That means no.

John: Yes. Rarely are you going to hear a harsh pass where they hated it. They’re never going to say that. Your reps are never going to tell you that. Sometimes the real answer is like, “No, absolutely not.”

Craig: They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. The end.

Drew: Or, “They didn’t spark to it.”

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, they didn’t spark to it. Just the spark. Ding.

John: Here’s one that I added. “We’re looking for noisy projects.” Have you heard “noisy” is a good term?

Craig: I have heard noisy, yes.

John: Craig, tell me about what noisy means to you.

Craig: Noisy means something that gets people buzzing either in town or in the trades or people in social media like, “Zzzz.” KPop Demon Hunters was incredibly noisy. There are also things that get announced as development projects that are noisy. Then often what happens is years go by and the noise never turns into anything. They like stuff that gets people chattering.

John: Yes. The chatter doesn’t have to be entirely positive. It can get people upset, and that can also create some noise. Just anything that feels a little provocative or not safe and down the middle of the road is good. We’re recording this before Wuthering Heights has come out. My anticipation is it’s a noisy title. Whether people like it or hate it, it will get attention because of just the noise around it, which can be really nice.

Craig: Yes, yes, yes.

John: Drew, help us out.

Drew: “We’re not the right place for it.”

[laughter]

John: What I like about this is, “Basically, that’s actually a pretty good idea, but we just can’t do it.” I think it’s sometimes a nice thing to say, which is not really accurate. Sometimes it’s actually true. It’s just like, yes, that’s a movie that someone else could make, but it’s not for us.

Craig: Really, that’s like saying to somebody that asks you out, “I’m not the right person for you,” meaning, “I’m not right.” They don’t like it. There are so many ways of saying, “I don’t like it.”

John: Yes, but if you’re pitching an A24 movie to Imagine, that’s the–

Craig: Okay, but you won’t even get through the door, right?

John: This is real talk here. When I will go out with a project, like there was a Mattel project that I was attached to, and so we would make our list of, like, “Here are the places that seem like a good fit.” A lot of other places would want it because they wanted to be in businesses with me, which is lovely and flattering. If I end up pitching these places, it’s like, “You really aren’t going to do this movie.” It was just wasting people’s time. That’s why I wish we’re not the right place for it. It was more obvious at the start.

Craig: If somebody is like, “Look, I know you’re pitching something that is a Mattel thing. We don’t make things like that, but we want to hear the pitch anyway.” They really can’t then say after, “We like it. It’s just we’re not the right place for it.” No shit. We all said that, but it’s more like when they are the right place for it. [chuckles]

John: I think a 2026 goal for me, which maybe based on other stuff that I’m working on, but it’s just to be a little bit more brutal about like, “No, I’m not even going to do that meeting on that Zoom because there’s no point to it.”

Craig: There’s no point.

John: There’s no point.

Craig: There’s no point. Then this next one.

Drew: “They liked it. They just didn’t connect with it.”

Craig: Yes, they didn’t like it at all. [laughs]

John: They didn’t like it, no.

Craig: “I like it. It’s just that I don’t like it.”

John: I also hear like, “I wanted to like it, but I didn’t.”

Craig: They always want to like it.

Drew: “It didn’t fully land for us.”

Craig: Right. If a plane doesn’t fully land, that means it crashes in a fireball. [laughs] It didn’t fully land.

Drew: “We’re looking for something camera-ready.”

Craig: Oh, please. No, you’re not. Nobody knows what that is. Get out of here.

John: You know what camera-ready is? It’s a script that’s already written. It’s not a pitch.

Craig: You’re looking for something camera-ready. It’s a script, a budget, a schedule, a cast, a crew. I mean, please. “We’re looking for something camera-ready.” Yes. Oh, God. Dumb.

Drew: “Well-told.”

Craig: Oh, well-told.

John: Well-told. Oh, my God. I’ve gotten a couple of well-tolds. I just want to just turn off the Zoom-

Craig: -and commit seppuku. Well-told is what they say after you pitch them something. They don’t want it, and they were bored. They say, “Well-told.” You did a good job putting all those sentences in the air with your mouth full. “We don’t like them, but well-told.”

John: To me, that is like you just saw your friend’s play and it was awful. It’s like, “You were up there on stage. Wow. It was great to see you up there on that stage. Well-told.”

Craig: Well-told. Oh, yes, like, “You did it. You did it. Yes, well-told.” Oh, this next one is– I don’t know. This next one is– yes, it’s bad.

John: It’s bad. It’s ambiguous. It’s not always bad, but let’s–

Craig: It’s mostly bad.

Drew: “Let’s revisit after the holidays.”

Craig: Yes. Which holiday? Christmas 2000-and-never? That’s just like if you want something, and here’s what happens. All this stuff gets put in context once you do something that people want. Suddenly, there’s nothing that could be faster. They were like, “Well, there are three people that want this. They want it now. They want it two minutes ago. They don’t want to wait until tomorrow. Here’s an offer. It’s on the table right now, and if you turn it down, it’s gone forever.” It’s never, “We really want this. Let’s just not do anything about it for a while.”

John: The situation where it’s not a pass, where it’s like if you’re talking with your reps about a project to take out or stuff like that, like, “Let’s revisit after the holidays,” yes, that makes sense. Going out after director, that’s a thing that’s an absolutely valid thing because you don’t want to approach people generally this week in December. It’s just like everyone’s busy with other stuff.

Craig: Yes, and just fair.

John: Yes.

Drew: “I’ll defer to the team.”

Craig: What does that mean? What does that mean?

John: What does it mean, Drew?

Drew: You have a disagreement about a thing, but you don’t care enough to fight about it. You’ll let other people make the decisions.

Craig: Oh, “I’ll defer to the team.”

John: Yes, but the fact that you’re actually saying it out loud means that you are stating that you have a disagreement with it. It’s sometimes a useful piece of information, but yes. I haven’t heard it yet. Now, my ears will be open for it.

Craig: Yes, for team deferral.

Drew: “I want to be respectful of everyone’s time.”

Craig: [laughs] That means–

John: I’ve said this on Zooms, too, where it’s like, “This is going on a little long. We need to be done here.”

Craig: Yes, “I want to be respectful of my time.”

John: Yes, and often you’re saying that because there’s people who are on the East Coast or in London, and it’s 2:00 in the morning. It’s like, “Let’s just be done.”

Craig: Or not, or everyone’s in Los Angeles, and this is boring, and it’s too much. The phone version, well, yes, because that feels like a Zoom thing. The phone version that blew my mind the first time I heard it was, “Well, I’m going to let you go.” Well, I’m going to let you go. “I know you have been dying to get up this phone call. I’m going to let you get off the phone. Really, you weren’t dying to get up this phone call. I am. I’m hitting eject.” It blew my mind. I was like, “Oh, thank you for this lovely gift.”

John: My friend Erin Gibson will make fun of me because I have this thing where we’ll go to lunch. At a certain point, “Okay. Well, this was great.” She’s like, “Wow, you just stopped the lunch.” It was like, I’m done. I’m just trying to acknowledge the fact that this lunch is over, and we don’t need to keep dragging it out for another 15 minutes to think about it. This was great, and I’m stopping it.

Craig: I think the problem, if I may, is the tense. “This was great,” as in I unilaterally decided it ended before I said that statement. You get no participation in it. [chuckles]

John: Craig, correct me. How would you end the lunch?

Craig: I would say “has been” instead of “was.” “This has been lovely.”

John: Realistically, I was doing it. The constant presence of–

Craig: Sometimes I like to go, “Okay, I’ve had the best time. What are you doing next? What are you doing next today? Tell me what you’re doing next,” and then you–

John: Thinking for the future.

Craig: Obviously, talking about what’s coming right after this lunch gets everybody generally motivated to GTFO. What you do is nothing compared to what our friend Derek does.

John: Tell me.

Craig: Let’s say Melissa and I are out to dinner with Derek and Christy. It’s never the wrong point. It’s a point where he would just go, “Okay, I’m done. We’re going. Let’s go. Christy, we’re going.”

[laughter]

Craig: We’ve been at their house where like a bunch of people, like 10 people, and then Derek will go, “Okay, it’s over.” [chuckles] Christy is always like, “Derek. Derek.” He goes, “What? They’ve been here forever. It’s over.”

[laughter]

Craig: It’s actually awesome because we all know that he just is going to pull the plug, and that’s that.

John: I respect that. A little candor, a little honesty there.

Drew: I prefer the clean break.

Craig: Yes, it’s the opposite of the Irish goodbye.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Oh, I have the best Irish goodbye. You know my ghost strategy?

John: Tell me.

Craig: I love to ghost. That’s my favorite thing. I’m at a party. In my mind, I’m like, “It’s time. It’s time for the ghosting.” I’ll start moving towards the door. I’m hoping that, at some point, and usually do, somebody’s like, “Are you leaving?” Then I go, “No, I don’t. I’m not Irish goodbying. I’m heading to the restroom, but I’ll be right back,” then I go.

John: They’re worried about you. “Craig, he said he wasn’t leaving, so something’s wrong.”

Craig: I say I am not doing it, so then if they don’t see me, they’re like, “Well, no, he didn’t leave. He said specifically he wasn’t going to do that. He’s somewhere.”

Drew: Diabolical.

Craig: Yes, but I’m gone. You know where I am? In my bed.
[laughter]

John: No, Craig actually does. He says that, and then he goes to the bathroom. He locks the door on the bathroom and then closes it. It seems like he’s locked in the bathroom. Everyone’s like, “What’s happened?” Meanwhile, there’s a line forming.

Craig: Yes. No, I lock the door, climb out the window. There’s not enough bathroom windows to climb out of. That is the air duct of– yes, there’s not supportive vents, and there are not bathroom windows to climb out of. What a shame.

John: It’s tough. Let’s get back to our passes here.

Craig: All right.

Drew: “A project’s too small.”

Craig: That’s crazy, but sure. I get it on some point.

John: I get it, yes.

Craig: Then you probably wouldn’t be pitching to a place where the project would be too small.

Drew: The next few seem to be from spec pilots or something, so like, “Not enough of a hook.”

Craig: Okay. Just the idea’s not grabby. All right.

John: Not catchy.

Drew: “Needs more of an engine.”

John: It’s boring. The story doesn’t go anyplace. It’s just like you’re stuck in one gear.

Craig: You’re not going to be able to write 20 episodes of this. You’re going to write two and then run out of stuff.

John: Yes.

Drew: “Too slice of life.”

Craig: What the hell does that mean?

John: I think it’s not story-driven in the sense of like there’s not a compelling thing that’s moving you along. It’s a hangout.

Craig: This is fascinating to me. That implies that there have been a lot of people writing stuff that has been two slice of life-y. I’m curious why. Is it a generational thing, where a certain cohort enjoys a slice-of-life story?

John: I wonder.

Craig: I don’t recall this being a thing.

John: I’ve never seen that as a note.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

Drew: I have a feeling probably a lot of stuff that’s geared towards younger people tends to be 20-somethings hanging out. Maybe that’s a nice way to say nothing’s happening.

Craig: I think maybe they should look at a little movie called Go, where things happened. You could argue that After Hours is a slice-of-life movie, but it’s tense. Stuff happens. It’s not just like doopity-doop. There were, but I will say there were some slice of life-y. Reality Bites was slice of life-y back in the day. The attraction of the movie was, “Look, it seems legitimate for people your age, right?”

John: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, yes.

Craig: Fast Times was actually quite slice of life-y. That’s true. That’s true.

John: Listen, comedy is on television like Friends.

Craig: Well, sitcoms are slice of life.

John: Everybody Loves Raymond, slice of life.

Craig: Yes, because it’s just the situation happens that week. That’s all. It’s the same. There have been slice-of-life movies that are good. I guess maybe the problem is it’s a pretty narrow target to hit. You’re Cameron Crowe. Yes, I could see you hitting that.

John: Indies tend to go more towards the slice of life, where it’s just a little small.

Craig: Sometimes, that can drift into self-indulgent or boring. That’s a nice way of saying this was bad.

John: You have one thing here as studio speak.

Drew: Yes. Aline’s assistant gave me this one because they tend to go out with very female-centered projects, and they will get the note back that the studios are looking for more “male-entry points,” which means–

John: I love this as a term. Incredible.

Craig: I need to talk to my wife about the male-entry points. This is the worst–

John: I just talked about Heated Rivalry, which was full of male-entry points.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s right. By the way, ever since you talked about Heated Rivalry, it’s one of those things where you buy a car, and then you see that car.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: It’s been everywhere.

John: Everywhere.

Craig: Suddenly, on all the conglomeration sites I go to with news, it’s like– and then there’s this specific thing of why women are obsessed. Straight women are obsessed with this show. I started reading about it, but you were the first to mention those male-entry points.

John: Thank you. I’m flattered. I snuck in there because it was about to blow up as a meme.

Craig: Well, listen, gay culture is always right there in front of everything. Male-entry points on that show, yes, apparently, very important, but they’re important for all men.

[laughter]

Craig: It’s not just gay men, straight men. We’re all looking for entry points. This is the most horrible phrase possible for what it actually is intended to mean, which is, Drew?

Drew: That we want more male characters so that men will watch.

Craig: Just say that male-entry points, you’re taking something that’s already a little bit, “Eh,” and making it so much more, “Ugh.” Just say, “Yes.”

John: More dudes.

Craig: “We want our stuff to appeal to both genders equally. This feels a little lopsided.” That’s fine. That’s a perfectly fine thing to say because audiences have demographics. Male-entry points? Oh, yes.

John: It also feels like Netflix thinking about, “What are we going to put on the tile on Netflix as you’re scrolling through it?” As a gay man, my tiles on Netflix look entirely different than your tiles just because if there’s one hot guy in the show, if it’s the 19th character, that’s who will show up on my tile.

Craig: [laughs] I have to look and see. Do you want to see what shows up on mine? Because I don’t watch Netflix that often, so I’m going to it right now.

John: We can share screens and see. I rarely see Netflix on my computer, so let’s see if it actually holds up right.

Craig: Okay. Let’s see. All right. This is fascinating. Actually, I have cool tiles. I’ll share the screen here.

John: Excited?

Craig: Yes, so this is actually like a–

John: That feels pretty normal, yes.

Craig: It’s very normcore.

John: Listen, Schitt’s Creek has Annie as the lead character rather than–

Craig: Oh, so they do stuff like that even though–

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: Oh, interesting. Interesting. Okay.

John: Any situation where you’re not seeing maybe the main star but a supporting person is interesting.

Craig: Right, because they’re like, “You’ll like this pretty lady.” Oh, that’s interesting. This is not a bad collection. Well, they’ve got Man vs. Baby with Rowan Atkinson. I guess I would probably like that. [chuckles] They probably would like these things. Maybe I should watch more of these things. All right, so that was mine. Let’s take a look at yours.

John: All right. Let me share my screen here.

Craig: Your collection of hot guys. Oh, this is not that different from–

John: It’s not that different. We have the same tile for The Diplomat.

Craig: For Man on the Inside and Nobody Wants This and Wednesday. You have the baking show. Oh, but your Frankenstein tile is different. Your Frankenstein tile, I think there’s some hot guys in the extras here. [chuckles] Mine just had the monster. [chuckles] You have Rowan Atkinson also, but you have KPop Demon Hunters. I got to say, it’s not–

John: It’s not radically different.

Craig: It’s very, very similar. It’s very similar.

John: Nothing that’s showing up here, but there have definitely been times where it’s like, “Well, that’s absurd that they’re showing me that as the tile for this movie that person is barely in.” Now, there’s nothing that I’ve been scrolling through here that says like, “Oh, well, this is clearly just hot men.” What have we learned in our analysis of our discussion of stock phrases in Hollywood? Why do we have them? What good do they serve?

Craig: Well, they are illuminating about our business because I think in other businesses, people are far more curt and direct because we have a lot of personalities and because it is a little bit of a, “I don’t want to date you now, but if you get hot next year, I might want to date you then.” Everybody is shining everybody on. Nobody wants to say, “No, no, no.” They just want to be careful.

John: Yes, we’re a freelance business. You’re constantly looking for your next job, looking for the next thing. You’re constantly dating, and so you don’t want to preclude any opportunities. You’re trying to maintain relationships while also getting stuff done.

Craig: There’s a guy who is a partner at a prominent production company that will not be named. There was something that I had pitched them many years ago. Oh, no, sorry, I hadn’t pitched them. It was a script I’d written that I didn’t even know they got. This guy loved it, but wasn’t the right for us, but loved it. Years later, there was something I was doing that he wanted. He was like, “Remember, I loved that script.” I was like, “The one that you didn’t give me any money for?” That’s the thing. It’s like everyone’s always hedging their bets.

Nobody wants to be mean to anybody. That person could be your boss tomorrow. That’s how Hollywood works. Everyone’s careful, which can be frustrating at times because sometimes you just want the truth.

John: It’s not the extreme cliche of a Japanese culture, which they will never tell you no. It’s not that at all. You do have to learn what the things really mean. There’s an idiomatic quality to it. If you are coming into this from a foreign language or you’re neurodivergent, you may have a bit of a learning curve figuring out what’s actually really happening here. You may need to ask some people like, “Wait, what does that really mean?” Because you could make wrong assumptions.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. That’s a great point about neurodivergence because Hollywood has a lot of not neurodivergent people. Particularly in the area of producers and executives, those people often have outstanding social skills. They are really sharp and instinctive. They are slippery.

John: Yes. They’re also sometimes really good at managing up. You see, how does that person have their job? Because they seem actually terrible at everything I see them do. They’re really good at managing their bosses and understanding what their bosses want to hear and they can deliver that.

Craig: There is, I’ve always said, one of the great unheralded skills in Hollywood is the skill of not being fired. There are people that I think, literally, their only skill is they know how to not get fired. They’re still there. It is a thing. If you aren’t somebody that’s particularly well-attuned to subtleties and all those things, then, yes, you can be very quickly confused by or outclassed by these people in these meetings.

I’m thinking of one screenwriter we both know in particular who’s incredible, amazing, a legend, and so on the spectrum. I have seen him in meetings. I’m cringing. I’m like, “Oh, my God.” I just want to go over there and help because he does not have meeting skills at all.

John: That’s the case where you’re going to need to find reps and other trusted people who can actually help you interpret and really understand what’s going on, versus me at my point in my career, when I get on a phone call with my reps or even just emails with my reps, I can be very honest about, like, “That felt like a pass. That’s this.” I’m ahead of even where they’re at because I just know how things fit together. I know that this project feels great right now, and it’s going to get really bumpy in about a month when this thing happens. I know we’re not hearing back from this because of these other things, and that just comes with time and experience.

Craig: You will get better at it over time, no question.

John: All right, let’s talk about some numbers. I was listening to a podcast called Search Engine, which, Craig, you don’t listen to podcasts, but Search Engine is a really fun podcast that explores different topics. A fun thing they do for their premium subscribers is they do an annual meeting, kind of like how you have a shareholder’s annual meeting. They talk through this stuff. They have a Zoom, and they have a Q&A, but they make a presentation about how the year went, how things are going. Maybe in a future year, we’ll do that.

I thought on the episode today, we might talk through some of the numbers behind Scriptnotes, both the podcast and the book because I’m a big believer in transparency, letting people see how stuff actually works. Craig, we just passed 15 million downloads all time for Scriptnotes, which is absurd.

Craig: Wow, that’s crazy.

John: That’s crazy. 15 years?

Craig: It took us a long time, [chuckles] but still, that’s insane. 15 million downloads, wow.

John: 1.6 million downloads in 2025. We average 25,000 to 30,000 listeners per episode. Of those, between 2,000 and 3,000 are premium members who are paying money.

Craig: That’s information that I didn’t know. I don’t think that’s a lot compared to these big podcasts and everything. It’s just a lot in an absolute sense.

John: I remember many, many years ago, we were trying to understand our numbers. It was like, we’re Bon Jovi of podcasts. We’re filling a stadium. That’s kind of true, but it’s also–

Craig: It’s a small arena.

John: It’s a small arena.

Craig: Yes, it’s an arena, but you know what? Madison Square Garden, right? I think you got 30,000 people, you can fill MSG. It’s pretty good. It’s important to remember that there are a lot of people listening to it. That’s good. It reminds me to say fewer stupid things.

John: Our most-listened episode of the year was 673, Structure and How to Enjoy a Movie, which was just a crap episode, which is great.

Craig: I like that stuff.

John: Our all-time highest episode is the one with Christopher Nolan.

Craig: Of course.

John: Which was only about double the typical numbers of– It wasn’t like a giant spike outside of everything else. We have 4,500 premium subscribers. Those are the people who are paying us.

Craig: That’s great. Thank you to all of those people. That’s awesome.

John: Which is great. January is always our biggest month for premium subscribers, so thank you again for people who do it.

Craig: Oh, because it’s a Christmas gift?

John: It’s a Christmas gift to themselves or other people who bought it for them, which is awesome. Craig, you’ll remember that I think, last year, we were harping on people like, “Don’t do monthly. Do annually because it saves you so much money.” We bumped up the monthly to nudge people to do the annuals, and they did, which is great.

Craig: Great.

John: Everyone knows we zero out the budget every year. We’re not a nonprofit technically, but we’re just a corporation that deliberately does not want to make any money. We’re an LLC.

Craig: We’re a for-profit company that hates profit.

John: That’s what it is. At some point, we could probably do a B-corporation where we’re not–

Craig: We could convert to a 501(c)(3) kind of thing, right?

John: Yes. We talked about that with the lawyer people, and it’s like the amount of paperwork involved to do that is just–

Craig: We don’t receive a lot of tax-deductible stuff. It’s more that we just give it away when we hit the end of the year.

John: Before we started recording, we talked about how we’re giving away money that’s left over at the end of the year. We’re going to be supporting Pay Up Hollywood and their annual survey, and also Entertainment Community Fund, which we’ve often supported over the years. They help out with basically everyone in the entertainment industry, not just Hollywood, but also Broadway and other artists, musicians who need help. This last year, of course, we had the fires, and they were involved in helping people recover from the fires.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Everyone throughout. I’ve actually toured their buildings here in Hollywood. They have low-income housing for artists, and it’s a great organization.

Craig: Yes, this makes me feel good. I do want people to know because when we say 4,500 premium subscribers, they are paying us. Of course, just so people understand, we use that money to pay for our staff and to make the show. When there is money left over, and there is, we donate it to good causes.

John: Yes, which is nice. We also had a book this year. Our book, we hit the USA Today best-sellers chart, which is certainly not a given.

Craig: Okay, but I do love how we hit it, though. It’s perfect. It is not the top 10.

John: No. USA Today lists the top 150 titles each week.

Craig: 150. We came in at?

John: 149.

Craig: Boom.

John: 149, baby.

Craig: Suck it, 150.

John: The USA Today list is basically all books. Kids books, and because it was December, a ton of Christmas books are on that thing. We came in above the most recent Harry Potter Christmas book. Excited about that. We came in below the D&D Player’s Handbook, which felt so wonderful and so appropriate and correct.

Craig: Never want to overdo that.

John: One of the other big titles of the week that we came out was Olivia Nuzzi, the journalist, had a book about American Canto, which was the RFK Jr. stuff. We beat her.

Craig: Oh, really?

John: Yes. She sold 1,200 copies, and we sold 3,129 copies our opening week. We crushed that book. It was a good reminder that just because something is in the news, it doesn’t mean it’s actually selling any books.

Craig: Listen, this book business is tough. I always felt this about the book that we’ve done here is the kind of thing that just will hopefully be an evergreen and it just, over time, people– Not because we want to make money, because we don’t. It’s because I think it’s helpful. I think the book will help people. I do.

John: I think it will. Of the 3,129, the vast majority are the hardcovers, 2,400 of those, 300 e-books, 350 audio books. These are just the North American numbers. It’ll be a long time before we hear the UK numbers and the other places that we’ve sold. It’s a great start. You were on the email chain with the publishers. They’re happy with the start of this. It’s not like the runaway greatest hit bestseller of all time.

Craig: It was not going to be. [chuckles]

John: It’s a super strong launch for this book. We’re on a track to earn back our advance at some point. Around 13,000 copies sold. We’ll have earned back the money that they already paid us. Drew, we have some books that they’ve sent us that are currently under your desk. I want to make a pitch for what to do with those books because, obviously, we want people to buy books for themselves, which is great. There’s also probably a lot of school libraries, community libraries that also need books who don’t have the money to buy these books.

If you are a person who runs a local library, a school library, probably junior high school, or I don’t think a grade school library is going to be appropriate for our book, write to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com. Let us know what your library is. Provide some proof that you actually are this person who is responsible for obtaining books to these libraries. We’ll see if we can send you one of these books that we have here in the office because–

Craig: I honestly feel like if somebody takes the time to pretend to be a library, I think they’ve earned a book.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s kind of cool, yes.

John: We can send them to US libraries. Because of tariffs and customs and everything else, it’s going to be crazy if we try to send this overseas. For stuff here in the United States, we can send them to libraries because this is a book that I would have gotten out of my school library if I had been there.

Craig: Sure, of course. Cool.

John: Craig, any feelings about the numbers, any surprises, anything that you’re still sorting through?

Craig: I don’t know anything about the book business, so I don’t know what any of this means. I do think eventually we’ll earn our advance back. [chuckles]

John: Yes, we will.

Craig: Which is just, you know, otherwise I’ll feel bad.

John: Which is really rare, honestly, for a book to earn its advance back.

Craig: Then why did they make– Then, I don’t understand.

John: Here’s the math behind things, and I think this is the general stuff. I’m pretty sure our contract is similar. There’s the list price of the book, so that it’s $32 for the Scriptnotes’s book. Of that list price, we get $3.20. We get 10% of the first 5,000 copies. The next 5,000 copies we get at 12%. After that, we get at 15%. It’s that $3.20 that we’re earning on that story now that has been paid off our advance.

Craig: That’s the recoupable part. They’re going to make money is the point.

John: The publisher is still making money.

Craig: They’re making money.

John: They’re making money.

Craig: Got it.

John: The bookstores are making money, too.

Craig: Yes, good. Then I’m happy. I just want everybody to be happy.

John: An interesting thing about our book, it was something like 50% of our sales were Amazon, but a lot of them were not Amazon, which I think is also great too. Just the people buying through other places, including local bookstores. We’re excited about that.

Craig: Great.

John: If you still want a signed copy, there’s a place you can order called Premier. Drew, help me out here.

Drew: Yes, Premier Collectibles. I can put the link in the show notes.

John: Premier Collectibles has ones that Craig and I signed. If you’re in Los Angeles, you can also just go to Larchmont. Chevalier’s Books has a few left that we’ve signed on the day of our live show. They’re there if you want signed copies from me and Craig. Let’s answer some questions. Let’s start with this first one about video podcasts.

Drew: Keeping an Ear Out writes, “My question’s about the explosion of video podcasts. I heard that this terminology took off because studios wanted to make videos without signing contracts with IATSE. Is that true? More largely, what’s going on with the guilds in podcasting? Do any guilds cover digital content, and for what kind of labor?”

John: A couple of things. First off, there’s now a term called “audio podcast,” which we always thought of like podcast, of course, it’s audio, and then a video podcast is a separate thing, but now you actually have to distinguish it. Currently, Scriptnotes is an audio podcast. We may do some video stuff down the road. You look at some of these podcasts with video podcasts, and they’re not that different than a lot of talk shows would be or a lot of other broadcast shows. Now, Netflix is buying some of The Ringer’s shows and moving them over to Netflix.

Video podcasts are in this interesting space where it’s like just TV, and so why shouldn’t it have the same kind of rules as TV? I can tell you that some of this stuff is already being covered by the guilds. The Pod Save America podcasts are covered by the Writers Guild East. Whenever there’s a new market, you’ve got to figure out how are we going to handle it or treat it because you don’t want to come in with a heavy hammer and smash everything down before there’s even a viable economic model.

You also don’t want it to mutate into this thing that replaces what you’re actually really doing, or that existing programs get reclassified as being video podcasts. Rather than talk shows or things where we already have Appendix A protections for. We’re going to see what comes in this space.

Craig: Yes, I’m not sure what’s going on with IATSE here. I don’t quite understand how they go about organizing and doing things. The WGA, for instance, in this case, they have an organizing department. The point of the organizing department is to go to podcasts that are prominent. I think somebody said once, the Writers Guild looks to represent anyone who writes things that move on a screen. This moves on a screen. Let’s organize these shows. We can create contracts. The Writers Guild is not about coming in and saying, “Yes, you have a podcast, and you employ a writer. You have to sign the same terms that we sign with Apple and Paramount.”

John: Jimmy Fallon Show.

Craig: Yes. We have the ability to create separate agreements. We do. We also have an agreement with news writers. We have an agreement with daytime writers and all that. I think, yes, this is something that the Writers Guild could certainly do. IATSE can absolutely shut stuff down if they want. I don’t know if you can get around IATSE. At some point, they’ll come for you. When they come, they do have a hammer, a big hammer. Nobody wants to mess with that.

John: Really, you look at a show like Last Week Tonight, John Oliver’s show, which is terrific and great. It has a big writing staff and big production staff. They are able to create an amazing show every week. You compare it to some of the video podcasts, which are also creating a show every week. They may not be quite to the same scale, but they do similar things. This question of, shouldn’t they be treated the same, is correct. Also, the business model behind it is different. That’s why you need to make a separate way of thinking about the deal.

Craig: Yes. We look at the delivery system compared to the work itself. Is this being delivered through television? Is it being delivered through theatrical? Is it being delivered through the internet? Is it being delivered through– Everything can get its own thing. The Guild is not ignorant of the differences. I think, in a case like this, this is a good area for the– I don’t know what the Guild’s organizing department has been doing lately, but this would be an interesting spot to go.

John: This is the thing that the Guild’s organizing department is going to be focusing on. The East already started. We also talked about verticals a few minutes ago. That’s another thing, which is the Guild’s are now looking at how we’re treating those. WGA is, SAG is, thinking about how are we handling this thing? Because, clearly, we can’t just apply normal TV terms to it because there’s not enough money there for that to actually make sense, but you want to have some protections. You want to have ways that this area can grow, but also that people can make a living at it. Let’s answer one more question from Nicole.

Drew: “I have a couple projects that my reps are reluctant to send out anywhere because I created each of them with another person. Their argument is that they’re trying to sell me as an individual, and if I want to partner with someone, then they need to be able to sell us as a true writing partnership with our own joint samples and shared career track, and I need to commit to that forever. This isn’t really something I’m interested in, and my partners on these projects aren’t either. I’m not doing this willy-nilly.

In one instance, my TV concept is about a person with a disability, so it felt important that I develop it with a friend with a disability who’s also a TV writer with credits. Are my reps right, and it’s not worth trying to sell projects as a one-off partnership? Am I never allowed to work with my friends? Is there something I can do to make these one-off partnerships more appealing to my reps or to execs, and what’s the best way to proceed here?”

Craig: I think your reps are right.

John: I think your reps are right.

Craig: Look, these things aren’t dead. If you don’t want to have your career work as a team, and you want a solo career or the ability to join up with anyone at any time, you need to create your own career first. If you sell something as yourself, it goes well, you can always go back to the people that have paid you and said, “By the way, I’ve written a script with this other person. Take a look at it,” and they will. Okay, but first, you got to get going as yourself, and I’m guessing, based on this question, that you’re not necessarily at that place yet.

John: Yes. Nicole already has reps, which is great. I’m reading this letter saying that they signed you as an individual, and now they’re trying– You have this thing you wrote with somebody else. Like, “I don’t know what to do with this because we’ve been trying to sell you as an individual, and now we take this thing out, it just becomes weird and difficult.” I get it. Remember, reps want to be able to sell you to people and then give a consistent story about, “This is what she writes, this is the kind of thing she’s referring for. This is the kind of show they’re trying to staff her on.”

It’s confusing if they’re now trying to sell a thing which is written with somebody else.

Craig: Because then you are going to want to sell something by yourself, and people will ask, “We don’t know if Nicole’s good by herself.” It could have been the other one.

John: It’s the same with writing samples. If they read this thing that you guys wrote together, they’re like, “But did she really write it?”

Craig: Exactly.

John: Craig and I both know writing teams who’ve split apart, and they need to start writing something separately that is just their work, so people can read it as just their work.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: All right, let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing is a Substack written by the artist Charli XCX.

Craig: [sings] I don’t care. I love it.

John: Exactly. Craig, I’m impressed you know Charli XCX.

Craig: Of course. How dare you?

John: I am so sorry.

Craig: I barely. What I just did is pretty much the sum total of my Charli XCX.

John: Charli XCX of Brat. She did the music for the upcoming Wuthering Heights.

Craig: Brat Summer.

John: Brat Summer. Smart artist. She has a Substack, which is just her writing about the things that are on her mind. I just feel like more famous people should do it because it’s a chance to have it unfiltered, like, “This is exactly what I think, I don’t have to go through a journalist to put it out there.” Yes, it could be a blog. A Substack is just a common format for this kind of newsletter. I dig her for doing it. I think it’s a smart approach for this because it’s just an unfiltered, “This is what I think about, that one we’ll link to, is the death of cool.”

It’s like her opinion on how much she values cool in a way that is felt a little, I don’t know, she’s ambivalent about it, but also willing to acknowledge that, like, “Yes, I really care about being cool.” I really like that she’s actually just taking the form and just writing in it.

Craig: It’s blogging, right? This is sort of–

John: Yes, you and I both started as bloggers.

Craig: It’s like a very early 2000s thing that people are doing now. This is a new thing. [laughs]

John: This is a new thing?

Craig: No, it is not. It is an old thing, but this is very bloggy. I’m looking at it. It’s like, the blog is back, basically.

John: The blog is back.

Craig: Which is good. It means–

John: It’s not a visual medium. It’s not–

Craig: It’s words.

John: It’s just words.

Craig: Thank God.

John: Give her credit. She gets to string together words that communicate what she wants to say, which is nice. I don’t know. It gets more of us reading things versus just scrolling Instagram. I’ll take it.

Craig: Yes. Complete thoughts with nuanced arguments.

John: Yes.

Craig: Twitter just killed blogs. It just killed it. Now it’s back because Twitter died.

John: I’m glad for that.

Craig: Yes, yes. Dead bird.

John: Dead bird.

Craig: All right, well, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.

John: What are you looking for, Craig?

Craig: Oh, baby.

John: I see the trailer here, and I’m excited. I didn’t know about it, so [crosstalk]

Craig: At the Game Awards, which were held just a few days ago, the Game Awards are an interesting award ceremony because it’s like, I would say, 50% awards, 50% trailers and announcements. It’s like if the Oscars weren’t run by the Academy but rather just by all the studios. [laughter] The thing is, that’s why it’s an awesome award show, because really, it’s like the Super Bowl, where it’s like, “Okay, the game’s great, but show me the ads.” There was a trailer for the new game coming from Larian Studios. Larian Studios, which made our beloved Baldur’s Gate 3.

They had a prior franchise to Baldur’s Gate 3 called Divinity, and in fact, Baldur’s Gate 3 is built on the Divinity platform. They’ve announced essentially what looks to be a reboot-ish start, but not like going back to the start of a new story, but like with a different level of polish and accomplishment because of technology. The trailer is insane. Now it is not a game play trailer. It is very clearly like a very highly rendered cinematic sequence.

John: [crosstalk]

Craig: I’m going to tell you.

John: It’s giving Wicker Man, it’s giving–

Craig: It goes so crazy. [chuckles] I loved it. I loved it, and it was disturbing and beautiful and ugly and gross and amazing. I cannot wait to play Divinity, and I suspect I’m going to have to wait for some time. This was the first time that they announced that this is what they were doing. They’re saying it’s going to be bigger than Baldur’s Gate 3 in terms of the amount of content, which is mind-boggling to me.

John: Absurd. Will we ever get Grand Theft Auto, or will they keep kicking the can?

Craig: Oh, of course.

John: They’ll keep kicking the can.

Craig: No. I think they’re married to September 26th. They’re saying November 19th, 2026. I think they have to hit that. They have to. They can’t miss Christmas. They’re going to–

John: It’s true, it’s Christmas.

Craig: They have to.

John: This is very helpful.

Craig: In my mind, they are saying November 19th because they probably feel like they could absolutely be done by July. I mean, like, at this point. Either way, by the way, they could release it on the worst release date of the year, and it doesn’t matter.

John: Oh, yes. It doesn’t matter.

Craig: It will make $14 trillion.

John: It will break the internet.

Craig: It is going to break everything, including me. We should be well-wrapped in terms of shooting by then.

John: You’re going to just submarine into some GTA?

Craig: No. I have to do quite a bit of post-production, but still, honestly, yes.

John: AI can do it by then.

Craig: Oh God, how dare you? I can hear my editors screaming at you right now.

John: Oh my gosh. That’s the worst. That does look like an incredible trailer, so I’m excited to–

Craig: To tuck in and enjoy it fully.

John: Such smart people. We wanted to have the Larian folks on the show at some point to talk through the-

Craig: I would love to.

John: -storytelling of that. We’ll see if we can find time to get them on.

Craig: I would love that.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find the clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.

You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. People have been sending through their book purchases on Instagram, so Drew reposts those when we see them on the stories. It’s great to see the book showing up in all different places. Craig, I don’t know if I’ve talked about how the book in the UK is a little bit narrower and embossed and shiny.

Craig: Yes.

John: It looks nice.

Craig: People in England deserve something nice.

John: They do. They need to have their own special kind of thing.

Craig: As well as Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. I think I covered them all.

John: All the Commonwealth countries basically get the UK version. Oh, so Canada gets our version. We have t-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find there’s a Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our 4,000 or so premium subscribers. You are superstars. Make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Get signed up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Difficult Collaborators. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we have a question from a writer abroad.

Drew: “How do you tell when a difficult collaboration is simply part of learning this industry and when it’s crossed over into something harmful to your creative spirit? How do you move forward without letting an experience like this make you smaller?”

Craig: Oh, dear.

John: Oh, dear. We’ve talked about this on many episodes, particularly about the mentor relationship or people who are like just bad behavior, or producers who are not even predatory, but just they’re crossing lines consistently. We’ll say this is a little different than the mentorship because this is a collaboration. This is somebody you’re supposed to be working with on a regular basis. I’ve had difficult collaborations where filmmakers, directors, who just like, “We just work at very different speeds.” Some of them have ended up being fruitful, and we got through it.

Some of them ended up badly. It’s a tough thing. I know, Craig, you started off with a writing partner. You and I both now write alone. I feel like I’m not a great creative roommate as a writer. The times I’ve tried to write with other people, I’m just a little controlling and demanding. Sometimes I’m the difficult collaborator, but in general, like, what are some things you’ve learned over the last 30 years doing this about collaboration and that instinct of like, “Oh, this is not working well?”

Craig: Collaboration with a director or a collaboration with a producer or a collaborator is different than collaboration with a writer. That is a very specific thing. I don’t know what the nature of this collaboration is that the writer’s asking about, but we can talk about, yes, I have had moments where I’ve written with other people that I enjoyed. I enjoyed writing with Todd Phillips. That was fun. Mostly, I just want to write by myself alone, to the extent that even though we do have a writer’s room for The Last of Us, I write the scripts. That’s just how I like to do it.

I know that, and I think if you know that about yourself, then it’s incumbent upon you to then avoid situations where you find yourself not being able to do that. When you are in a situation that you can’t avoid, the difficult collaboration comes in two flavors. One flavor is like what you were describing. I move at a different speed. Creatively, I think differently. We don’t agree on tone or all those things. That’s solvable by just one person saying, “I’m going to do it this way, the end.” Or you muddle through with this mush, and it just doesn’t work.

That’s a per-project thing. There’s really nothing you can do about that. That’s just, I’m tall, you’re short, that’s that. The ones that have really messed me up a little bit, and I feel like this is maybe what our questioner is wondering about, are the ones where it’s more of a personal problem. Where there is something that’s upsetting you as you work with somebody. You have a meeting, you work on something, you go home, and you don’t feel good. That’s a tougher one. The writer says, “Harmful to your creative spirit, how do you move forward without letting an experience like this make you smaller?”

There are times in this business where it will be harmful to your creative spirit. It will make you feel smaller. You will struggle with that. Maybe the value of those moments is just, “Okay, I just had the measles. I’m not going to get measles again. Not for a long, long time.” There is a difficult immunization that occurs through infection. It’s hard to recognize certain flavors of trouble until you’ve experienced the trouble.

John: Let’s talk about power. Because a lot of times, what’s really coming down here is who has the relative power in the relationship. In cases where you are a staff writer hired on in a writing room, and there’s a showrunner, and that showrunner has power. That showrunner is also making all the decisions. You can say, “It’s a difficult collaboration.” Yes, it is a form of collaboration, but you are really working for the showrunner. It’s understandable why you might feel frustrated. You might feel like this is difficult. You might not be having a good time in that space.

In terms of the creative process, ultimately, that showrunner is going to be making those decisions, and you have to give yourself some grace of, like, “I don’t have power or control in a lot of these things. That’s just what it is.” I was scrolling through Reddit screenwriting earlier this week, and this writer was complaining that there was a staff writer on a show, and they turned in their script. They didn’t give a lot of notes and feedback on it. The next time they saw the script, it had been really vastly rewritten, and they felt like, “Oh my God, this is so awful.” That’s the nature of the process that you’re in right now.

Craig: That’s normal.

John: That’s normal. Sometimes understanding what normal is, is part of that. Power could also be where you’re much more powerful than the other person you’re collaborating with, which has been some of my situation where I have tried to write with other people, where it’s just like, it wasn’t difficult from my side, but I’m sure it stuck with the other person because it’s like, I would just do whatever I was going to do. Where I suspect this person may be coming from, it’s like, they’re at a similar level here. It’s not clear who’s actually driving the car.

That’s one of the real frustrations, where it’s just like, you both are trying to pilot this thing, and you’re just disagreeing on how to do it, where you’re going. It’s sort of the couple’s therapy of it all, is figuring out how do we get this to work?

Craig: If the primary issue is this person has strong opinions about creatively why something should be this way, and you have opinions about why it should be the other way, in those circumstances, I try to default to the other person’s side, in the sense of like, “Okay, you feel strongly about this. Let’s dig into why, because you may convince me.” I want to be convinced. The whole point of a creative partnership is we are more than the sum of our parts. If I can understand where you’re going with this, maybe we’ll agree, and then we work in sync, or I learned something from you.

That’s potentially valuable. If they have the same attitude toward you, this could be quite fruitful. If they don’t, now you’re crossing into the other issue, which is the issue of personality. It can be incredibly difficult when the personality is such that it’s hard to describe in any other way than when you finish a session, you feel angry. You feel quietly resentful. You feel unheard. You feel insecure. You feel whatever it is that you feel. It may not be the other person’s fault. It may just be the symptom of a mismatch that you’re not meant to be collaborating with this person.
Sometimes, this is something that I still try and work on, is the toxic positivity thing of, like, sometimes in an effort to make something work. In the past, I have been in situations in the past, not recent past, but where I was to go along to get along, and the work suffered.

John: A mutual friend of ours had a very difficult collaboration on a project they were working on. I was hearing the backstory of what was going on behind the scenes, and I was full of sympathy. It’s like you’re both parents of this child, and you want the child to succeed. Sometimes, in those difficult marriages, you do have to suppress some of your instincts to just run away because you both want this child to succeed. It’s finding ways to acknowledge the actual frustration of this moment that you’re in and this contentious relationship.

Also, for the good of the kid, not letting it erupt and damage everything else until you can get through it. Then you can go your separate ways and be honest about what you loved about the experience and what was actually not great about the experience.

Craig: There have been times where it does feel like, okay, after every session, there’s some sort of personal discussion that needs to happen. That is sometimes unavoidable because of the nature of who we are. We are creative people. We’re weird. Our minds are doing this weird thing. It’s unlikely that your weirdness and another person’s weirdness will mesh so beautifully that, A, the work is better when you’re together, and B, you aren’t having personal issues of any kind with the person. Now, writing partnerships that work like that lasts. Thinking of like Harry Elfont and Deb Kaplan, or these people.

John: Dan and Dave.

Craig: Dan and Dave.

John: Benioff and Weiss. They will argue to death about a lot of things, but they’re still all writing together.

Craig: Right. It’s not possible that one of them walks away every single time, going, “I feel bad. I feel resentful. I feel angry. I feel unheard,” whatever it is. Their arguing is good arguing. It’s productive arguing. It’s not personal. Or even if it is personal, it’s personal in a way that’s like brothers, but we are secure enough in our love for each other that tomorrow we’ll be fine. I remember Johann Renck, and I had this thing of, like, because we loved each other, and we would fight all the time. It was such great fights. Very early on, we were like, “Let’s agree to agree.

If we fight, let’s fight. When we get to the end of the fight, we agree.” If you’re like, “Okay, you know what, I’m going with your way,” you don’t go with my way, and then walk away like, “I’m not doing that, actually,” or, “I’m angry.” You’re like, “Oh, okay. You know what? We’re doing it your way.” It worked. I think it worked because we loved each other and because we also had faith that the other person was persuadable. It’s when you feel like you’re in a deal where somebody’s not working in good faith with you that you lose confidence that, really, maybe this can function in a way that is fair and reasonable.

John: A perfect example from my own life was my very first TV show that I created and executive-produced. It was called D.C. It was for the WB Network. It was a partnership, a collaboration between me and Dick Wolf of Law & Order. Anyone should have been able to say, “Oh, this is not going to work. This is going to be disastrously bad.” It was. It wasn’t a good collaboration because of the power imbalance. He was so powerful, and I was the creative person trying to do all this stuff, but also didn’t know what I was doing that it was awful.

I ended up getting fired off the show and having a nervous breakdown. It was bad on almost all the fronts. The reason I bring it up, though, is in time as I pull back out, it just feels like a war that he and I were both in. I have no animosity to him. It was a bad idea for us to be collaborating on this project.

Craig: Mismatch.

John: We never actually made peace. We never spoke after I was fired.

Craig: You don’t need to.

John: We’re both fine. We’re both doing just fine.

Craig: It’s not like your paths are going to cross again. You’re not making procedurals for Dick Wolf. That is a mismatch. That can happen. I’ve been in mismatches. I’ve been in mismatches, and you muddle through. The thing about running a show is you cannot be in a mismatch. You will die. If there is a mismatch, it will express itself. You just won’t be able to make a show. Scott Frank often says, “Good process, good result, bad process, bad result.” It’s not always the case, but I do think if you don’t have some sort of healthy partnership, it’s hard to make something at all.

It’s hard enough even if you have a good one. I didn’t know you back then, but if I did and you were like, “Hey, I’m going to be making a show. I’m going to be running a show for the first time, and it’s for Dick Wolf.” I would have said, “Amazing,” but in my mind, I would have said, “Oh, no.” [laughter]

John: “Oh, no. That feels fraught.” Over the years, I’ve remet writers who are working on Law & Order in those same offices, and they’re like, “I used to just hide in my office because you and Dick would be shouting down the hall at each other.” Can you imagine me shouting in a hallway, Craig? That’s where I was at during that time.

Craig: No, sir. I can imagine you finding a janitor’s closet and crying in there. [laughs] That’s what I would do.

John: There was some of that, too.

Craig: That’s what I would do. I don’t shout down the hallway either. Our friend Derek, who made all the Chicago Fire and all those, he has some great Dick Wolf stories. They’re not bad stories, by the way. I don’t want to imply that he is, but he’s a big personality.

John: He had some power in that situation.

Craig: Derek actually is a great– I could say that is a match. The stories are fun. Dick Wolf is a fun character in his stories, but he’s certainly larger than life. There’s no question about that. Larger than life.

John: Wrapping all this up, you’re going to have situations where you have difficult collaborators. When you have choices about your collaborators, like Craig does in terms of hiring department heads, you’re focusing on the people who it’s going to be a fit. It’s going to be a marriage, and you can make that work. Other times, you’re going to be assigned. It’s like a roommate that’s assigned to you, and you’ve got to make it work and get through the semester. Then learn what you’ve learned.

Craig: Yes. One of the interesting things about being, what you said, in power, when you have power, then you are in a million collaborations, and you do have the ability to end them or continue them, promote them. That is also a tricky thing to recognize there’s something wrong and end it. It’s hard. We’ll call that a good problem to have, I suppose. For our person who’s writing in, I would say you are experiencing something that John and I have both experienced multiple times. The hope is that each time it happens, you at least learn, “Okay, that is a flavor I do not like. I don’t like that flavor of ice cream. Let’s not get pistachio. Oh, let’s not get French vanilla. I don’t like that one either.”

John: You recognize the patterns. You recognize off at first, being like, “The vibe is wrong, and I should trust my instinct there.”

Craig: Trust your instincts. It’s so hard because everyone else has no interest in your instincts. You just got to trust your instincts and trust them in defiance of whatever looks right on paper is nonsense. It doesn’t matter. I’ve talked a lot about when we chose a composer for Chernobyl, and Jóhann Jóhannsson died. We had to replace this incredible composer because he died. We went with Hildur Guðnadóttir, who had scored Sicario 2, and that’s it, but had been working with him and was like his protégé.

There were a lot of composers who– and on paper, she was the least qualified and the weirdest possible choice, but our instinct was that we loved her. Sometimes you just got to go by instinct and let go of what looks good on paper.

John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Drew: Thanks.

Links:

• How Disney’s OpenAI Deal Changes Everything by Steven Zeitchik and Julian Sancton for The Hollywood Reporter
• Guilty! Director Who Scammed Netflix Out Of Millions Faces Decades Behind Bars by Dominic Patten for Deadline
• Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon
• Down to Puck: Why Women Are Going Wild for ‘Heated Rivalry’ by Seth Abramovitch for The Hollywood Reporter
• Search Engine annual meeting
• Order a signed copy of the Scriptnotes Book!
• Charli XCX’s Substack
• Trailer for Divinity by Larian Studios
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
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• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 717 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. While this is, in fact, Episode 717 of Scriptnotes, it’s also Episode 277 of The Screenwriting Life, a fantastic podcast hosted by Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna, where they also talk on a weekly basis about screenwriting. Craig and I went there to talk about the Scriptnotes book, which is out there in the world. They’d read it, they’d loved it, but we also had a good, deep conversation about lots of other things related to writing and the craft and the process.

It was a really good conversation, a great chance to talk with other pros about this business that we all love. If you don’t know them, Meg LeFauve is the co-writer of the Inside Out movies, as well as The Good Dinosaur and Captain Marvel. Lorien McKenna is a writer on shows like Curious George, and a former story manager for Pixar. If you enjoy this episode, give them a follow, The Screenwriting Life. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great show for anybody who listens to our show to also listen to. One of the things I really appreciate about their show is that they talk every week.

They open up with a segment where they talk about the writing they did that week, where their successes and failures were, and their challenges. That was just great. Take a listen to this episode, and if you like them, give them a follow as well. Most of the episode is that, and then we’ll be back at the end for some boilerplate, some follow-up. In our bonus, for our premium members, we’re going to talk about the career, the life of Rob Reiner. I knew him. I knew his wife, Michele. I knew way too much about the places where this tragedy happened, but I also want to celebrate the incredible things he was able to do and to share some personal reflections on Rob Reiner. Enjoy this episode, and we’ll see you here at the end as we wrap stuff up. Thanks.

[music]

Meg LeFauve: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I’m Meg LeFauve.

Lorien McKenna: I’m Lorien McKenna.

Meg: Today, we have a truly special show. We are talking to John August and Craig Mazin, the duo behind the Much Loved Scriptnotes podcast, which has been running for 14 years.

Lorien: John August is a screenwriter whose credits include Aladdin, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, and the first two Charlie’s Angels movies. In addition to his work in film, John wrote the Arlo Finch middle grade novel trilogy and earned a BAFTA nomination for his script of the Broadway musical Big Fish. Through his company, Quote-Unquote Apps, John makes utilities for writers, including Highland and Weekend Read, along with a writer emergency pack, which is used in 2,000 classrooms nationwide. He was also a member of the 2023 WGA negotiating committee.

Meg: Craig Mazin is a multiple Emmy award-winning co-creator, executive producer, writer, and director of such shows as the smash hit HBO series The Last of Us. Record-breaking and critically acclaimed, season one became the most watched debut of any series for HBO. Previously, Craig served as creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO limited series Chernobyl, for which he won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, a Peabody, and awards from the Writer’s Guild, the Producer’s Guild, the Television Critics Association, and the American Film Institute. Currently, Craig is executive producing the upcoming HBO Esports drama Damage alongside writer, director, and executive producer Celine Song.

Lorien: Together, John and Craig have released a brand new book, Scriptnotes, a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, which distills more than 700 episodes of podcast conversations, craft principles, and no bullshit wisdom. John August and Craig Mazin, welcome to the show.

John: Oh, we’re so excited to be here.

Craig Mazin: Thank you.

Meg: All right, so the first thing that you guys have agreed to do with us today is Adventures in Screenwriting, or How is Your Week? We’ll let Lorien kick it off. Go ahead, Lorien.

Lorien: My week this week was actually really good. It started out really shitty because I’ve been so busy. What is it, Meg? The busyness is the–

Meg: The highest form of laziness.

Lorien: Highest form of laziness. So busy, so stressed. I have a project due on Monday, and so all those self-doubt, fear, all those icky things came crashing in. I had the panic moment of I have to burn it all down. Instead of that, I talked to my therapist, and we made a big list of all the things I’m doing. I have to say no to a lot of things, which is good, and prioritize my time and energy so that I’m focusing on the right things. I did that, and I feel more in control and more powerful in the right ways. I have a good plan for the end of this year and into the first quarter of next year. It’s been a good week. It sounds horrible, but cathartically speaking–

Meg: It’s a good week.

Lorien: Craig, how was your week?

Craig: It wasn’t that different from yours. My guess is if our weeks are defined by the anxiety that we experience, and then the panic that we have, and then the burn it all down, and then the, “Wait, I’m a genius,” and then, “Wait, I’m an idiot.” That’s pretty much my week every week. I’m up here in Vancouver, and we’re prepping the third season of The Last of Us. I spend my week with forced busyness. I don’t want the busyness, but they force it on me. I try, and have them divide my day. Okay, mornings are meetings, scouts, all of that stuff, and then afternoons are writing. The problem, of course, is sometimes I just don’t want to. Also, sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

The script that I’m in right now is a tricky one because it’s middle-ish, which is always hard, but there were some nice breakthroughs. I’ve just been sitting with a lot of discomfort, as my wife says, but I also had a lovely moment this week. While I was peeing, it’s not about the peeing itself, but I was peeing, and I had an idea. [laughs] It’s so amazing how often this happens where I just need to remove myself from civilization, go into a bathroom, or a shower, and then suddenly, I have an idea. I had an interesting idea that scared me. I wanted something scary, and I went, “Oh, my God, that’s scary.”

Meg: Congratulations on the pee breakthrough.

Craig: Right?

Lorien: All right, John, how was your week?

John: My week was really good largely because I turned in something last Friday. It’s weird how 30 years into this career, you’d think I would get over the joy of turning in a thing, but it just feels so nice to have a script off your desk and for not to be consuming all the brain cycles. Especially that last week where you’re trying to make all the last little pieces fit, it was a rewrite, so it wasn’t the first time through, but there were a lot of notes I was trying to incorporate. I wanted this to really reflect both what I intended, but also what the filmmakers needed to do. I had made a plan for turning it on Friday, and I hit it.

Friday morning, it was just done. It was ready to go. Drew approved it, sent it through, and I had that relief of having a thing off my plate. This week was really fun because I could just do the other stuff that kept getting delayed, and deferred because I was so busy working on that script. The main thing I was writing this week is I have to prepare for a speech for next month. It was really a chance to think through like, what do I actually think about this? What am I trying to communicate? How am I writing for my own voice? That was a fun thing to be working on. Craig and I had finished the first round of promotion for the Scriptnotes book.

It was just a chance to revel in people reading the book and enjoying the book. It was just a dream week. It was also nice to get all this stuff done before the holidays and have a sense of it’s just not looming over me. I’m not expecting any notes until January. It was a very good week for me.

Meg: Perfect. It’s perfect. It’s the perfect timing. We can’t wait to talk about the book.

John: Tell us about your week.

Meg: I will tell you about my week because it actually has a question for you guys. My week has a question, so we’re just going to dive in.

Craig: I love a question week.

Meg: My week was I’m writing a script for a studio with my partner. I’m in there doing the draft, and I’m ready to send it back to my partner because I think we’re done, and I realized, well, wait, I should go check those notes they sent us. Meaning, we had done verbal notes, and then we had taken off on the verbal notes. They were great notes. We were so inspired. We’re cutting out characters. We’re cutting out subplots. It was so fun, and challenging. Then I read the notes, and I was like, “Oh, shit, there’s more stuff in here.” There’s a big thing in here that I did not– By the way, they might have said it on the phone, and I just didn’t catch it, or in writing the notes, it came out.

Who knows? Nothing bad to the studio. I should have read the notes before taking off because in the notes, it says that the main relationship, they’re just not really connecting to them as a couple.

John: That’s a big note, Meg. [laughs]

Craig: Yes.

Meg: It’s a big note. It’s a really big note. I think a lot of the other notes are actually symptoms of this because now that’s a problem, that’s a problem. Maybe they are problems because you’re not emotionally connecting to the characters. Because I came from the Pixar school of thought, I’m like, “I have to blow it all up.” I have to blow up the whole thing because at Pixar, if you get a note like that, we’re starting over. Just [onomatopoeia] like, “Breathe, outlied.” I got very overwhelmed, called my writing partner, overwhelmed him, which was not the smartest thing to do because poor guy driving in the car, and I’m like, “Oh my God.”

My question to you is, short of blowing it up, let’s say I’m not going to blow it up because that’s, in a way, easier to just go, “Fuck everything, let’s just start over.” Somehow, to me, that’s easier because I can start blue-skying again.

Lorien: It’s a burn-it-down philosophy.

Meg: Sometimes, a lot of times, you do have to start over, so I’m totally in for it and up for it. If you guys get a note like that they’re not connecting emotionally to a character, where do you guys go?

John: I go to the first from where we first meet them. I think that so often that is a symptom of they did not meet the character in a way that they were ready to engage with them and to click with them. Something was not setting their hooks of curiosity correctly as we were first meeting this character, and that’s why they’re not seeing themselves in their situation. I fully hear the burn it down start all over again, but that’s definitely not my go-to reaction. It’s something in those first few scenes where we get to know this character are not inviting them into the story.

Craig: I will sympathize with you. The overwhelmed feeling is the worst, and it doesn’t help, but it’s so natural. It just comes and you feel like you’re drowning. It feels like, “The work that I would need to do to make this good is impossible to do in the time I have. What do I do? Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” but of course, if you could come back from the future and hand you the script that is finished, that does fix everything, it would only take you a day or two to write it after you read it, right?

Meg: [laughs] I love that.

Craig: If you know what to do, you have the time. In a situation like this, the first question I have is, this is about a central relationship. Which of those characters is the “protagonist”? One of them is, I assume, the protagonist. Why does that person need to meet the other person? It just goes to the question, what is this movie about? What’s the point of all this? If I know what the movie’s about, and I know what the point is, and I know what the problem is with this main guy, and I know what this main character needs to be at the end, which presumably is different, why is this other person the perfectly best person to send in? Why does God send this person? [laughs]

It’s a reflection, in a way. It’s what they needed to get. If you think about it like that, then suddenly, you don’t have to wonder, how do I make people care about this? You’re just going to care because you understand inherently this person’s poking right at the thing that our hero didn’t want poked.

Meg: That’s really interesting because I think what’s happening is, normally, in the past, I’ve written transformative characters that have to meet the person that’s going to poke them, help them change, help them change their view of life and themselves. These are characters who are more claiming their power. Meaning, think about Titanic, they’re not wrong, but they need each other in order to move right to the next place. Their transformation is more a claiming of who they are, and Moana’s a claiming character to me. She’s singing her song. She’s right. Her song is right. She needs to go. She’s just full of doubt, and her how is wrong.

Craig: Who does she need to meet?

Meg: Okay, you’re right. Darn it.

[laughter]

Craig: This is my point. Kate Winslet knows that she should be an independent woman who doesn’t have to marry this guy, except she’s on a boat, and she’s going to marry that guy. Who does she need to meet? What’s so delicious is that when she does meet Leonardo DiCaprio, she’s just giving him the arguments that her mother gave her. “I don’t like you. You don’t live right. I shouldn’t be with you. You’re gross. Fuck off.” We know that she’s just, okay, you’re literally afraid to do the thing. You’re so afraid you’d rather die than actually stand on your own two feet, and here comes this rakish fellow. Perfect, all handsome.

John: I love the story, class, and discussion that we’re having here, but I want to get back to, Meg, your initial comment, which is basically that you went back to these notes, you realized like, “Oh, they had this thing here which we didn’t address in this,” but at the same time, you had a call with them where they’re highlighting their main note wasn’t about this relationship. Going back through those notes, that moment of doubt was–

Meg: Yes, literally in the middle of a paragraph.

John: In the middle of a paragraph. Here’s what I’m saying is that I am skeptical that you, Meg, with all your experience, have actually done something so disastrously bad in this relationship. While it may be useful for you to think about “How to do this thing better?” I doubt that you’ve done a bad job. I doubt that it’s actually a crisis. Because if there was a crisis, these people, their notes would have been about that. That would have been the giant red flashing lights there, and it was not. I want to both honor and acknowledge that, yes, it’s so great to be thinking about how are we maximizing this relationship, and do we have the right people, but also you can rip apart things that are working beautifully with the false goal of improving something.

Meg: All right, so you guys have to come on the show every week and talk to me about my writing. [laughter] Number two, my poor writing partner basically said the same thing, and I yelled at him.

John: I see.

Meg: I was really overwhelmed. I was like, “You’re not listening,” that kind of thing.

Craig: I get that because you have to balance what John is saying, which is a general healthy self-regard with the other concern, which is that you’re just going, “La, la, la, I don’t want to hear this note,” but you wouldn’t be overwhelmed and have this feeling if you didn’t think maybe they were onto something. If I know that these characters are compelling in the way that I’ve created them for me, and someone’s like, “I’m just not compelled by them,” then I don’t know what else to do because I know I did this right. If someone says these aren’t compelling, and it’s really, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” it’s because I think deep down probably–

Meg: I think you’re right.

Craig: Yes. Now overwhelm. You’re our Kate Winslet today, Meg LeFauve.

Meg: Oh, my God.

Craig: You’re overwhelmed.

Meg: So beautiful, yes.

Craig: When you’re yelling at your writing partner, that’s you flinging yourself into the ocean. [laughter] You’re just going to turn back to your writing partner and say, “Take my hand and carry me off, and let’s do whatever the writing equivalent is of having sex in a car and storage in the Titanic.”

Meg: You can get on the door, writing partner. You can get on the door.

Craig: Yes, and you know what? We both fit on the door.

Meg: We both fit on the door. There’s plenty around.

Craig: Clearly.

[music]

Lorien: We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the show. We’ve been doing this podcast for a while, clearly not as long as you two have been doing Scriptnotes, but I have this experience, I think Meg does too. We learn something every time we talk to somebody, whether it’s an epiphany about our writing or a process or just, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” or, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” When you sat down to write this book, what did it force you to face, to articulate that you’d never got the chance to do in the podcast? Specifically around, what did you learn putting this book together? What surprised you?

John: It was my idea, my team’s idea to do it because our listeners had often said, “Oh, we would love to have a book.” The theory was like, “Oh, you could just take the transcripts and print the transcripts,” and it would have been larger than an entire library. There’s just too much there, and so we had to distill it down. Then it became an issue, what are the topics, and then how do we go through the transcripts and pull everything we’ve talked about, character introductions over the course of 700 episodes to see what kind of stuff was there? I think one happy surprise is that we’ve been very consistent. From episode 20 to episode 900 or 720,-

Craig: Oh, God.

John: -we are very much the same. Our messages are the same, but distilling it down was so, so, so much harder than I thought it was going to be. I was naive. We had Drew Marquardt, our producer, Prasant, who’s one of our editors, Megana Rao, lots of folks who worked with us all throughout this process, trying to pull and distill and to get it down to one consistent voice was just really hard to do. I’m really happy how we were able to get there, but it was just a long slog to do it. Like any writing project, you sort of think like, “Oh, I know exactly what this is going to be like.” You can envision the final product, but getting there is just a much more of a journey and adventure than I was anticipating.

Craig: I learned nothing because I didn’t do it. [laughter] Here’s what I did. I showed up and talked for 700 and some odd hours, and then John and the Scriptnotes team did all the work to turn it into a book. I’ve said this many times, I spend most of my life being in charge. I’m in charge of my show, and I like it. I like being in charge. It’s hard. There are a lot of challenges. It’s exhausting, but it’s what I do. Then Scriptnotes, I am not. I love it. [laughs] It’s so awesome to not be in charge. I don’t know if you guys are– Is one of you in charge, or do you both share?

Meg: No, share.

Craig: You share. I love that. Really, the podcast was John’s idea in the first place. I’ve always been a guest on my own show. [laughter] John comes up with what we talk about, John figures out everything. My job is to show up and be as spontaneously entertaining and as informative as I can possibly be. It’s like John gets to summon me like a wizard summons a familiar. I just pop into the world completely like, “What? Huh? What are we talking about? Great. Ti, di, di, boop, boop,” and then an hour later, I go, poof.

[laughter]

Meg: That’s amazing. I love that. It’s funny, Lorien, and I had this conversation after reading your book. We were like, “Pretty much we can just tell people, ‘Go read this book.'” [laughter] You cover everything, and it’s all so good and all so insightful. We are just going to talk about a couple of the things in the book just to let everybody know, just get a taste of it, and all the great stuff inside. Obviously, we’re not even going to get in depth in even one topic because the book is so in-depth and great. You guys talk about, and I believe this was mainly Craig’s chapter, but in terms of structure, and that there are these people who are analysis people, and they create these things where this is what structure is.

You have to hit this, this, and this, and then how that is bullshit because it’s about creation, and it’s more of a spine or a skeleton inherent within the character. It’s interesting because at first, listening to it, I was hoping it would be your voices, and it’s not, but the guy’s very great.

John: His name is Graham. He’s fantastic.

Meg: Graham is fantastic. He’s now part of your ethos to me. You were talking about, Craig, how at first you were like structure’s bullshit, basically. I love structure, so I was like, “[gaps] We’re going to have a fight on the podcast because I love structure.” Structure is everything to me, but then I realized we have a different way of saying the same thing. I say it as structure is the character’s movement,-

Craig: Exactly.

Meg: -and you’re watching a human being come to consciousness about something.

Craig: Exactly.

Meg: You’re saying, and I loved your word because it helps me think of my own script in a different way, it’s, I want to make sure I get the right words right, that to you it’s a central dramatic argument, a thesis that you’re putting forward, and you use examples like men and women can’t be just friends, better be dead than a slave, if you love someone, set them free. That’s so great to take to my work and be like I think about words, I think about redemption, I think about forgiveness, but that isn’t fully a thesis yet. What do you have to say about forgiveness? My question to you, and I love this chapter, you break down Nemo. I’ve used Nemo too, which was fun.

I was a little jealous. I was like, “Wait a minute.” [laughter] I thought, okay, mind melt. How do you, and I’m asking both of you now, how do you get to that argument? When you’re writing drafts, how do you find and distill it down? Do you always not start before you have it? Do you find it as you go? How do you, even if you have a word, let’s say forgiveness, or how do you distill it into that argument or that theme that will become the structure and the character movement?

Craig: I do caution people, I think, even inside that bit to not necessarily feel like they have to start by writing down a bunch of fortune cookie things, and then what story should go on. We often start with an idea. Really, the thing that gets you excited is the thing you should start with. You have an idea for a plot. You have an idea for a cool character in a place or time. The next question I usually ask, then, is like, okay, if I have an idea for a movie, just plot. Then the next question is, who would be an interesting person to see inside of that? Then the next question would be, why did I think that that person would be an interesting person, and what is wrong with this person?

Something’s wrong with them. Otherwise, they’re fine. I don’t want to watch it. It’s not drama. What’s wrong with them? By asking what’s wrong, you will get to a place of, okay, I understand. It’s a cool idea. Shrek was a cool idea. The man who wrote the book, William Steig, is that right? He had a cool idea. I think somebody like Ted Elliott comes along, and he goes, “All right.” The character is someone who is so angry about losing his swamp. Why would anybody want the swamp in the first place? What is an ironic thing for an ogre to want? Love, right? You very quickly will get to it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.

It’s just like, boom, right there, but that’s fine. You’ll get there through examination of what the fertile soil is around the plot that you’re playing with or around the characters that are emerging.

John: Going back to Craig’s Finding Nemo chapter and this overall framing of the question, we talk about structure, but central dramatic argument is also theme. There are all these words that we throw around a lot about in screenwriting. I feel like the jargon of it all is sometimes a barrier for people to understand what’s really at the heart of this, which is that, do you have interesting characters who are trying to do interesting things, and are you creating obstacles in their way that are compelling for the audience? I think a thing that Craig and I often feel frustration about with dogmatic structure is that you’re hitting these beats, but what is the experience of the audience?

What is the audience feeling through this? How is our relationship with that character changing? How are we putting ourselves in their shoes, seeing the choices they make, and have it feel like they are really driving the story? So many “well-structured” scripts are terrible because they’re just not compelling. They’re not interesting, and scene by scene, they’re not working. So many of these books talk about these templates for things and neglect like, oh, no, you actually have to have interesting scenes that do compelling things where there’s a structure within the scene where you have conflict within the scene.

In the book, we’re just trying to tease out those things and make it clear that as a writer, you’re thinking about all of this at the same time. You’re both in the scene with the characters and sitting in a theater watching it on the big screen. That’s really the challenge of the craft that we’ve chosen is that you’re trying to do all this at once and forget that you actually know what’s going to happen next.

Lorien: Along those same lines in the book, you talk about abandoning want versus need, which I am 100% for. I think it’s so distracting for people because they write characters who articulate their need in the first 10 pages. They’re super aware. We as the audience are aware, and we’re like, “Great, I know what’s going to happen,” so it’s not engaging. Again, it’s that conversation of the different words we use for things. I try to articulate that as what does the character learn? What do they realize? Meg talks about that belief system. How is their belief system shattered? What are ways that you talk about it that is more clear to you when you’re writing specifically?

Craig: Those all sound good. I just think about myself and you mentioned therapy earlier. We don’t go to therapy to announce the insights. Also, insights themselves–

Lorien: Wouldn’t that be great though if we did? [laughter] “Here are the things I know about myself. You pay me. You’re welcome.”

Craig: Just say them back to me. As my therapist and Scriptnotes associate therapist, Dennis Palumbo, says, insight is the booby prize of therapy anyway, because just because you realize something doesn’t mean you’re okay. In fact, that’s usually the worst moment. The worst moment is when you realize you’ve been wrong, you realize the way it should be, and you have no idea how to get there. You can’t go home, and you can’t go forward, and you’re just lost in the phantom zone. That is in fact what the low point is. It’s just that in these structure books they go, “No, a low point happens. Your character’s sad.”

Why? I do think quite a bit about just the simplest things. What is this character afraid of most? How profound is their denial? I want their denial to be profound enough that they are not aware of it because that’s how denial works, but I don’t want it to be so profound that they cannot then be shown. It’s right under, but it’s got to be under, and that’s as simple as that. What are they afraid of? What’s their denial? Why would I be invested as a third party in them having the insight, and then finding the courage to move forward and become the new person?

John: If you’re making those choices, honestly, they should resonate with the audience. The audience should be able to see themselves in this protagonist. Even if they wouldn’t make necessarily the same choices, they understand why the character’s making those choices. They want that character to succeed. They are right there with them. That’s classically what you’re going for with the protagonist going through on a journey and having that transformation. I think we also really try to focus on the book is that it’s never about one character. It’s always about a relationship.

It’s always about the relationship between two or more characters, and really thinking about that relationship as its own entity, and where are we at with this relationship. We probably have a POV perspective on that. There’s one character who’s driving a little bit more, but we have to really be able to understand things from both characters’ points of view. Again, that’s a thing we didn’t see in the books that we read growing up as we were starting off in this business.

Lorien: I love it. I like the, what are you afraid of? That’s something Meg talks about Jodie Foster asking all the time. What is the main character afraid of? I think it’s such a great. Then how much, how deep in denial are they? Because we have to be in denial with them.

John: Yes, and we have to make their denial understandable and even attractive. I want to know. I’m rooting for Shrek in the beginning. I’m like, “Yes, beat it. No one likes me. The world is designed to kill me. My parents sent me away when I was eight [laughter] to be alone, and I like being alone.” He’s so happy in the beginning of the movie, but it’s not really happy. It’s just content.

Meg: I talk about this. You guys have a whole chapter on point of view, which is great and enlightening. My take on it is also emotional point of view, which you’re talking about. Emotionally, I have to agree with the denial. Who’s emotional point of view in the scene? Sometimes when I help people with their scripts, I’m like, “Just go through your script and see whose emotional point of view are we in each scene because it’s flopping all over the place and I’m never landing.”

Craig: What you just said should be chiseled onto some wall at the DGA because where I find non-writing directors struggle sometimes is very specifically with that. Who has the emotional perspective in the scene? It’s such an important concept. The emotional perspective is typically defined to me as the person with whom at the end of the scene, I go, “You. You ran this. You were in charge of this. You saw it. You get it. You learned. You changed. You influenced. You did something,” but it’s got to be someone’s. Yes, I love that. Thank you for saying that.

John: It’s always a challenge when you have parallel plot lines. You may have a protagonist, you may have a secondary character who can drive their own scenes. They clearly have storytelling power in the movie or in the series, but then you put those two characters together in a scene, and it’s not obvious to the audience who is driving the scene, who’s in charge here, who we’re supposed to follow. You as the writer, you have to make that choice because they can’t both be driving the car. That’s a fundamental thing to do. I’ll go back Harry Met Sally. The movie is largely Billy Crystal’s movie and he’s driving those scenes when he’s in them together, but they’re wrestling for control of the wheel and that’s some of the fun.

Lorien: We get asked a lot, “Which project do you focus on? How do you know?” It’s, well, who’s paying me? What are the deadlines?

John: Yes, who’s paying me? That’s a good one. [chuckles]

Lorien: Other than that, let’s say you’re an emerging writer or you have multiple things going on, what do you say no to, I guess, is the bigger question. You talk about this in your chapter on endings. You say, which one has the best ending?

Craig: Yes, my default go-to answer. It’s like, write the thing with the best ending.

Lorien: Which is this is great. In a feature, your ending has to be inevitable, surprising, satisfying. In a TV show, you need to have an ending for each episode.

Craig: You get to have an ending for each episode.

Lorien: You get to have an episode that’s ending.

Craig: It’s a gift.

John: It’s so nice.

Craig: It’s a gift.

John: You also get to have a new start at the beginning of every episode, which is so great. Back when they had commercials, you had act breaks, which is also exciting.

Lorien: You get to have an ending at the end of the season and the series. What advice would you have for someone who’s writing a spec pilot and they need to have that ending of it that makes the person desperately want to read the next episode?

Craig: For starters, for television, you have to ask an important question. The movie question is, who would I like to sleep with for a month or two? The television question is, who would I like to move in with? I want to live here for a long time. I want to be in this world and tell these stories with these people for a long time. This will be good. In fact, I have too many ideas about what happens next. My problem is, how do I break these down into a manageable amount of episodes? Definitely, there’s a big idea at the heart of it that makes you go, “Okay, yes, I need to see this now.

At the end of this first episode, I understand, the audience understands why I want to be here.” I’ve transmitted to them the moment that made me go, “Ooh, I got to do this as a TV show.” Transmitting that passion theoretically should work.

John: Yes. My next project is probably going to be a streaming series. I’ve written the pilot. We took it out. We had all the meetings. What was so great about the meetings when they’d actually already read the pilot is they could ask me questions, and I could pitch them detailed things like, “Okay, this happens next, and this happens next, and this is a typical thing. In episode 6, this is how we’re flipping it.” I wasn’t faking any of that. I’m genuinely passionate about doing it. If you’re looking at writing your own spec pilot for something, you should have that sense of enthusiasm and excitement, and that will carry through back into the pilot you’re writing.

You’ll see that you’re setting up these things, and so like, “That’s going to be so exciting to pay off.” I’ve read a lot of spec pilots where it’s like, “Oh, I can see that you delivered the premise of that, but I just don’t feel like there’s another episode there.” While the writing on the page was good, I’m not that necessarily excited about that writer because I don’t feel like they have that hunger, that zeal for continuing and actually making this as a show.

Meg: Yes, so many times the spec TV pilots, they don’t have an engine to the show.

John: No.

Meg: Do you guys have any insight into TV engines? I’m a feature writer, so I can talk about feature engines till the cows come home. When people ask me about TV, I’m like, “Ah.” What is a TV engine for you guys?

Craig: I don’t know because I don’t write that kind of show. I’ve only written shows that had endings planned. The Last of Us, it’s just a very long single story cycle that has cyclots inside of it. Each episode is a cyclot. The season is a cyclot. The series is a cyclot. I actually don’t know how to write a procedural that is meant to go on forever or even an adventure show that’s meant to go on forever. I understand it. If you put a gun to my head, I could do it. Just I’m not sure that that’s where my smarts are particularly leveled up.

John: I would go for making sure that each of the characters that you’re establishing as your series returning regular characters, that there’s interesting things that we want to see paid off that can’t be possibly paid off in the course of an episode so that over the course of a season, over the course of multiple seasons, we’re going to get a chance to see them grow and change and get somewhere closer to where they’re going to be going.

The challenge, of course, is then the reason why you have to have big brains and/or a writing staff to help you do it, is finding ways that what each of those characters is going for, what they’re trying to pay off, the stuff that’s driving them can resonate with multiple characters in the course of an episode, and that they’re in conversation with each other, that each of these plot lines really do have a reason to be intertwined in ways that are meaningful. It could be thematically. It could be the conflict that’s going to come between them, but that’s the hard work.

If you go back and look at your favorite TV shows, the ones that keep coming back, they have that in their DNA. From the pilot forward, you can see that they set up characters who can just generate a lot of story, and that’s crucial.

Lorien: Craig, when you said movies are who do I want to sleep with for the next two months, you said, and then a TV show is who do I want to live with, and I thought, “How dare you? That’s not true.” Then I quickly flipped through everything I’ve recently watched to check to see if that was real, and I was like, “Oh, no, it’s mostly true.”

Craig: I’m mostly true. That’s my thing.

Lorien: Mostly true.

Craig: I’m true-ish. [chuckles]

Lorien: It’s a great generalization, though, to check because we also get asked, how do I know if my idea is a feature or a TV show? It’s a little bit of, do I want to hang out with this person for a really long time and be all up in their business, or do I want to be with them for this hot moment, intense experience, and then say goodbye?

Craig: We have met people that we can think to ourselves, “This would be a great hot moment, but oh my God, I would not want to live with you.” You have to ask when you think, is it a movie or a show? How much is really here? Is this an explosion or is this dominoes that keep going? That’s what you just have to have a sense for. God’s honest truth. The reason that so many screenwriting books are bad is because they just don’t acknowledge something brutally fundamental to what we do, and that is talent. [chuckles] Taste, talent, instinct.

There are things that you learn over time that John and I have learned over time that you guys have learned over time, and you share with people, and we share with people, but we don’t get to that if there isn’t the stuff that you cannot teach. There’s a lot you can’t teach. The Screenwriting Education, our book, it’s ultimately for people who we will find out later had what they needed to have at the start. Maybe this helps them get where they were going to go a little faster. I think is nice, but these questions, movie, television show, we’ve all sat in rooms and watched executives debate with each other because they don’t know. It comes down to us, gulp.

[music]

Lorien: We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the show.

Meg: I also love the chapters in the book where you’re taking quotes from your guests. It’s really fun to see them so distilled down, and great insights from all the guests. One insight that I wanted to ask you guys, David Koepp and Eric Roth both talk about getting fired. These two penultimate writers, the icons of screenwriters, talk about, yes, getting fired sucks. Eric Roth talks about how much it hurt. To me, that’s also talking about, as writers and artists, our failure, which we want our characters to fail so they can transform. Yet, when we fail, we’re like, oh, what’s happening?

Craig: Exactly.

Meg: What is your experience, take on, it doesn’t have to be being fired, because maybe you’ve never been fired-

John: Oh, good Lord. We’ve both been fired a lot.

Meg: -or maybe failure.

Craig: A lot is strong praise, but certainly, we’ve experienced– you can’t work in this business and not. There’s the hard firing and the soft firing.

John: Mostly, the soft firing.

Craig: Mostly, the soft firing.

John: Mostly, it’s like we’re not proceeding with the thing.

Meg: They just never respond to notes. Literally, you hear from someone else, oh, they’ve moved on.

Craig: You do the drafts that you were hired to do, then they don’t really need more, and you go do something else, and then you hear that someone else is working on it.

Meg: How do you process that? What is your process? Do you immediately start something else? Do you rage? Because again, it’s approach to failure and what our characters do too. How do you guys approach it?

John: Maybe before I talk about healthy approaches, we should describe unhealthy approaches, things we’ve seen other writers do, which is just not serving them or serving anyone well. We’ve seen writers who fixate too much on one project to the exclusion of others and their entire identity becomes about this thing that it’s the next thing they’re going to make and it’s going to happen, or they got screwed over by this producer on this thing, it’s all they could talk about for years, and they don’t write other things.

That is so frustrating and debilitating when you see talented people who are getting in their own way by fixating too much on one thing. I think you have to passionately love the thing you’re writing, believe in it so deeply, and then also acknowledge at some point it could just vanish and go away, and it doesn’t diminish your experience and your love of it, but that you have so little control over it ultimately.

When I’ve written books, books exist out in the world, they’re on a shelf, I’m done, and they’re there. As screenwriters, we’re just writing this plan, this vision for a movie or a series that could be, and sometimes it’s not, it sucks, and you can grieve that, but if you fixate on it, if you let that be your defining quality, you’re going to be at the start of your tragic beginning. You’re going to protagonate on that, and that’s not a good place to be beginning.

Craig: It’s harder when you start your career because you have fewer experiences. If you get up to bat and it’s your first at-bat as a major league baseball player and you strike out, currently, you are on course to strike out every single time and be the worst player in history. You have to have a short memory. Feel your feelings. The most important thing is to not let it define you and to also remember, thank you, Dennis Palumbo, that feelings are real, but they don’t mean anything. They have no logical significance, and they are terrible predictors of the future because what we tend to do is say, I got fired, I will be fired, I’m the fired person. Now everybody looks at me as no good, I’m no good. The end. That’s in fact not what’s happening.

There’s this wonderful study that I’m obsessed with that these guys, we’ve talked about this before on the show, Kahneman and Tversky, who are these two psychologists who studied human irrationality. They were hired to look at the performance of people in the military, like in the Air Force. They were hired to basically help evaluate and teach the people teaching these people how to teach them better. They asked, well, what’s something that you guys know? They said, well, we know that when somebody goes out on a practice run, and they do really well, they come back, we praise them, the next time they don’t do so well.

When they go out, and they fail, and they come back, and we yell at them, the next time they do much better. It seems to us praising people makes them worse and punishing them makes them better, which is a perfectly human conclusion to draw, except the reality is, it’s just regression to the mean. Generally speaking, when you do really well, you’re doing better than you normally do. When you don’t do very well, you’re doing worse than you normally do. What happens when you get fired is, they could be wrong, which has happened to me before, where I’ve watched it, and I’m like, ahah, but let’s say you didn’t do as well as you normally do, that means you’ll do better because normally you do normal.

That’s the perspective that time gives you because you can’t see it unless you get fired a bunch and you succeed a bunch. There are wins that I’ve had that I didn’t really deserve. There are failures I had that I didn’t really deserve. There’s all sorts of weird things that occur, but eventually you can get to a place where at least you go, okay, if you don’t want to continue with me, that’s for the best. It’s good. It means you hired the wrong guy for what you want. It’s, you know?

Meg: Yes. I love that. It’s not a definition of you and your worth and your value and who you are forever. I think that’s great and a great example of belief systems in your characters and how we see things that are just not really, you might have to wake up through experience to that. All right. We could talk for hours and hours with you guys. It’s such a privilege. Craig and John, you have shows to go and features to write. We always ask our guests the same three questions at the end of the show. Go ahead, Lorien.

Lorien: Craig, what brings you the most joy when it comes to your writing?

Craig: When something just sings, I don’t know how else to describe it. When there’s just a beautiful harmony, and I know it’s right. You just know when it clicks, and you’re like, that is correct. It doesn’t matter if anybody in the world told me this isn’t correct, they would be wrong. This is correct. There’s no defense or argument here. It’s just humming in my bones. It’s humming the right tune. It is in harmony. That’s the most joy.

Lorien: I look forward to that happening quite soon for myself.

Meg: Craig, what pisses you off about writing?

Craig: How disconnected effort is to result. It’s remarkable. There are times where just, there it is, done. I’ve gone two weeks grinding myself over one scene because it’s just wrong, and it makes me crazy. Then, eventually, there’s a moment where I go, oh, it’s because that’s not the right scene or because of whatever. It is so frustrating to not be able to say, well, if I just work harder, if I’m building a house and I just sleep less and work more, theoretically, the house will get built faster. It just doesn’t work that way in writing. It’s frustrating. It pisses me off.

Lorien: What’s your proudest career moment to date?

Craig: Probably somewhere around the second or third week of Chernobyl airing, where it became clear that people were watching it. I didn’t think anybody was going to watch it. When that happened, and the response was what it was, I just felt great because it was legitimately after– I had been working at that point for 25 years, it was legitimately the first thing I had ever done that I wasn’t fulfilling anyone else’s request. I thought of a thing, I did a thing, I did it entirely in my own terms, and I was in charge of it. That was my proudest moment. It’s going to be hard to top that one. I don’t think I’m going to top that one. It’s a pretty good one.

Lorien: Yes, you will.

Craig: I’m still sad and anxious all the time. Don’t you worry.

Meg: All right, John, what brings you the most joy?

John: Related to Craig’s, he’s talking about how everything in the scene clicks. For me, it’s when a character surprises me. When the character does something that I wasn’t anticipating them doing, they say a line, suddenly, they just are able to do a thing that I was not conscious that they could do. At a certain point, they just become alive; they’re just doing their own things. Those moments where you feel like you are just a documentarian filming them doing their life, those are the moments that bring me real joy. Those are generally moments where I’ve passed into flow, where it just becomes easy. That’s the joy. That’s the high you’re often chasing.

One of the things I just try to remind writers is that just because you’re not in flow doesn’t mean that you’re doomed, that you’re bad. Flow often won’t happen, and yet, no one will know that you wrote that scene while you were in this magical, mystical state, versus you were just grinding through it.

Lorien: All right, so what pisses you off about writing?

John: Probably what pisses me off about writing is that there is fundamentally this impossible task we’re given that we are trying to create the experience of watching a movie just with the words on the page, and that all the artistry we can do, all the craft, all the little tricks we can do to create the visuals and the sound experience, or just the feeling of being in that world, it is fundamentally limited, and that it’s going to have to be interpreted through actors and directors and everybody else, and it’s never going to be quite the movie that I see in my head.

You have to learn to live with that and accept that. It’s never going to be quite– there’s just no direct brain connection where people can quite see the movie that’s in my head, and what’s helpful is when you remember that, you are the only person who’s ever seen the movie, you can have a little bit more patience with people who are still getting up to speed on the process, the directors who are asking 20,000 questions because they just cannot see the same movie that you’re seeing.

Meg: Last question is, what is your proudest moment in your writing?

John: Weirdly, it wasn’t a public moment, but I would say when we did the Big Fish musical. I wrote the movie Big Fish and did the Broadway musical Big Fish, and along the way, you do these readings and workshops where you’re getting it up to speed, and what’s so great about them is they’re so private. There’s maybe 20 people in the audience for some of these things, just sitting in chairs, and you don’t have props or costumes, people are at music stands. Yet, I can see, oh my God, Andrew Lippa and I made this thing that was just beautiful, and everyone’s crying in this room.

It was just great to see that you can create these really amazing emotional experiences with nothing but just words and songs. There’ve been many moments along the way in the Big Fish musical, but those small, intimate moments were some of my favorite and proudest moments.

Meg: John and Craig, thank you so much for coming on our show.

John: An absolute pleasure.

Craig: It was great. It was great to be here. Thank you, guys.

Meg: Thanks so much to John and Craig for joining us today. Their new book, Scriptnotes, a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, is out now, and we’ll link it to the episode description.

Lorien: For more support, find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and head over to thescreenwritinglife.co to learn more about our workshop program, TSL Workshops. We have a growing library of prerecorded workshops that cover craft-related topics from character want to outlining a feature. We also host two live Zooms a month where you could chat with me and Meg about projects you’re working on.

Meg: Right now, we’re running a special holiday promo. Just head to the tslworkshops.circle.so and use the code holiday25 to get 50% off your first month. The link and promo code are also in the episode description. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to thescreenwritinglife@gmail.com.

Lorien: Thank you for listening, and remember, you are not alone, and keep writing.

John: That was The Screenwriting Life. It was produced by Jonathan Hurwitz and edited by Kate Mishkin, whereas Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Our Christmas-y outro music is by Matthew Ciarlelli as well. 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 like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram at Scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts and hoodies to drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you. Thank you to all our premium subscribers, especially the folks who are joining us in this new year. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. 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 Rob Reiner. For Drew and Craig, Meg and Lorien, thanks for listening.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Okay, bonus segment. Not the bonus segment I wanted to record.

Drew Marquardt: No, I’m so sorry. As soon as I found out, I texted you because you knew Rob and Michele. It was heartbreaking for me. I can’t imagine how it was for you.

John: Yes. We were having dinner with friends, and another friend texted me and said, holy shit, Rob Reiner. I was like, yes. You quickly look at the headlines, but you don’t know what’s really happening. When I saw stabbed at his home, I was like, oh, I hope it’s not the son, and it was the son. Weirdly, Rob Reiner is, of course, an icon of a director. Looking at that period between 1984 to 1995, he was just unstoppable.

Drew: Incredible.

John: Just amazing. This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men, The American President.

Drew: Incredible.

John: Incredible. Back to back to back. So many of these movies we’ve talked about on Scriptnotes over the years. Obviously, we did a whole deep dive on The Princess Bride, but When Harry Met Sally, it’s foundational.

Drew: Whenever I leave the podcast someday, let’s just do a deep dive on When Harry Met Sally. I think I’ve seen that movie more than-

John: Next week.

Drew: Next week, yes. Perfect.

John: It’s an incredible movie. We think about it as Nora Ephron’s movie, but it’s Rob Reiner who directed it. It’s because of his working with Nora Ephron that we got the movie that we got. We got that perfect trajectory-setting romantic comedy. It was hard to imagine what our rom-coms would be like if we hadn’t had When Harry Met Sally.

Drew: The American President felt like it was a constant on TV when I was growing up. That was Sorkin, right? I think wrote that.

John: It was Sorkin, yes.

Drew: He made these sort of North Star movies.

John: There’s an episode of Love It or Leave It where Rob Reiner comes on to talk to John Lovitz about just directing and other things. They talked about Aaron Sorkin, where he’s very upfront about all the cocaine he was doing when he was writing The American President. It was this 600-page script he delivered. Rob Reiner was going through and cutting out all the stuff that he did down to, here’s The American President, and all the parts that were not there became The West Wing.

Drew: That makes sense. It’s been striking to me in the last week or so, since this all happened, how many people just talk about him as a person who lifted them up and gave people freedom, creative freedom, and really bolstered people he believed in. He just seemed like the best, both professionally and then also politics, too.

John: Absolutely. I never worked with him on anything. I may have had one meeting at his company at Castle Rock at some point early on, but he was doing other stuff. I wasn’t writing anything for him. I first got to know him, recent history here. In California, we had marriage equality briefly, and then there was Prop 8. My husband and I got married during the brief window of time when we still had marriage in California. It wasn’t legal federally, but it was recognized within California. Then the same year that Obama was elected, Prop 8 passed in California, which took away marriage equality.

Mike and I were part of the lawsuit that was challenging the legality of that, which was designed to be a federal lawsuit. It was an organization called American Foundation for Equal Rights, and Rob Reiner was a big funder behind it. I went to organizing dinners and other events at their house to get this stuff started, to meet Ted Olson and David Boies, who are our lawyers behind all this. They were great and helped find us plaintiffs and helped put the whole thing together.

Over the course of years, I saw Rob and Michele a lot, and they were phenomenal. Obviously, everyone’s going to talk about Rob Reiner because he’s a legendary director. Michele Reiner was great. One detail I think is worth telling about Michele, which I’d never seen anyone do before, but was so smart. This was a pretty big dinner, and Michele said there’s going to be one conversation at the table, no side conversations, everyone participates. That was the rule, and it was a smart rule because it makes everyone be involved and no one gets pushed off in a corner. It’s like 20 people, but it’s one conversation.

Drew: That sounds like them, from everything I’ve heard about them, that making sure that everyone’s heard and everyone has a seat at the table.

John: I last saw Rob and Michele during this last election cycle. There was an event at their house that Kamala Harris was speaking at. It was right after Biden’s disastrous debate. Everyone was on edge. What is possibly going to happen? Kamala Harris just killed it. She was so competent and in charge. I remember walking away thinking, okay, Biden should pull out, and Harris should replace her. That event only worked because Rob and Michele just made everything comfortable. They just made everyone feel like, yes, everyone’s panicked, but also, we got this. We’re going to get through this. They were great, as always, and remembered me. Michele remembered me from years before, which is another great sign.

Drew: Just, oh, they sound so cool. Like adults in the room, exactly what you want a person to be.

John: It’s a great loss. Directors, everyone’s going to die. It’s going to happen. This could have happened in a car accident, and it would have been heartbreaking. For it to happen in such a grisly family tragedy way is what makes this so particularly awful and keeps it at the top of the news cycle. It’s mostly what I focus on. We lost two really good people, and it sucks.

Drew: I think that compounds the heartbreak for me. Also, you just imagine what it is to be a parent with a child who you can’t help and who you know has these huge problems. They seem like the kind of people that– I’m sure they did everything they possibly could do. This isn’t–

John: The son, Nick, was at this fundraiser, which is where I met him. He had a strange quality to him. I didn’t know his backstory, but reading about that story, oh, that tracks make sense. They could tell they loved him and that they were trying to help him out. It’s awful. It’s a tragedy. I guess I’m a little happier now that everyone’s starting to acknowledge that this is a family tragedy. There’s no greater meaning behind it. It’s a thing that could have happened at any point in the last couple centuries. It’s a thing that is specific to this family and so heartbreaking.

Mostly, I want to celebrate Rob Reiner, an incredible run of great movies, even forgetting an actor. An actor going back to– Obviously, that’s made his start. All in the Family, he came up with that initially with Penny Marshall, who also became a director. Was always guest-starring as somebody’s dad in New Girl or some other thing. Exactly who he’d want for that.

Drew: His sandwich is lettuce, tomato, lettuce, meat, meat, meat, cheese, lettuce.

John: Perfect. That’s what you want, you’re going to have it.

Drew: Never forget it.

John: Listen, I don’t believe in an afterlife or any sort of meaningful way that people, when they’re gone, that they’re watching down over us. He’s the kind of person who I hope their spirit lives on in a sense of we should all aspire to have that kind of effect on those around us.

Drew: Absolutely. I think talking about him and Michele now, everyone feeling that and feeling like that is a model for what we want to do with our lives.

John: You don’t really lose somebody if you can take the lessons and model what they would have done. What would Rob do?

Drew: I hope we keep doing that because he was great. They were both great.

John: Thanks, Drew. Thanks.

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 716 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you dramatize the untold aspects of an historical moment as a limited series? No, Craig, we’re not talking about Chernobyl again. This time, it is the assassination of US President James Garfield and the chaotic, dysfunctional political system surrounding it. We’ll also discuss personality typologies, the systems for categorizing what makes people and fictional characters tick, plus listener questions. To help us do all that, we welcome back Mike Makowsky, who joined us last time on Episode 448 in 2020.

Mike Makowsky: Thank you for having me.

John: Welcome back, Mike.

Mike: Good to be here.

Craig: Yes, blast from the past. I love this.

Mike: Yes, it was a COVID Zoom.

John: It was a COVID Zoom, yes.

Craig: Back in the COVID days, yes.

John: Back in those days. Your screenwriter, whose credits include HBO’s Bad Education, which is what we talked about.

Craig: Which we loved.

John: Which we loved. Death by Lightning is your new series, the Garfield assassination series. It’s now out on Netflix. It’s just terrific. Congratulations on it.

Mike: Thank you so much.

John: I want to talk about the production of it, the intention of writing about this obscure president and what happened there.

Craig: How dare you, by the way? Obscure?

John: Obscure. Also, just the notion of limited series because they’re increasingly hard to make. We’ll talk about that. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about coaching trees. This is an article that we found this last week, which was about which TV shows, writers’ rooms generated the most other creators of TV shows. There’s like a–

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: It’s a branching sort of–

Craig: Like Sid Caesar, our show of shows was sort of the ultimate.

John: Absolutely. That’s sort of the iconic one, but there’s many other ones along the way. Maybe just talk about what the culture is in those shows. That allows for so many writers to grow out of them. First, if anything is going to grow or change, it’s going to be in a new ecosystem because, as we’re recording this, which is sort of two weeks ago for our listeners, Netflix is apparently buying Warner Bros. Craig, how do you feel about that?

Craig: Well, it’s interesting. I work at HBO. HBO is owned by Warner Bros. I think everybody was sitting around going, “Well, it looks like David Ellison and Paramount are going to be buying Warner Bros. Then Netflix, and was it Universal? Both took a swing.

John: Yes, Comcast Universal.

Craig: Yes, Comcast Universal. Then it turned out that Netflix was the one that came out on top. Now, the thing is, we kind of don’t know. We all got the email from Netflix’s subscribers, right? They were like, “We did it.” Yes, they did it in the sense that the board of directors agreed to sell the company to Netflix, but there will be some significant regulatory issues here. Apparently, this is another horseshoe effect where the far right and the far left are very excited to join hands to try and block this sale.

John: It’s also worth remembering, like you were here with us in 2020, the universe conspires to do weird things. Anything that seems like a given or granted is just going to often not happen the way you expect it to happen.

Mike: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s far above my pay grade to be able to speculate what is going to happen here.

John: I think the only thing I would come back to as sort of ground truth is that I’m really concerned about the idea of making theatrical movies, because Netflix–

Craig: If you’re only really concerned, you’re not concerned enough. [laughter]

John: I just want to state sort of, basic foundational principles is I genuinely believe that movies, by which I’ll define as being roughly two hours of experience, of a narrative that is filmed, I think they belong in theaters first. The theatrical experience is crucial. Once they’ve made their money there, then you can release them for purchase, or for streaming. The goal should be to maximize the value out of each individual title and then reach the widest audience possible. That sounds so basic, but it seems to be so forgotten in all of this.

Craig: It’s not forgotten. I think it is rejected. I think Netflix has rejected that theory completely. They put things in theaters now for a week or two to mollify the filmmakers that they want to attract to their not theatrical experience. They do give Greta Gerwig or Rian Johnson a little taste, helps them qualify for the Oscars and so forth. Really, they just want it on their platform. I’ll make a few predictions because, unlike Mike, I do not have the humility of understanding when things are above my pay grade. These are above my pay grade, I don’t care.

John: Here to promote a Netflix show today, definitely.

Craig: Yes. Well, most shows are Netflix shows, and even more shows are about to be Netflix shows if this goes through. If it goes through, I think Warner Bros theatrical is toast. I think the only question is, what do they do with HBO? Because you don’t buy HBO to not have HBO, that would be crazy. The worst possible view is that Netflix bought Warner Bros for the library alone. Now they will just make Lord of the Rings shows and Harry Potter, which HBO is already doing. HBO is one of the only brands that means something in our ecosystem.

Prediction is that they actually keep an HBO app. It won’t be HBO Max anymore. It can finally just go back to being HBO. Well, it’s one last change. It will be a bundled app with Netflix that you get for free as part of your subscription, and HBO will live as a little island. It’ll obviously all be owned by Netflix. Then, when the Emmys come around, HBO, Netflix will win all the time.

John: All of the Emmys.

Craig: Constantly. It’s them, and then FX picks up a few here and there. That’s my prediction.

John: I can see that happening. We should acknowledge that as we’re recording this, there’s a lot of public statements about, oh, no, we’re going to maintain Warner Bros as an entity, and they’re going to still release things theatrically. They also said that about Fox. Fox exists kind of a name only. They are making movies.

Craig: That was Disney, that likes making movies.

John: They like making movies.

Craig: I think what Sarandos said was something like, yes, we’ll take a look at it, and then as things evolve, we’ll re-examine. It was sort of like, no, we absolutely won’t use this gun pointed at this head to shoot it. It’s a bummer.

John: It’s a bummer.

Craig: It’s a bummer. It’s not that I don’t like Netflix. I subscribe to Netflix. I watch Netflix. Netflix makes great shows like Death by Lightning. They make a load of great shows.

John: They do.

Craig: It’s just that I also like going to the movies, and that’s an area where I disagree with them. I know that when somebody like Ryan Johnson says, “You must give me a theatrical release,” clearly, he does too. We all want a theatrical release for things like that. I’m not stupid enough to root for one corporation over another. They’re all corporations. It will be interesting to see. It’s going to take, what, 18 months? Is that what they’re saying?

John: Yes. It’s going to be a while before we sort of know how this sorts up.

Craig: This will be the fourth corporate parent that I’ve experienced at HBO since I’ve been there. I’ve only been there since 2015.

John: That’s crazy. All right. We will not be able to resolve the Netflix of it all, but we can talk about something much more local, which is the Scriptnotes book. As we’re recording this, we don’t have the actual sales figures, so we don’t know how it did its opening week, but it did really well. We’re really happy with the launch of it. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered it. Thank you to everyone who bought it the first week. Thank you for everyone who came out to our live show to buy it there. Everyone who posted about it, that’s awesome. Drew has been reposting a lot on the Scriptnotes Instagram.

Drew Marquardt: Yes. Basically, anytime I open up the app, there’s five or so people who have posted about it, which is great.

John: Yes. We’re resharing their stories. Thank you to everyone who’s left a review on Goodreads or Amazon, because those help us get the word out about the book. One thing that’s come up frequently, and Mike, you have your copy of the book in front of you, people say it’s lighter than you expect it to feel, that it feels light in your hand. Do you notice this?

Mike: So light. I have to compliment the binding as well. It’s a beautiful-looking tome here.

John: It is a gorgeous book. I want to talk a little bit about why it feels lighter in your hand, because it’s one of the most consistent things we’ve heard. Craig’s like, “Oh, did they make it out of balsa wood? Is there something strange about this book?” I went down a rabbit hole, and I did the math. I did some research on it. It actually weighs about what it should. If you compare it to another hardcover book that’s the same size, so I Have Atomic Habits, which is a bestseller that’s also the same number of pages, it weighs more than that, which it should because it’s physically wider than that. It’s 24% bigger by volume, but only 13% heavier.

It’s a little bit different than should you expect. Mostly, the effect is that it’s called the size-weight illusion. It’s what makes your brain make predictions about how much it thinks something should weigh. This is actually a documented phenomenon. I’ll put a link in the show notes to it. Craig, you like psychology. This is certainly up your alley.

Craig: I love psychology.

John: Your brain makes predictions about how much something should weigh so that as you’re reaching for it, you have an anticipation about how much force you’re going to use to lift something. That’s based upon visual information. What you see, it’s size, it’s thickness, it’s apparent material. It’s based on semantic clues. You have a sense that a brick should weigh more than a book should weigh. Then, just prior experience with similar objects. I think that’s mostly what is throwing people off about it is because it looks more like a textbook, and we have a sense of how much a textbook should weigh, and it just weighs less than a textbook.

Craig: Why does it weigh less?

John: It’s a different paper stock. I think it’s mostly what it is. This is the standard hardcover book paper stock, whereas opposed to a textbook has that glossy paper and that glossy paper just weighs more. There’s an area called expectology, which is the expectation factor. When you make a prediction error about how much something should weigh or what it should sound like or feel like, you get this moment of cognitive dissonance. I think that’s what’s happening with the book.

Craig: To me, it still feels like when you pick it up, that it’s one of those fake books that you open and it’s hollow, and then you put your keys in it or something.

John: Absolutely. You store your hooch in there. You store your sippets.

Craig: Also, who needs a heavy book? Holding a book actually is annoying after a while when you’re reading it. Where do you think people are going to read this, John? Physically, in space, where are they reading this?

John: As we talked about from the very start, I think it’s an ideal bathroom book.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: You’re sitting there–

Craig: You’re on the toilet, and you’re getting smarter.

John: Yes, as you’re doing it.

Craig: Yes, I always wanted to be one of those books.

John: Yes, so good. For me, growing up, my D&D manual is one of those books.

Craig: Do you know who we had in our bathroom growing up? Reader’s Digest.

John: So good.

Craig: Yes. Did they even make that anymore?

John: I suspect Reader’s Digest still exists. I remember there was the word power. It pays to increase your–

Craig: Then there was Laughter is the Best Medicine. It was so clearly meant for old people because there were ads in it, and I recall they were always for pheniment or aspergum, basically just arthritis medications. I’m like an eight-year-old sitting on the toilet reading books for 80-year-olds. It was nice, though. I learned.

Mike: They do still exist in print, but it seems like it’s a bigger, it’s like a magazine size. I remember them being smaller.

John: It should be a little folio size. Oh my gosh, that breaks my expectation, and therefore I hate it.

Craig: Yes, therefore I hate it.

John: We also have some follow-up about Orange Books. Mick wrote in. On a recent episode, you referred to the Scriptnotes book as The Orange Book. As a former Nickelodeon writer, producer, and longtime listener, I feel a duty to mention that on my first day at the network in 2001, the creative director handed me a copy of The Orange Book. This incredible tome is a creative guide to all aspects of Nickelodeon’s brand. It’s legendary amongst Nickelodeon writers and producers, and it takes its title from the famous orange splat logo. I fear that you may be served a cease and desist order by the Bikini Bottom business and legal affairs team over your claims to the term The Orange Book.

They sent through a photo of The Orange Book, or a copy of The Orange Book, which still remains. I couldn’t find a copy of a PDF of it online, but I found some other material referring to it and drawn from it. It looks like a really good brand design book. I will say that Nickelodeon, at its peak, you clearly understood what Nickelodeon was. It was a very consistent sort of space, the same way Disney is very consistent branding. Good on them, but also don’t sue us.

Craig: I don’t think I’ve ever reflected on how odd it is that the cable children’s channel that was, I guess, at one time, the best, or the peak, was Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon is the most old-timey word ever.

John: It’s also a word I can never spell properly. I keep wanting to do it like a C-H rather than a K, or the L-E as opposed to the E-L.

Craig: That’s Nickelodeon. That’s different. Yes, but Nickelodeon?

John: It’s a word like chariot, where it’s just lost all reference to what it was really meant to stand for.

Craig: Yes, it’s a very strange thing. It’s something that they would never do now, but see, it worked. Children don’t know what an actual Nickelodeon was, which was, what, the five-cent thing that you would play the silent movie in while you stuck your face in it. In 1920, I guess.

John: I also feel like they, at some point, just shortened it down to Nick, and that they don’t say Nickelodeon very often anymore.

Craig: Nick, Nick.

John: Nick Jr. There’s Nick at night.

Mike: We have more follow-up about breaking into your 30s. Anne writes, after spending my 20s and early 30s working in a rock and roll concert production, I was in need of reigniting my creative side. With a stack of writing samples and a surprising number of contacts I’d unearthed, I moved to Hollywood at the age of 35. To support myself as I navigated this new world, I began temping at the studios as an assistant and quickly discovered that my age and experience were an asset. I became known for being able to parachute into high-level executive offices and keep everything flowing smoothly.

I found my home in the Disney Touchstone film division, where I rotated through executives while I inhaled the script database and watched the movie-making machinery in action. I don’t know if what is left of the studio still uses temps, but if so, this is an avenue that the person who wrote it earlier should explore.

John: Temping is a thing we didn’t talk about in that, and it does make sense. I think the original writer was saying, “Oh, I want to get a writer’s assistant job. I want to do this kind of thing.” I said, that’s a challenging way in. What Anne’s describing, which is being that temp who actually knows what they’re doing and can just show up on the day and make stuff work and happen, that’s great. I would say a lot of these companies do have internal temp pools or floating workers, and that feels like a really smart choice.

Craig: That was the first couple of jobs I had were temp jobs. I think we’ve talked about. Do they still have the Friedman agency, the temp agency just for entertainment business? I think it still exists.

John: Live Google.

Drew: F-R-E-I-D?

Craig: Yes, Friedman.

Drew: Yes, Friedman Personnel Agency. It seems to still exist.

John: Yes. A place like that could make a lot of sense and also give you a chance to just see a bunch of stuff. If you’re just at one desk at one studio, you’re not seeing a bunch, but if you’re floating around, you can have a chance to read a bunch of things. Also, the expectations of ability to do stuff as a temp are pretty low. Basically, just keep the lights on is probably a lot of it, so that may help.

Craig: Yes, you can easily exceed expectations.

John: All right. On the subject of exceeding expectations, we have Mike Makowsky here. Your show is delightful. It details the assassination of James Garfield and the man who assassinates James Garfield. Spoiler, he’s going to die. I want to first just start with a fundamental question. Why make this show? It’s based on a bestselling nonfiction book. It’s not called Death by Lightning. How did it come upon your reading list, and what made you want to make it?

Mike: About seven years ago, I was at the Grove Barnes & Noble at the Buy 2 Get 1 Free table, and I needed a third book. I picked up this book about the Garfield assassination. Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard. First, I obviously made sure it was the proper weight. I made sure that from a semantical perspective.

John: It looks like a book. In your hand, it felt like a book.

Mike: Yes. It wasn’t orange. It didn’t conflict with Nickelodeon or anything.

Craig: It sounds nice to be honest, they’ll get sued.

Mike: I read the back cover, and I think I had known that James Garfield had been assassinated. I dimly recalled that fact.

John: It feels like Jeopardy information.

Mike: That’s the reason I bought the book. I was like, I think I want to be on Jeopardy one day. Let me educate myself. I felt very embarrassed that I knew nothing about our 20th president. To me, James Garfield, his name evoked a little more than a very anonymous bearded portrait on a wall sans any real context. The book sat in a pile for a couple of months to get up the juice to read the James Garfield book. It wasn’t necessarily a priority for me. I wound up reading the book eventually in one sitting, which was atypical for me.

I found it not only propulsive, but very moving and tragic and crazy and absurd. I kept having to go to Wikipedia every five pages to make sure that this historian in Kansas wasn’t making all this shit up because it seemed way too crazy.

John: I will say that the show is absurd, but also it’s funny in ways that you wouldn’t expect it to be.

Mike: I found myself laughing a lot at this book that’s not written with any real explicit levity or mirth, but there’s a deeply ingrained situational absurdity to virtually all of the proceedings.

John: This man should never have been president.

Mike: He was nominated for president against his will, ostensibly. James Garfield shows up at the 1880s Chicago convention for his party to nominate an entirely different candidate. His speech is so profound and presents such a strong vision for the future of our country that someone stands up in the rafters and shouts, “We want Garfield.” Which is so crazy. In many ways, Garfield was this poster boy for the American dream. He was a Civil War hero. He was this outspoken progressive advocate for civil rights and civil service reform, and universal education.

He was largely self-taught, grew up in abject poverty, just the right man for the job. He was not a popular figure prior to stepping on that stage and delivering an Obama in 2004 level speech, where everyone’s just like, who the fuck is this guy? Eventually, the voting reached a deadlock because no one could agree on a candidate. There were a lot of warring factions within his party at the time. On the 36th ballot, Garfield is accidentally nominated for president.

John: There’s a version of that which is essentially Conclave because that’s the underlying–

Mike: It’s very much like an American Conclave. I wrote the show long before Conclave existed, but I remember seeing that in theaters last year and being like, “Oh, that’s just like, it’s very similar.”

John: You’re reading this book, and you have to make a decision like, okay, you want to do something with it, but when did you know, like, oh, this is probably a limited series versus a feature? What were your next steps after reading the book?

Mike: Yes, I think instantly. Again, I read the book. I found myself laughing a lot. That’s not normal for me, but my tone tends to be a little bit more darkly comic. I think the fact that I was laughing a lot led me to believe. I think that this is indicative of my voice and my perspective. I don’t know that other people would necessarily receive this story in the exact same way. I think I should try and pursue this thing. I ended up getting the historian, Candace, on the phone and pitching my heart out to, “Please let me adapt this.” She was like, “Yes, okay.”

I ended up optioning the rights to the book myself because there wasn’t anyone that was going to pay me to write a James Garfield show anytime that I told, whether it was my agent or executives that I was friends with, that I wanted to write a limited series about the Garfield assassination, they were like, “Good luck.” [crosstalk]

John: Let us know when you actually want to work.

Mike: My agent was just like, “Do you despise me? Do you hate me?”

Craig: At the same time, you probably understood that that’s why the show could work because nobody’s expecting anything. Then you go, surprise, there was this entire thing under your nose that is extraordinary. You’re sitting on a gold mine. That’s a good feeling, actually.

Mike: The great joy of Chernobyl was obviously very instructive for me in a lot of ways. It was a five-episode limited series about a subject that, on the surface, most people probably wouldn’t think that they would be terribly interested in. Then they would assume that any telling of that story would be a little bit dustier, didactic, like a history lesson. To be able, as a writer, to create an interest where there was none before. I have absolutely no illusions that most people are going to want to readily watch a James Garfield show or learn a ton about James Garfield.

Certainly, in the 150 years since his death, there hasn’t been a ton of interest in him.

Craig: That’s good news, though. That’s good news.

Mike: It’s a sort of tabula rasa where you’re like, you actually get to present, hopefully in a compelling enough way, a story that people really don’t know anything about.

Craig: I think it’s wonderful.

Mike: That’s so exciting.

Craig: It is exciting. When we think about the choices of what we’re going to do, it is true that if you say, I want to do a story about James Garfield, everyone’s going to either laugh or make fun of you.

Mike: There’s a lot of jokes about him hating Mondays or my agent loves lasagna. Keeps calling him Andrew Garfield by accident, so I just stopped correcting him.

Craig: That’s all fine. The problem is, if you say, I want to adapt blank, and it’s something that they would be excited by just because of the subject, it’s been done. It’s been done a million times. What’s the point of saying, “You know what I want to do? I want to do a story about Vietnam.” Oh, yes, the Vietnam War. I know about that. That’s a thing that people like. That’s why we made 400 movies and shows about it. Finding something like this that is this little hidden gem, and we know that oftentimes these are the things that just seize people. I’m thinking of Scott Frank’s Queen’s Gambit. I want to make a show about people playing chess.

Mike: The metrics for how few people who engage with the Queen’s Gambit have actually even played chess before is pretty fascinating. Again, you’re creating an interest where there was none before. From a marketplace perspective, these are, as I know you know, from Chernobyl, incredibly difficult propositions. No one’s lining up. There’s no ready-made comps for what you’re trying to achieve. You’re not trying to make the next Stranger Things that ends up being a pale imitation of Stranger Things. It is a wholly original proposition, and that is really scary. It ends up being incredibly difficult.
99 times out of 100, you don’t get to actually follow through with it, which is heartbreaking. It feels in many ways like we got to pull off this incredible heist by getting this show made.

John: You’re saying we, but you were just off writing this by yourself. What happened next?

Mike: I spec’d the pilot script, and it was immediately–

John: You didn’t say pilot, but you knew it was going to be four episodes, five episodes?

Mike: I originally intended for it to be six, and for a number of reasons, it ended up becoming four prior to ever being written. I wrote the pilot script as a proof of concept because, again, anytime I told people I wanted to make a darkly comic and subversive take on the Garfield assassination, they were just like, “No, fuck you.” I wrote the script. I was super proud of it. Then just through the different machination, it took about a year, but it ended up getting in the hands of our mutual friends and the producers of the show, David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bernie Caulfield, who gratefully fell in love with it and were able to champion it at Netflix, and at least get Netflix to agree to let me write a second episode.

It was a development process that lasted about three, four years, ultimately, because I had to jump through every conceivable hoop imaginable over there. I wrote a 70-page bible after the second episode. I ended up writing four more episodes, then condensed those back down to two more episodes. We had a director. The director fell out. We got another director. We had to cast the two leads. We were in Budapest scouting for the show, backing into a start date, and we weren’t actually greenlit yet. Again, I feel like we just slipped in under the wire on this thing.

Craig: I was going to congratulate Netflix on their impressions and their risk-taking. Now, I’m going to pull back a little bit just because it does sound like they really put you through it. Then again, HBO put me through it, too. Nobody’s just going to casually go, yes, here, make this thing that’s probably just going to run in social studies classrooms. They are going to put you through it, which I understand. I have to assume, based on Budapest, that budgetarily, you did not have a lot of wiggle room there, I’m guessing.

Mike: Yes. Whenever people ask me how the show got made, I hold up the one Dr. Strange finger from the Avengers. I don’t know that there were multiple pads to get this James Garfield show made in 2024 when he shot it. I’m extraordinarily grateful to Netflix. I don’t know that anyone but Netflix would have made this show at all. We had a slate of executives who were also extremely passionate and grew extremely passionate about the show. Even that only really gets you so far. No, we had to pass a lot of litmus tests in order to ever see the light of day.

John: Can we talk about Budapest? One of the things I was surprised about, but I realized I have not seen that era of American history very much on screen. Budapest, I suspect, had buildings and places that actually looked like that in a good way. I’m sure there was a lot of visual effects to create the depth behind things. It looks great, and you also have scenes with 500 extras in them, which is just very difficult to do in the US or even in Canada to get that sense of scale. That’s all really helpful. It’s also challenging just being in Budapest for six months or so.

Mike: Yes. It was funny. I got married, and two weeks later, I was in Budapest for five months. Now I’m getting divorced. No, we’re good. She’s finally out of that here on air now. No, Cara got a line in the show, which she was thrilled about. She’s crowd woman number one. She came out for one week, and she was treated as a queen.

John: Boo. Well, congratulations on the show. I’m just so happy that it exists and that it got made. I remember Dan and Dave talking about, like, oh, yes, we’re doing this crazy Garfield thing. They didn’t say it’ll never get made, but it was clear this is going to be a hard lift to get it there.

Mike: I’m not sure anyone but them could have really mounted it.

Craig: I love that they did that. Mike and I would pass each other in the halls over at Formosa Sound, where I was mixing the second season of The Last of Us, and he was mixing Death by Lightning. That’s where I found out that this was a show about Garfield. I was just to give a little salute to my dearly departed dad. He was an American history teacher, and he loved Garfield. He loved Garfield. He thought Garfield was one of the only good presidents of that era. Also, just as a musical fan, I love Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and Charles Guiteau’s song is the best song in the show. It’s the best.

John: I need to go back and re-listen to it. I’ve seen Assassins, but I don’t know it off the top of my head, so I–

Craig: Because he’s crazy.

John: Yes.

Mike: Charles Guiteau is the guy that assassinated Garfield, who is a very fascinating character in his own right and is this perverse funhouse mirror image of Garfield in many ways. These are two guys who operate at opposite ends of the American social spectrum. On one end, again, you have this poster boy for the American dream who falls upward accidentally to a presidency just based on strength of character and merit. Guiteau, who also grew up in abject poverty, but worshipped Garfield. As soon as he heard about Garfield, he was like, “This guy gets it.”

Craig: I deserve a job from him.

Mike: Right. I need to do everything in my power to get this man elected because once he’s elected, he’s going to see that the two of us are kindred spirits, and he’s going to appoint me to an ambassadorship to Paris. Guiteau, unlike Garfield, had failed abjectly at everything that he had ever attempted. He was a failed lawyer, failed public speaker, failed newspaper editor. He had spent a couple of years at America’s first-ever free love commune, the Oneidas, and he was kicked out. He was the one guy who couldn’t get laid at the sex commune.
He refused to do the manual labor required of him, so the women on the farm would call him Charles Get Out.

Craig: Charles Guiteau.

Mike: Once Garfield is elected, it’s the first time in Guiteau’s life that he’s ever put his energy into something and succeeded in some warped way, and derive so much of his own self-value from Garfield’s. There’s this weird, toxic parasocial obsession quality that feels so modern.

John: It feels incredibly modern. It feels like it’s a pre-social media time, but you recognize, oh, I see there’s that. Rather than retweeting him, he’s like, I’m going to shake his hand, and therefore we are best buds, and I know him. It’s interesting to watch that.

Mike: Once he’s rebuffed by the Garfield administration, he just descends into madness and becomes convinced that his way to matter and to etch his name in the annals of American history in a positive way is to save the country from James Garfield.

Craig: Well, he’s etched his name into the annals in the strangest way. We all know the name Charles Guiteau, just not for the reason you wanted. I’m very glad that you made this show. I hope it’s doing well. I would urge people, as they’re listening to this, if you have something that you’re obsessed with in history, I hope that you’re pulling out of this. The most important thing that I think Mike said about the genesis of this is how he became passionate. He felt like, “Ooh, I can’t wait to tell people about this.” If you start telling people about these things, and they go, “Oh, you got something.”

If you start telling people about these things and they’re like, “No, that’s pretty much as boring as I thought it was,” then you don’t. Follow that, at least that initial thing is very exciting to find something that we haven’t seen a million times.

Mike: James Garfield was my Roman Empire for about seven years. To anyone that would listen on the street, I would pull them up with the lapels and be like, James Garfield’s the most fascinating story you don’t know. I had a birthday cake one year that my parents made for me with Garfield’s face on it. They were just like, “When are you going to stop talking about James Garfield?” What a privilege to be able to help reintroduce this man to modern audiences. In the process of my research, I went to Ohio.

He’s the only president who is not interred or cremated, or buried. His coffin and his wife’s coffin are on twin pedestals in their crypt in Cleveland at their memorial. Anyone can go and spend time with Garfield. Obviously, the coffins are behind broad iron gates. You can’t touch the coffins. I went there in 2019 when I was first starting to do research on this. For the full hour that I was down there, I was the only visitor, which felt crazy to me.

Craig: That sounds about right.

Mike: No. To you, it seems crazy, but to everyone else listening, like, no, that makes sense.

Craig: I’m routinely the only person at Buchanan’s grave. That just happens. It’s just standard.

Mike: Buchanan, that’s not a good one.

Craig: No. It’s not. It’s just fully bad.

Mike: As a bonus, I also get to tell the story of Chester Arthur, who is Garfield’s vice president, or [crosstalk] Nick Offerman. Yes, our buddy Nick Offerman, who is just such a dream. Of all of the characters in the script, I wrote Chester Arthur with Nick Offerman’s voice in my head the entire time.

Craig: Which makes it so easy. I was just saying this the other day. If you can just sit there in your mind and go, well, it seems to me that you’re not, and you just start slipping into the cadence. You’re like, I know what to write. I know how to do this.

Mike: It does help. He was so great. I’m so glad that he said yes.

John: Mike, the first time I met you was on Zoom because you came on for HBO’s Bad Education. Then, post-pandemic, you and I met up for coffee, and we got to talk a little bit. At that coffee, we were having a conversation about your writing practices, your thing, how you do stuff. I think I noticed this in the Bad Education script is that we talk about how much things look on the page, how you want a good-looking page. Your pages were, all the margins were exactly identical. Each line was the exact same length.

There was a precision that I worried was a little bit overkill because you’re not making the best choices on words if you’re actually worried about the character length. I asked whether you’d ever consider talking with somebody about your writing practices and things like that. We had a little conversation about that. How much are you comfortable sharing what you’ve done in the meantime?

Mike: I didn’t know we were going to be talking about this. We had coffee a few years ago. You guys have done however many episodes of Scriptnotes. It’s 714.

John: 16, yes.

Mike: 16. I have a very, very specific way of writing. I think it’s a low-grade OCD where a lot of people don’t like orphans or orphan lines. I think I’ve taken it to an obsessive level. I think I showed you a sample page from something that I was currently working on, I think probably Death by Lightning. I was like, have you seen this before? You looked at it for about 30 seconds, and then you looked up at me, and you were like, “Are you in therapy?” [laughter] I was like, I’m not. You ended up introducing me to my therapist, who’s also a frequent guest on this podcast as well.

John: Dennis Palumbo, Episode 99. A famous episode for our listeners, which we talk about psychotherapy for screenwriters and specific things that writers may benefit from therapy. Was it helpful? Again, as much as you feel like sharing or don’t feel like sharing, I’m curious because I feel like we have other listeners who probably have similar sort of things that they’re working on.

Mike: Here’s how I feel about writing. I probably spend about 50% of the time that I write making sure that the lines fit correctly for me. Sometimes that means sacrificing a really great line, but it also leads me to over-scrutinize every word in a way that I think actually does ultimately improve the writing. Nothing about my writing process is passive, and it needs to fit a specific way. The one sheet that I do, I don’t fuck with margins at all, but sometimes I will reduce the space between two words from a 12 to a 10 just manually.

I spend a lot of time obsessively just making sure that the dialogue looks like blocks and that there’s not just one or two words hanging over. I didn’t always used to be this way. It’s actually grown more cute as I’ve gotten older, which I think is a little bit worrisome. It’s also become almost like a good luck talisman. I want to present the best-looking aesthetic version of a script because I do believe that there is a subconscious quality to reading a script. If it just looks sloppy on the page, at least for me as a reader, it does sometimes affect how I read.

Craig: I wonder if, as I listen to you, I think a couple of things, that one, that’s crazy, but two, so what? Because you’re good. I guess whatever helps a good writer write. We are not perfect. We all have our things. As you mentioned, maybe there is a theoretical, better version of a script you write that is less concerned about these things, but you don’t write that script because you are concerned about those things. If the script is good and you need to not use the letter Q for some reason, what do I care? We’re all crazy.

What we do is a kind of insanity, and we all have our weird things. It sounds to me like maybe you’ve made your peace with it and you accept that it’s part of your process and it’s a good thing for you.

Mike: Yes, it’s never felt crippling. Then once you get into production and there’s just the realities of talking about the actors, and then you’re like, you know what? I don’t think I’m so hobbled by it, but I do think in those early drafts that it does help my process to over-scrutinize and be a little bit obsessive with the words that are in the script. Yes, I’m probably insane. When I first spoke to Dennis, my therapist of about three years now, I showed him a sample page, and he was just like, “Do you feel like it helps you? Do you feel like it makes you better at doing this?”

I think at least in the short term, it does. In the long term, we’ll see. For right now, I think it leads to a more thought-out product and one that I do think, from an aesthetic perspective, it is helpful to be presenting something that looks clean.

Craig: It may not really matter to anyone but you, but that’s fine.

Mike: It does matter to you.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I want to go back to my initial instinct when I saw your page. My concern was this may be getting in the way of you doing the best work that you know how to do. To hear you articulate that you feel like this is a helpful way for you to get that best draft that you feel good about that feels like it is your work, then I totally respect that. It sounds like Dennis provided a perspective on, is this helping or is this getting in your way? That would be the crucial question. Is this helping you do the work that you want to do, or is it a thing that is stopping you from doing the work or distracting you from doing the work?

It sounds like you believe at this moment, it’s helpful, but you’re also mindful that at some point, it could be not helpful.

Mike: It has to be. I’ve never run a writer’s room or really been in a writer’s room. When you’re collaborating with other writers, yes, you have to throw that in the garbage immediately, that notion that your script should look like someone else’s. At moments, I’m not that crazy.

John: Also, there are a lot of people who are listening to this podcast who are looking at their own scripts and their own pages. Listening to the three page challenge, and we’re talking about how it looks on the page. We’re talking about widows and orphan some, but also just how lines are broken up and how this all feels.

I want to make sure that in the conversations that Craig and I have about the pages that we’re looking at, no one is taking it to an unhelpful extreme. No one’s being so obsessed with it. They’re not actually focused on what the words themselves actually are. Which is, it sounds like it is for you, a tool to really help you inspect what are the word choices you’re making, not just is it exactly 60 characters long?

Mike: I know, I think every word has a cost to it, so hopefully it leads to a tighter draft.

Craig: It leads to a draft. That’s the–

John: It leads to a draft. That’s a crucial thing.

Mike: As long as it leads to a draft.

Craig: It’s how it comes out. That’s how it’s organized with you. Our brains are complicated. One of the things I’ve been really working on for myself in this area of– I don’t know what you’d call it, human growth and enlightenment, is understanding that the process that I follow to make stuff is flawed because I am flawed, and that’s okay. That’s standard. Standardish human being, not a god, flawed. It works. It’s just the flaws are part of it.

You have to accept it. You can call the flaws at that point not flaws, just characteristics. You don’t actually get to write anything if it doesn’t go through the machinery of, and I also want it to look like this. It’s the same thing. You can’t separate them. When you get to a place where you’re like, “I actually don’t like this. This is holding me back. Now it just feels like a bad habit,” then you become aware and then it is recontextualized, and perhaps it is teased apart, but if it never gets teased apart, if you spend the rest of your life turning things to make them fit, if the scripts are good, this is how you do it.

John: You said bad habits. I think I often say is that early in my career, I felt like I had a lot of bad habits, and at some point, stopped labeling them as bad. They’re just my habits.

Craig: They’re your habits.

John: They’re the way I do things, and that’s actually okay.

Craig: That’s part of it.

John: Some of my procrastination is just my habit, and I can’t fix it because it’s actually just how I work. That’s also okay. If at a certain point it does get in the way of how I work, then I need to really stop and examine them and see if there’s a thing I can do to not fall into that pattern again.

Mike: It’s actually incredibly helpful to talk about this with you guys. In no way would I recommend that anyone else do what I’m currently doing.

Craig: No one else is going to.

Mike: I’m not preaching the gospel here.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like fun.

[laughter]

Mike: No.

Craig: It sounds like you.

Mike: To me, it’s a version of problem-solving and puzzling in a way. It’s an added component to the way that I write. I think that at times it ends up leading to something beautiful. Other times, I do have to sacrifice my first blush best line, and maybe I find something better. Hopefully, if I’m ever on this podcast again, we can check back in, see if I’m still doing it. Right now it’s proved I would say mostly helpful and not too benevolent.

Craig: It seems like it’s been incredibly helpful, actually. Sometimes people will talk about these issues, and they will put them under, “Oh, I know I seem a little OCD about this.” We tend to concentrate on the O, which is obsession. I think it’s the C, it’s compulsion that is far more frequent among people who do what we do in a large sense, because we’re compelled to do it in the first place. It is compulsory. Then there are these kinds of compulsions that occur as part of this compulsory behavior of writing.

Mike: I think all screenwriters are bound by this. We’re all compulsive, we’re all a little crazy. We’re all neurotic. We’re all in our heads, locked ourselves in rooms, and written these things in a vacuum. There is a compulsion there. Sometimes that comes out sideways, like in my case. We all have different processes, and it’s helpful to be able to talk about it, especially with two guys like you.

Craig: You are not alone. To say that we are all idiosyncratic in our own idiosyncratic ways would be an understatement. This is actually great for people at home who may feel sometimes like they’re weird. Yes, writing is a weird thing to do. Imagining that you’re 12 different people who are all disagreeing with each other is a weird thing to do, coming up with these scenarios all the time, and what we do is weird.

It is neurologically weird. How could you not, as part of the neurological weirdness, have quirks? To the extent that you can accept those quirks as long as John says, they’re not things that you don’t– if you don’t feel a great need to get rid of it, then you and Mike Makowsky have something in common, and me, and John.

John: Next thing I want to talk about is typologies. This came up because my husband, Mike, I was describing to him this person I needed to work with and some frustrations I was feeling about our working relationship. Mike said like, “Oh, well, she’s a questioner.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” It’s like, “Oh, Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies. There’s a questioner.”

He brought this up before, and he is like, “I will show you the chapter on how to deal with a questioner.” He showed me the chapter in the book. I’m like, “Oh, wow. That is exactly right. You’ve precisely diagnosed why I’m having a challenging time with this and what the best strategies are for getting into consensus with this person.” I want to have a general conversation about personality archetypes, the ways we saw people, both in the real world and also our fictional characters.

I think there’s this instinct that you should be able to neatly categorize all these people and their personalities and their types. Craig, you and I have talked about Myers-Briggs before. In addition to Myers-Briggs, there’s Enneagram, the Big Five, you hear about the four behavioral types from DiSC, and the four tendencies from Gretchen Rubin.

Mike: I remember I read a book in high school when I was buying all the screenwriting books called The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits.

Craig: Sure.

Mike: I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of that one.

Craig: Is it Orange? Does it–

Mike: I’m sorry. I’m frantically–

Craig: Is it light?

Mike: It was blue.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I’m frantically trying to Google it right now, but maybe we can-

Craig: Blue books are out, orange books are in.

John: Absolutely. I remember an early book I read was The Gods in Everyman, or The Goddesses in Everywoman. Basically, it was talking about personality types that way. I’d love to have a discussion about to what point is it useful and to what point is it just astrology, and you’re just randomly assigning labels to things.

Mike: Oh gosh. I don’t–

John: You don’t think of your characters in terms of a bundle of attributes that sort of fit neatly together?

Mike: I don’t think so. I tend to adapt. I adapt a lot of true stories. I definitely gravitate to characters that have similar misguided impulses to one another, but I wouldn’t say that I try to be too prescriptive by sorting them into boxes.

John: Craig, have you ever tried to do Myers-Briggsy on any of your characters or how they approach things?

Craig: Hell, no. Everybody goes a phase where I don’t know– Melissa’s family was super into Myers-Briggs, but I never thought that it was particularly interesting. There’s probably a character type called person who likes character types, and they get value out of this.

John: I bet there’s a large number of our listeners, or at least a sizable percentage, who really want to neatly be able to categorize things.

Craig: You can’t.

John: That’s part of their process.

Craig: You can try, but-

John: You can try.

Craig: I personally don’t think this is a good– because it’s post, it’s not pre. Writing is about creating somebody. When you are introducing characters to an audience or a new relationship and a story to an audience, they need to see the birth of it, and they need to see people discovering each other. As they discover each other, they should be changing each other. We tend to look at people when they’re in moments of change. These things are sort of this is who you are, not changed. It’s simple, and they tend to go over the same things. Really, as far as I could tell, these things exist to sell books.

John: To sell books and to do workshops to understand your coworkers and things like that.

Craig: Here’s the thing, I’m fascinated by people who aren’t like me. I’m also fascinated by people that are fundamentally not like me. It is interesting. I don’t necessarily know if the people I’ve liked the most as I’ve gone through my career have been a certain type. My guess is no, I think generally what I seem to be attracted to is intelligence. There are intelligent people in all of these. You and I are not the same personality type. Did you know that?

[laughter]

John: I did notice that. Somehow over the last 15 years, I’ve noticed that. It’s funny. Yet we do have significant degrees of overlap in terms of our desire for logic, our desire for-

Craig: Also, you’re smart. Bottom line is you’re smart. That’s what I go for. I like smart. I like smart people who are so wildly different on only scales. When I meet somebody that has my characteristics, who’s just dull, I don’t need to hang out with them.

John: There’s a thing we’re developing internally for– so we made a writer emergency pact, which is, as you get stuck in a story, ways to navigate out of a jam. A thing we’ve been working on is a version that is more character archetype-sy, but rather than being expose facto, ways of thinking about if someone has these two characteristics together, what character would have that?

What would a nurturer or explorer feel like? What kind of character is that? Useful storytelling thinking tool, but it’s not meant to be, “Oh, you have to have this exact mix of characters in order for it to work properly.”

Mike: To what end do you think D&D character classifications?

John: I feel like I am constantly referring to characters as chaotic neutral. The alignment charts, yes.

Craig: Alignment charts are fun, but again, post-facto fun in and of themselves, they’re pretty blunt tools. There’s also quite a bit of fuzziness between some of them.

John: Here’s where I imagine it could be useful. None of us traditionally work with a group of other writers, but I could imagine, as you’re having a conversation about a character or a new character you’re introducing, how it fits together, rather than trying to apply an exact label to them, look at some of the spectrums that they lay out there. To what degree are they introverted or extroverted? To what degree are they rebelling against external expectations, or are they intrinsically motivated to do certain things? How agreeable are they? To what degree do they want to challenge authority? Those are useful conversations to have, but rather than reduce them to one little label, I think you’re probably better off.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

John: Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions. What does Julia in Oxfordshire ask us?

Drew: I’m a novelist who teaches creative writing. I would be interested in your views on what someone with IP, like a popular novel, should look out for when people start circling. What’s the ideal journey from page to screen, and what’s the nightmare?

John: I’ve had a couple of adventures with adapting books, or you’re dealing with a property that’s becoming popular. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences with authors in that situation. I won’t talk about the bad experiences. My Arlo Finch books came out at the same time that Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi came out. It’s been interesting watching that development cycle because that came out in 2017, and the first movie version has only coming out next year or 2027. It’s like a 10-year journey.

Looking through the number of times it got set up and then fell apart and then got going again, as the author, I used to say, you just cannot know when a thing is actually going to happen, when it’s all going to come together. Mike, you bought this woman’s book, optioned this woman’s book, and it took years. At no point did it seem like a certainty that it would ever actually make it to the screen, even two years out or a year and a half out.

I would say that talking with authors whose books have been optioned or purchased for adaptation, you have to treat it as this will probably never happen and make peace with that. You won’t have the kind of control over it that you do over your own book. It’s just like your kid is going off to college, and it’s just going to become its own thing.

Mike: Yes. I think a lot of authors have really challenging relationships with the eventual product, and so many other times. Some of the greatest books of the last 10 years, books that maybe in a different era would have readily been ripe for assassination or-

Craig: Wow.

John: For assassination. [unintelligible 00:52:50]

Mike: -for adaptation. I recently went on a big Barbara Kingsolver kick over this past year, and reading books like The Poisonwood Bible or Demon Copperhead where you’re just like, these are some of the best books of all time. Why hasn’t this been made as– You weren’t the first person who ever thought of doing it. It’s hard to get things made. Yes. It’s just really, really, really difficult.

John: I would encourage Julia Nostrachir, if someone’s circling your book, you might think, “Oh, a director would be fantastic.” Directors attach themselves to 19,000 things, and none of them ever happen. If a Mike Makowsky approaches you, who’s a writer who’s obsessive, who can actually do the thing, it’s generally a better choice.

Mike: I tend to classify myself more as compulsive than obsessive.

John: I’m sorry about that, yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Well done, sir.

John: I don’t want to mislabel you or put you on the wrong side.

Mike: Yes. If I call you, please say yes. I agree.

John: Let’s answer one more question. Oh, here’s one from Marco about writing with a bad back. Craig, you may have an opinion about that.

Drew: I remember you mentioning back injections for pain. I’m turning 50 and right when things are finally starting to go well career-wise, my back decided to revolt. I can barely sit for more than 5 to 10 minutes without serious pain. The price of 15 plus years glued to a chair, I guess. I have scoliosis, facet joint arthritis, mild anterior-

Craig: Anterolisthesis.

Drew: There we go. Oh, boy. A couple of disc protrusions, probably the usual writer’s cocktail. Surgeons say it’s not bad enough for surgery, so I’m stuck in this frustrating in-between zone where something could be done, but hard to figure out what. Did you ever find something that actually helped? Do you have specific physio or exercises, or a special chair? Any professional tips would be a lifesaver.

John: Pretty sure many of the Scriptnotes audience might be in the same boat. Craig, you and I were talking about this just backstage right before the curtain opened at our live show, and you were about to get another injection. Did that happen? Did it help?

Craig: I had to make the appointment, but I’m going to be having it when I’m back home right after Christmas, right before New Year’s. In between Christmas and New Year’s, that’s back injection season. It’s going to be lovely. First of all, Marco, I certainly sympathize with you. Yes, you’re in your 50s, and yes, this is how it’s going, and you already had issues. Scoliosis has been there almost certainly since you were a kid and just gets worse over time.

Anterolisthesis is not fun, and any arthritis anywhere in your back, and disc protrusions, that’s really the worst of it because that starts to push on the nerves all around. That’s what the pain is. The pain is nerves. It’s not bones. It’s not the rest of it. It’s the nerves. Yes, physical therapy can help. There are some stretches that I do every morning that seem to help. I would not suggest you do those because those are for what I have, which is spinal stenosis and [unintelligible 00:55:35] and I don’t know what stretches would be good for you, but I think physical therapy, it could help.

Pretty much every single back doctor in the world suggests that you strengthen your core muscles, which I would do if I had them, but I’m pretty sure that my abs have actually dissolved. I don’t think I have abdominal muscles. [laughs] I basically don’t have a butt muscle or an abdominal muscle, and those are the muscles that they want you to strengthen, your glutes and your abs. That is something that they will always recommend.

I do use an Aeron myself, and it works very nicely for me. My body conforms to it, and it feels good. The special chair you should use is the one that makes you feel the least pain. Back surgery is a nightmare. If you can avoid that, I would avoid it. PT, for sure. Strengthen the ab, core, and butt, and find a chair that is okay. If you need to sit up in bed and write a bed, you write in bed. What can you do?

John: A friend of mine with back issues swears by peripheral nerve stimulator implants. Basically, once a year, they implant a little thing that basically keeps stimulating those nerves until your nerves just go like, “Oh, well, this must be normal. There’s actually not a problem,” but it’s a hassle to do, and you can’t get your back wet for a while, and things like that. There are other alternatives.

I would just encourage, and Craig, I want your opinion on this too, for Marco, this person says it’s not bad enough for surgery. That shouldn’t be the last person you go to. That shouldn’t be the last word on things. There may be other solutions out there. Don’t assume that you have to live in pain.

Craig: Well, as we get older, we will all be living in pain. Pain’s coming. You hear that, Makowsky? It’s coming.

Mike: Oh, no.

Craig: There are levels, of course, and there are remediations. The other thing that they sometimes will mess around with is radio frequency ablation, where they use radio waves to fry the nerve tips. It didn’t work for me, but some people have gotten relief from that. I don’t know where you live, Marco, but in Los Angeles, Cedar-Sinai has a pain center. That’s where I go, and it is a building full of doctors that are there to deal with pain.

The good news is that they have never suggested to me that the answer is opioids. Don’t worry about that. They’re not going to turn you into a junkie, but they really do concentrate on how to alleviate pain and to get to the root of it. It’s been good for me. I get basically two of these shots a year, and they work pretty well.

John: Let’s do our one cool thing. Craig, your one cool thing looks like it’s related to opioids.

Craig: It is. Opioids on my mind. I’m here in Vancouver. The guys here on the podcast who see me on my Zoom thing can see lovely gray slate rainy Vancouver behind me.

John: I want to say yes.

Craig: That is standard. Vancouver is a fantastic city. It has a brutal opioid problem. Anybody who lives or works here in Vancouver knows that there are about, I don’t know, six, seven straight blocks of East Hastings that are populated almost exclusively by people who are using drugs and primarily fentanyl and also now some sort of tranquilizer thing, like another veterinary tranquilizer. It’s bad.

The fentanyl epidemic is at this point just become the problem everywhere. There is an effort now to create a vaccine. You guys have probably heard of Narcan, which is naloxone, the thing you spray– Oh, you’re at a party. You see somebody go, and they thought they were injecting heroin. It was fentanyl. They’re dying. You spray this in their nose. It blocks all of the opioid receptors in the body and can help keep them from their central nervous system plummeting to zero. The issue, of course, is that has to be administered after the fact.

What they’re working on now is they call it a vaccine. It’s really more of a prophylactic. The idea is they inject you with something that binds to the fentanyl molecule, but along with it has a larger chunk of protein that keeps it from crossing through the blood-brain barrier. Basically, it can’t go anywhere, so it can’t hurt you. It just runs around your bloodstream doing nothing. This would be for people who are like, “Hey, look, I do use this drug, but I don’t want fentanyl, I just want heroin, I don’t want fentanyl.” It protects you against the thing that might kill you.
There are issues that this could create.

John: I could imagine.

Craig: For instance, then people are like, “I want fentanyl, I got the fentanyl vaccine, but I really want to get high off of fentanyl. I think I’ll just take twice as much as I normally did to overwhelm this.” That is a potential danger because one thing we do know about people with substance abuse issues is that they’re incredibly persistent and clever. The other issue, of course, is if you ever did need some sort of surgical intervention or something, if your blood-brain barrier is blocked from one or more methods of anesthesia, you may have a serious problem.

It does feel like, given how bad it is out there, something like this might be a good mitigation solution. It’s a very interesting thought because we do– Here’s what we absolutely know, telling people to not use opioids does not work. That is useless. We know that for a fact. Let’s see, maybe the fentanyl “vaccine” will gain some traction.

John: Great. Mike, do you have one cool thing to share?

Mike: Yes. In adapting this true story from the Annals of American History and then trying to make a show that appeals to more than just the 2% of people that would pick up a book about James Garfield, but also to the other 98% of people who are quite certain at the outset that they do not care about James Garfield and making a show with a little bit more of a modern engine behind it. There are a handful of other shows and films that have done it well, a small handful, one of which is a show called The Good Lord Bird from 2020.

It’s so good. It’s based on this incredible James McBride book, and it’s about John Brown, the abolitionist in his reign on Harpers Ferry in 1859 that, in many ways, precedes the Civil War. It’s adapted by Ethan Hawke, who plays John Brown and Mark Rashard. It’s so funny and weird and incredible. It’s one of the best adaptations that I’ve seen in a really, really long time, and I think very much is of a piece with Death by Lightning, hopefully. It’s just a show that I thought was really, really remarkable and that I wish more people still talked about because it’s great.

Craig: The Good Lord Bird?

Mike: Yes. It’s on Showtime in 2020, which was probably one of the reasons.

John: It’s probably Paramount+, I would suspect.

Mike: That’s a great question. I don’t know. I hope it’s available somewhere.

Craig: Let’s do a quick Good Lord Bird. Let’s do a little quick live Google. Good Lord Bird-

John: It looks like it’s on Prime, but I don’t know.

Mike: It’s really, really great. Would recommend it to anybody that likes my show and would want to do another historical deep dive. It’s very different from what you would expect it to be. It is rollicking and funny and strange.

Craig: Looks like it’s on Apple TV, and that’s about that. Oh, no, I see Prime Video. Yes. I think you got Amazon or Apple TV, both of which will be purchased by Netflix Warner Brothers within days.

Mike: Ethan Hawke is so, so good on the show, and Daveed Diggs is there. He plays Frederick Douglass.

John: That’s great. Again, that was peak TV, and so much was being made, it was so hard to just find an audience for anything, especially if it wasn’t on HBO or Netflix, even Netflix stuff disappeared. My one cool thing is a show that was made for Canada, made for Crave TV, is now available in the US on HBO Max called Heated Rivalry. Gay people know what I’m talking about because every gay person is obsessed with the show.

Craig: Every gay person.

John: Every gay person in Los Angeles or New York City. Basically, everyone on my Instagram knows about Heated Rivalry. What I admire so much about the show so it’s based on a book by Rachel Reed, and it’s created, produced, and directed by Jacob Tierney, who I want to get on the show at some point. The show is about professional hockey, and so it’s these two hockey players and their romance between them.

What is remarkable about it is, remember, Craig, we had Rachel Bloom on the show talking about sex on screen, and sort of like why we’re not seeing good sex on screen, and the show does it and delivers it in a really good way. There are sex scenes that are actually narratively important, really well shot, and story happens during sex scenes, which you just don’t see. It’s not just like a little bonus you put on there, it’s like, no, it’s like the sex is the point and the story purposes are happening during it. Just incredibly well made. Don’t watch it with your family, don’t watch it with your kids. [laughter]

Craig: Don’t watch it on a plane.

John: Don’t watch it on a plane. It is unapologetically smutty in a great way. I just really respect that they were able to make this show and put it out there in the world. Heated Rivalry.

Mike: Where is it?

John: It’s HBO Max in the US, and it’s just really, really well done.

Craig: Yes, so Crave is the HBO output channel up here in Canada, so typically it’s HBO shipping things to Crave, but I like that Crave is shipping something back.

John: Yes. It’s shot in Toronto, but set in many places around the world. Clearly, it made smart choices in pulling in the horniness of Challengers, the tennis show, but it’s actually making that subtext text and really nicely done. Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Foster. If you’ve an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. Please keep sending through those posts about the Scriptnotes book. Those are delightful. We’ll continue to repost those.

We have T-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkwear. They’re perfect for the holiday season. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You also get the first emails about live shows and other stuff that’s coming up.

You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and bonus segments. You get Mike’s episode from 2020. You get the Rachel Bloom sex episode, all those things, and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on coaching trees as sort of the growth of one show leads to showrunners of other shows. We’ll talk about that after the music. Mike Makowsky, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much for having me. It was a blast.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. This topic came from a listener, Rob G., who sent us in this article by Alan Sepinwall, who was writing for The Ringer, on which TV show has the best coaching tree. Here’s the setup. Football fans often talk about coaching trees, how so many currently successful NFL coaches used to work for Mike Shanahan, or how Bill Parcells at various points in his career employed Bill Belichick, Sean Payton, Tom Coughlin. I see you shrugging like you don’t follow football.

Mike: I don’t know who any of these people are.

Craig: John knows all of them.

John: I’m impressed I was able to pronounce these names.

Craig: The only thing John knows about sports are the names of those two guys in that hockey show.

John: Oh, really? [laughter] Hollander and Ilya.

Craig: There you go.

John: There you go. Absolutely. There are also TV coaching trees where producers or shows bring together many writers and directors who go on to have these amazing careers and, in some cases, create their own coaching trees. I’ll talk you through some of the ones they sort out, but then I also want to discuss why this may happen. The first one is The White Shadow, which I don’t really remember. Ken Howards.

Craig: I love that show.

John: John Falsey, and Joshua Brand, Mark Tinker, Thomas Carter, Tim Van Patten, Kevin Hooks all came out of that.

Mike: Well, Tim was an actor on the show.

Craig: He played Baloney. What was it? Oh, Salami. It was Salami. That was his name. Not Baloney.

John: Ken Howard is an actor. [crosstalk]

Craig: The former president of SAG.

John: SAG. He was Hank Cooper on 30 Rock. 30 Rock’s so good. Great.

Mike: He died a few years ago. When I first moved out to LA, I didn’t really know anyone, but my dad and stepmom were doing this dog charity that he and his wife were really passionate about. I got dinner with Ken Howard, and we really hit it off. He was the first person I ever met in the industry. He saw me as, I don’t know, someone that he would say [unintelligible 01:09:11] sure. Then he died three years into me living in LA.

My parents had a holiday party that year, and his widow comes to the holiday party, and she gives me this box. She’s like, “Put this in a safe place and open it tomorrow.” I was like, “Okay.” I was a little drunk. I was like, “Yes, thank you. It’s so good to see you, Linda.” The next morning, I open it up, and it’s this translucent blue and orange paperweight. I’m like, “Oh, that’s so nice from Linda Howard.” I’m like, “I’ll put this,” I don’t know.

Underneath it, there’s this note being like, “I just wanted you to know that Ken thought the world of you, so it seems only right that you would have a piece of him.” I have one-twelfth of Ken Howard’s ashes on my desk. The paperweights, it’s a company called Artful Ashes, and it’s the white shadow colors. They purposely did the white shadow colors. I see Ken every day. He’s my roommate. Isn’t that wild?

Craig: I’m thinking about who is going to get a little piece of me.

John: My instincts as well.

Craig: By the way, we now, both of us, have to send a little bit of our ashes to Mike Makowsky. He needs [crosstalk] weird collection.

[crosstalk]

Mike: My stepmom’s mother, who I was also really close with, died, and she was so inspired that she then contacted Artful Ashes, so I also have one-twelfth of Jan, and they live next– I’m collecting infinity stones, essentially.

Craig: Unfortunately, when you die, someone’s going to have to get all of your dead other people.

John: Wow.

Mike: That’s my Ken Howard story. That’s an incredible Ken Howard story. Whenever the white shadow comes up, obviously, I need to tell that story. He was such a great human being.

Craig: That’s awesome.

John: Let’s talk about that because it sounds like he was a great human being who also cared about the next generation. That’s partly what the coaching trees things were talking about. It’s like people who were apparently– they not only ran really great shows, but people developed underneath them who could take those lessons and do their own things. The Golden Girls, obviously, ran for a long time, was an accommodate institution. Mitch Hurwitz, Mark Cherry, Christopher Lloyd, all came from that. Christopher Lloyd went on to do Modern Family. Nash Bridges, Damon Lindelof, Sean Ryan, Glenn Mazzara.

Mike: Was Carlton [Cuse] on-

Craig: I believe he was.

John: I feel like they met on that.

Craig: I think that’s where he took Damon under his wing.

John: X-Files, Howard Gordon, Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, Tim Minear, Darin Morgan.

Craig: Wow. Look at this.

John: Incredible. When you get to The Office, of course, we’ve had Mike Schur on the show, but Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak, but also Paul Lieberstein, Justin Spitzer, Lee Eisenberg, and Gene Stupnitsky. Incredible writers who all went off and ran things.

Craig: Your show of shows.

John: Your show of shows.

Craig: That’s the immediate thing I thought of, and it is number one on this list. This was their stacked writing staff. Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen. What the hell? There’s a really interesting book about them that’s called Madness on Something Floors. It was just like the story of what that place was like with those guys when they were all, I guess, in their 20s and 30s. Neil Simon alone. Incredible.

John: The article also talks about Roseanne was not a happy place to be working, but obviously, amazing people came through there. Josh Weed, Amy Sherman-Paladino, Chuck Lorre, Norm MacDonald, Dana Jacobson, Bruce Helford. A difference, though, is that these are shows that most of these are– they ran 22 episodes per season. They had large writing staffs. There was a lot of you’re at that a lot, and so you got a lot of chance to just do stuff, and that helps you develop your craft and your career. Shows where you’re writing eight episodes, there’s just going to be less opportunity to learn from all that stuff.

Craig: Or a show like the one that Mike does where there’s nobody. Nobody learns. By the way, that’s my- [crosstalk]

John: Nobody learns. Chernobyl.

Craig: Exactly. Yes. Nobody learns, but it is interesting to look at how many shows there have been that were in this model. Quite a few shows now, even though maybe they’re not doing 22 episodes, maybe they do fewer. I’m thinking of shows like Hacks or something. There are still people on staff who are learning and growing.

John: They will [inaudible 01:13:57] it.

Craig: What it really comes down to, I think, is who’s running it and how good are they at picking talent? The people who were running these shows, Sid Caesar had choices. He was like, “All right, out of all the people I could hire, I like these people.” 100% accuracy on that. You have to look at the folks that were running White Shadow or Sopranos, David Chase. These guys had been around with some of these other people in other rooms before, but they knew, okay, I’ve been on a bunch of shows. I now have my chance to write my show. I’m taking this one, this one, this one, this one. Then those people are like, “Ooh, and you should take this one and this one.” The coaching tree is really a taste tree, I think.

John: Yes, I think that’s crucial. Thinking back to our guests, Abbott Elementary. We had Quinta Brunson on. We also had Brittani Nichols on, who’s grown season by season by season. She’s now an EP on the show. Five years from now, as we’re looking at this list, there’s going to be a ton of writers who’ve come out of Abbott Elementary who are controlling this business. It’s thanks to end the show on some happy news that sometimes things grow and change, and develop because people are good and they make good things.

Craig: Then you die, your ashes go into a chunk of Lucite, and it is sent to a guy.

Mike: To me. I will take your ashes.

John: You’ll take your ashes. On the future side, there’s less of this because you don’t have a chance to develop a staff. I would hope that I’ve had a very good run of assistants who’ve gone on to do amazing things and grown their own places. Rawson, and Dana, and Chad, and Stuart, and Drew, and Megan McDonald, and Megan– everyone’s gone off and killed in industry, which has been nice, too. That’s also a testament to you.

Craig: I’m sure you have great taste in picking assistants. You’re really good at this. As a recipient of this, I do have to acknowledge David Zucker, who taught me a lot, and Todd Phillips, who taught me a lot. Both of those guys didn’t need to include me to the extent that they did in the process of directing feature films, but they did. Without that, I would not– Those are essential things that I learned about filmmaking and writing and all of it.

John: Cool. Mike Makowsky, thank you again for being on our show.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Death by Lightning on Netflix
• Mike Makowsky on IMDb and Instagram
• Episode 448 (The last time Mike was on the podcast)
• Which TV Show Has the Best Coaching Tree? Alan Sepinwall for The Ringer
• Size matters: a single representation underlies our perceptions of heaviness in the size-weight illusion
• New evidence for the sensorimotor mismatch theory of weight perception and the size-weight illusion
• Friedman Personnel Agency
• Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
• The Ballad of Guiteau from Assassins
• The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
• Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda Edelstein
• A Fentanyl Vaccine Is About to Get Its First Major Test by Emily Mullin for WIRED
• Heated Rivalry on HBO Max
• The Good Lord Bird
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Luke Foster (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]
[applause]

Craig Mazin: Look at this beautiful crowd.

John: It’s lovely.

Craig: Beautiful.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Scriptnotes, a podcast and now a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

John: For folks listening at home, we are at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles. It is our book launch party. Craig, how are you feeling?

Craig: I feel very grateful because I believe everyone here is here because they bought a book.

John: They got a book.

Craig: Thank you.

John: This is the most books you’ll ever see in one place for Scriptnotes. Everyone has an orange book in their hands.

Craig: Yes. Cut to 400 years from now-

John: Absolutely.

Craig: -and our book is The Constitution of the New Country.

[laughter]

John: It’s the new Bible.

Craig: Yes. It’s Little Red Book.

John: Little Red Book.

Craig: Yes.

John: We have an amazing show for you today. We have Julia Turner here. She’s going to interrogate us about the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: Yes.

John: We’re also going to talk about Craig’s favorite topic, which is criticism.

Craig: Yes, I love it.

John: Love it.

Craig: Love it.

[laughter]

Craig: Can’t wait to talk with her about that.

John: Ashley Nicole Black will help us make a meal of leftovers.

[applause]

John: We’ll have audience questions. Craig, just this morning, you worked out a whole new game.

Craig: Yes. I love a little Christmas quiz. It’s a brief one. We’ll do it in between Julia and Ashley Nicole, I think. Just a little trivia quiz. I believe we’re going to need three contestants.

John: We’re going to need three contestants. You are already contestants. You just don’t know it yet. If you have a book in your hands, open it to where we signed it. If you have a star on that page, you are a contestant. Raise your hand if you have one of the starred books.

Craig: There’s a starred book.

John: There’s one. We have one.

Craig: Oh, there’s two.

John: There’s two. First, Craig, let’s have a seat.

Craig: Great.

John: The Scriptnotes book is finally out in bookstores. As people are hearing this episode, they will have gotten their preorders. They’ll be able to buy it at their local bookstore. We often talk on the podcast about starting a new project, but we don’t often talk about finishing, and just being done with a thing, and saying goodbye to a thing, because the Scriptnotes book is now done, it’s out.

Craig: It’s out.

John: We’re finished.

Craig: Yes.

John: Talk to us about how you feel about finishing a project, finishing a movie, saying goodbye to something.

Craig: It’s always sad. I get sad. We throw the term postpartum around, which I think is a bit insulting to people that actually go through postpartum depression. That’s a very serious thing. There is a postscriptum depression. There’s a thing that happens when it’s over because it’s been in your mind for so long, and when it’s done, and I mean done done, not necessarily like, “Oh, we’re on our third revision,” or something, you do feel like you’ve sent your kid off, and now it belongs to everyone. You just have to let it go, and it’s not yours anymore.

John: Yes. With movies, once you go to a premiere and it’s like, “Oh, it’s so exciting.” You’re seeing all this stuff. You’re doing press. Then at a certain point, it’s just its opening weekend, and it’s there. It’s no longer your movie, it’s the world’s movie. Their reaction to it is what’s going to keep it going or not going. I’ve had a bit of this experience with the three Arlo Finch books because I had the launch of the first one, great, but there was always a second one, and then the third one, and eventually, like, “Oh, wow, I’m no longer the person writing Arlo Finch books.”

It’s a weird thing to be done with it. It’s nice that it’s actually physically a book, that it’s actually a thing that sits on a shelf. So often we talk about scripts we write, and they get pretty fantastic, but if they don’t, all that energy, all that effort is just trapped in 12 Point Courier.

Craig: Yes. In a way, I think psychologically, I prefer that. There’s a world where the best outcome is you write a script, you perfect it, and then you encase it in Lucite,-

[laughter]

Craig: -and it is never read by anyone.

John: No.

Craig: It will never be tainted by their dirty eyes.

[laughter]

Craig: I love that, but the postscriptum that I’m really fearing is when I eventually get to the end of The Last of Us because we’re talking about years and years at that point. Now it’s like, “Hey, that’s a chunk of your life, and that’s going to be interesting.” I will either be terribly, terribly sad or wonderfully, wonderfully happy.

[laughter]

Craig: I’m rooting for the second, almost certainly the first.

John: A question people ask, like, “Oh, do you go back and read your Arlo Finch books?” Like, “Oh, God, no, I’m not going to read that.” People ask, “Do you watch your movies?” The answer is I really don’t. Unless I’m doing a special event for something, I don’t go back and watch old movies. I can understand why people would think you would because, “Oh, aren’t you so proud of it?” It’s not like your kid is going out to college or something.

[laughter]

John: It’s just like, “No, it’s there. It’s for other people. It’s not for me anymore.”

Craig: I can now watch clips online that occasionally go viral for the weirdest reasons from Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4.

[laughter]

Craig: We’re talking about whatever, 20 years. A couple of decades go by. Yes, I’m watching it like anyone else now. It’s gone. I can do that. I’m going to have to wait about 20 years per thing, and then I feel, yes, I could look at that.

John: The Scriptnotes book isn’t quite cold yet. Because it’s so awkward for us to talk about a book, we thought we’d bring on somebody incredibly smart to ask us questions about that. Our first guest is a longtime co-host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest. She’s also a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center. She’s also plotting some new media thing we’re not supposed to talk about.

Craig: Yes. Apparently, she’s got a scheme.

John: She’s got a scheme.

Craig: -to launch some sort of new digital journalism thing. It’s going to be based here in LA.

John: There was a Vanity Fair article about it, though.

Craig: I think a squib.

John: A squib.

Craig: A squib in Vanity Fair. I’m curious. We asked her backstage what it was called, and she said, “Fuck you, I’m not telling you.”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: Which I think is a brave title.

Craig: Amazing title.

John: I think it’s really good.

[laughter]

John: I’m going to have dinner for that.

Craig: Very catchy.

John: Welcome back to the program, Julia Turner.

[applause]

Julia Turner: Hello.

Craig: Hello.

John: Julia Turner.

Julia: Hi.

John: Oh.

Julia: Hello, everyone.

John: Hi. Before we fully hand over the reins to you, people may remember you because you hosted a conversation with us for our 10th anniversary of the Scriptnotes Podcast, which is excerpted in the appendix of the book. This is very meta to have you back here to talk about us.

Julia: Very full circle. I’m going to ask you mostly about that appendix.

[laughter]

Julia: How’d I do? Can we just stipulate that I’m the official journalist of Scriptnotes, I’m your official interrogator?

Craig: I have no problem with that.

Julia: All right.

John: 100% endorsed.

Craig: Your competition is literally no one else.

[laughter]

Julia: It would have been really embarrassing if you said no-

Craig: Yes, it would have been rough. [laughs]

Julia: -you need to think about it. [laughs]

Craig: Yes. Oh. Yes, we’ll take that under management. All right, official journalist of Scriptnotes, lay it on us.

John: We cede our control to you.

Julia: Okay. Let’s see where I can take this. I have listened to your show for more than a decade. I have spent so many hours in both of your company, mostly nodding in agreement, marveling at your stage wisdom, deeply amused, occasionally shaking my fist at you.

Craig: That’s me, right?

[laughter]

Julia: Both of you.

Craig: Okay.

Julia: More you. We’ll get to the part that I shake-

Craig: Yay.

Julia: -my fist at later. I have also heard you say many, many, many times that script-writing books are a crock and no one should buy or read them.

Craig: Correct.

[laughter]

Craig: I am consistent with that.

Julia: How did we get here? [chuckles] What made you want to write this book?

John: Yes, let’s talk about that.

[laughter]

John: Craig, have we changed our opinion on books about how to be a screenwriter?

Craig: No. I have not changed my opinion at all because, as far as I can tell, the only book that exists about how to write screenplays or write for movies and television that is written by two people or a person that has repeatedly done that job for decades is this orange book. It is unique. I don’t know of any other book like that. Most of the books are by people that did it once, or never did it, or were more analysts. I don’t think of this as inconsistent with my belief that screenwriting books are a crock. I think this book is a refutation of other screenwriting [chuckles] books.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: I hope that people do find it useful. That said, if they don’t, then we’ve just added one more pile of the crock.

Julia: [laughs]

John: Another thing I’ll say is that the subtitle in the book is A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters. It’s a book about screenwriting. It’s not a how-to-write-a-screenplay book. It’s about the craft and profession of screenwriting. It was a chance for us to share everything we talked about on the show, but also for the 25 interviews with other screenwriters in there talking about how they do their work. That, to me, felt like a valuable addition to the literature on screenwriting.

Julia: Yes. There’s a lot of expertise besides just the two of yours in there, but there’s a lot of the two of yours as well. I’m curious, when you first came up with the idea to do this book, were there particular moments from the show that you remembered that you thought, “That has to go in? I don’t care what else is in, but we’ve got to make sure this part is in there.”

John: Craig has a standalone episode called How to Write a Movie, which is such a pretentious title for an episode.

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s him giving his lecture on what writing a movie is like to him. It’s so specific to his point of view that it became pretty clear that’s just a chapter in and of itself. Literally, it’s the text of that episode. Very lightly edited, it becomes that one chapter. To me, it was talking through pushing back against the idea of what structure is, and that structure is something you impose upon a story. The structure is really instead something natural that evolves out of story. The structure is characters doing things.

Those conversations we kept coming back to about specificity, about pitching, about notes, and trying to make sure that the book was full of the kinds of things we talked about on the episode, but most of the chapters are not the one episode we did about that topic.

Craig: Right. I think that as, honestly, John and our excellent team did the vast majority of curation here, there’s, I think, a really good job of gleaning out those very practical moments from the podcast over the years where we’re like, “Okay, here’s something just about transitions from scene to scene. Here’s what conflict, different kinds of–” those things are very useful to people, I think, particularly useful to people who are good enough to be screenwriters.

Ultimately, you’re writing a book for people that are interested in screenwriting and screenwriters from a objective point of view, or who want to be and will be. It hopefully would help them along, but I also love the choices of the interviews with the guests that we’ve had over the years because it’s quite a startling group of people when you look at it in the aggregate.

Julia: When you guys read the early drafts, I think you’ve spoken about this, Craig, that one of the joys of podcasting is you can just talk and talk and talk, and it’s not quite the same as writing something down. It doesn’t have quite the same weight. You can be more exploratory. You can be more conversational. Also, at least in my experience as a long-time podcaster, sometimes you just forget what you said. You’re talking into the ether.

Craig: I forgot what we said when we got out here.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: Yes, you remember nothing.

Julia: Was there anything that surprised you when the corpus of your work was brought back to you with the help of your assistants? Were there any things that you had said or that each other had said that you were like, “What the hell? I don’t believe that at all.”?

Craig: No, I don’t think there was anything where I was like, “Oh, no, John,-

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: -I never said this about the Holocaust.” It was nothing like that.

[laughter]

Craig: It was amazing to go through it and read it and think, “These guys sound pretty good.”

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: It’s impossible to remember those moments. There’s so many of them. We’ve done a game where Matthew reads us quotes of things we’ve said. I think we did it at Austin, and he’s like, “Which one said it?” We don’t know.

John: [chuckles]

Craig: It’s how many years?

John: Yes, about 15 years.

Craig: 15 years of talking.

John: One of the real decisions we had to make with the book was, clearly, it’s not going to just be the transcripts, but are John and Craig going to speak with individual voices in it, or is it going to be one collective voice? We tried it with some breaking into John says a thing and Craig says a thing. It just did not work at all. We had to go through and strip all that out and make it just one consistent us voice throughout it.

What was good about it is that even though Craig and I will disagree some on the show, mostly it’s a conversation, and mostly we’re rowing in the same direction. There’s a lot of times where it’s a paraphrase of something Craig said or I said, but it makes sense as one’s collective voice in the book. It was challenging to make it read right, but it wasn’t challenging to make all the opinions fit together the right way because,-

Craig: We tend to agree.

John: -yes, 90% of things about the process of writing, we agree on.

Julia: It is interesting because it does feel new. As someone who’s listened to all these episodes, it’s fun to encounter this synthesized voice. I’m curious. I’ve heard you say that before, that the back and forth didn’t work. What didn’t work? What was bad about it?

John: It was jarring to get halfway through a page, and then Craig says a thing, and then John says a thing, and then we’re back. Whose voice are we in when we’re back? It just felt really, really strange, and so it didn’t work. It was nice visually on the page to break stuff up, but it never worked quite right. We had to either do a lot of it or do none of it. We just took it all out.

Craig: It’s also transcript-y and we provide transcripts. In a way, you’d feel like you just are selling me the transcripts.

John: The only section in the book that’s still transcripts is the section with you at the end.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: It’s the appendix.

Craig: And the index.

John: Then, when we did the interview chapters with our guests, we basically cut ourselves out of it, so it was just their words and did that light passage. It feels like it’s just them talking. Occasionally, you might see me or Craig pop in there to pull a point out, but it’s not really that feel.

Julia: Do you guys think that if you had read this book at the beginning of your careers, it would have changed how you approached anything, saved you from any mistakes or follies?

Craig: Absolutely.

Julia: Which ones? How so?

[laughter]

Craig: This is all I had when I started. Really, the answer is all of it because all I had was a line graph from Sid Field that was 30 pages, first act, 60 pages, second act, 30 pages, and then midpoint. What the fuck good is that? I remember sitting there. There’s 21-year-old Craig sitting there, wherever, on a park bench, making lines for these ideas I had. It’s useless. I didn’t have anything like, “Okay, let’s talk about dialogue, let’s talk about conflict, let’s talk about scene work, let’s talk about transitions, let’s talk about structure as a function of relationship, dramatic argument,” any of that. All of that just had to be instinctive and then learned. I do think it would have helped me dramatically.

John: Craig and I both came up as solo screenwriters, essentially. Craig had a writing partner for a while, but essentially, we were just doing all the work by ourselves. We weren’t in a TV writer’s room where we had other people to bounce ideas off of and see, “Oh, this person tried this thing, this didn’t work. How do we make this?” We didn’t have that back and forth to see how it feels to grow a story.

We just had these bad books to start with, and screenplays to read, but there weren’t as many available screenplays for us to read. It was harder to get up to speed. Hopefully, this gets people up to speed and makes people think, “Oh, okay. Now I get what it would be like to be a screenwriter.” Hopefully, a lot of them will say, “I don’t want to be one,” and then they can move on to something else.

Craig: Perfectly fine.

John: Absolutely fine. If it scares you away–

Craig: That’s actually an incredible outcome.

John: It’s a gift.

Craig: Saved you a lot of time and misery, and you can proceed forth to cure cancer, which is what you’re supposed to do.

John: [laughs]

Craig: If you are only interested as a student of film, then I just think it’s interesting without being practical.

Julia: Speaking of all the people who should not become screenwriters and go cure cancer, I’d be curious to hear you guys talk about the moment that we’re at in Hollywood right now. I feel like the vibe in this town,-

[laughter]

Julia: It’s a little like, “Are we Detroit?”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Julia: Is this going to still happen?

Craig: Detroit’s doing better, I think, currently.

Julia: Detroit has a long and beautiful trajectory. I spent a lot of great time in Detroit, but I think you know what I mean.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: I’d be curious to hear you guys– I have this, too, in journalism. Sometimes young people come to me and say, “Oh, how do I become a journalist?” I wonder, is the only responsible answer to give them run for the hills?

I’d be curious to hear you guys both talk about how the industry feels to you right now as compared with your previous decades working, and what it means to publish a book that’s inviting people into this trade at a moment like this.

Craig: What an insinuation.

[laughter]

John: We were very mindful of the fact that this book, we want it to feel eternal. Even though it’s capturing this moment, it’s not really so specific about the US film and TV industry as it stands right now. That it should hopefully feel like if you’re writing scripted entertainment, if you’re writing narrative with characters who are doing things, this should still apply. A lot of these lessons would apply for theater and for other kinds of writing.

I do think that we’re probably at a transition point where this next generation that’s rising up is going to make a new, different thing that is as different from the existing film and television as what the ’70s were in terms of how they upended our film culture, just because the gatekeepers are not letting them make the things in their system, so they’re going to make stuff outside of their system.

That new generation will find a new way to do stuff. Hopefully, some of the stuff that we’re talking about here in terms of thinking about how characters are driving the story, thinking about how theme emerges from conflict, those should hopefully be universal ideas that will continue.

Craig: Goes back to the Greeks. So far, so good for that. Yes, Hollywood has its ups and downs, and it also has chaos, and it has always been hard to break in as a writer. If it is twice as hard now, you’ve gone from a 0.02 chance to a 0.01 chance, it doesn’t impact you. I guess this is the message that I would give to people is don’t be disheartened by the chaos of Hollywood. No one knows who will own Warner Brothers next year. No one. It’s madness out there. Also, continue to make an enormous amount of television, they continue to spend a lot of money on content, billions of dollars every year. The chaos of them is theirs.

We don’t run Hollywood. We don’t own it. Not my problem. My problem is to do the thing that people like us have been doing forever for audiences, which is to entertain them. That’s what we do. The people who run this business, whether they are hair on fire, falling down, selling to each other, falling apart, and yet the audience will still need to watch stuff and to experience things. I guess the answer is it doesn’t matter. As long as people want to continue to watch things, then the people who write them are fine. It’s the people sitting in the boardrooms that, “Hmm, that must be fun these days.”

Julia: I think one broader question out of that that I also would love to hear you guys on is, why should people be screenwriters? Why should people do this thing that people have been doing since the Greeks, and probably before?

Craig: Don’t think should is the right. The problem is you need to. People who end up doing what we do do it because they have to do it. It’s a compulsion. It can’t possibly be a choice. If you have to choose every time, you’re actually going to choose no every time in a row because it’s hard at all phases. I don’t know why people become stand-up comedians, but clearly they must be compelled to do it because it is brutal. Brutal. That’s the best answer I can give.

John: I’d say that there’s–

[laughter]

Craig: You’re trying to figure out why you do this?

John: I’m trying to think why I should try it.

Craig: Quit.

[laughter]

John: I’m allowed to stop?

Craig: [laughs]

John: I think there’s a compelling– Craig and I often talk about how we were the kids who just sat around in our rooms and just imagined things all the time. I get paid just to imagine stuff and write those words down. That happens. It’s exciting that that’s my job, just to imagine whole worlds of things. There’s always going to be folks who are skilled at writing, who are skilled at sitting down and creating something new that wasn’t there before.

What’s different about screenwriting is that you’re doing it as the first step in a plan that is going to involve hundreds of other people to make a thing. The mechanics behind that will probably change, and they have changed a lot over the years, but I think that’s still a very universal idea. I think if you’re a listener to the show or someone who’s reading the book who says, “Yes, I want to do that thing because I have that drive,” there’s still going to be a way to do that no matter what happens in this crazy structure we have.

Julia: I have a question for you about AI.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: This book does not encompass AI. Makes sense.

Craig: Written by AI.

[laughter]

John: It was not written by AI.

[laughter]

John: Wait. I was very mindful as we were finishing up this book, like, “Oh, shit, a year from now, could an AI take all of our transcripts and generate something that’s–”

Craig: A year from now? Oh, that shit’s happened already. That boat sailed, yes.

Julia: Yes. I was going to ask, actually, if you had AI alongside your assistants scrape the corpus and see what it thought was important.

Craig: No.

John: Really, the scraping of the transcripts happened three years ago. If it were happening now, of course, you would throw it all into Gemini or something and say, “When did John and Craig talk about this topic?” It could pull up all those references. Instead, it was Drew and Chris and our amazing interns just googling our transcripts to find out when we talk about those things.

Julia: You guys, I think of you both as being technophiles and tech curious, not being Luddites, not being avoidant. Also, I feel like I’ve observed you both, even Robot John, being repulsed by some of what AI is bringing us. I feel like in my own life, I’ve seen, I don’t know, two different paths. I feel like there are people in my life who are like, “I’m never going to try it. I’m not using it.” Then I feel like the people who start to play with it. “What feels right? What’s the right way to play with it? What’s the wrong way?”

I’m curious, if this book is the staple of screenwriting schools that you hope, I assume it will be, and you’ve got to re-release it in four or five years with a second edition, what would the chapter about AI say? Are you guys AI curious, AI loathsome?

John: I don’t think a second edition would ever have an AI chapter because it would be automatically out of date. There’s no way to keep up to that level.

Craig: That’s just an apology to our AI masters.

John: Absolutely.

[laughter]

John: Will an AI ingest this book? Absolutely. It already has ingested this book, I’m sure, because the e-book will be out there someplace. You’ll ask questions. It’ll have some of our answers in there mixed into it. That’s also just culture. It’s just everything does get recycled and repurposed and put back at you. It doesn’t happen at the speed that we’re used to with it now.

Craig: I just find it gross. I don’t turn away from AI because I’m a technophobe. I love technology. I just find it to be crap. I think it’s crap technology. I think it’s boring. When I look at what people will show me that AI has done, I find it boring and flat and dead. That’s not surprising because it’s entirely built on the bits and pieces we’ve put out there, or in the case of language, just language. Not the stuff that language emerges out of, just the language.

I think I’ve shied away from it because it’s like, “Okay, I’m a carpenter. I like working with my hands and building something that’s beautiful,” and own the road, there’s a factory that just goes stamp, stamp, stamp, smash, smash, IKEA table, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with IKEA tables. God knows I’ve attempted to build so many of them.

[laughter]

Craig: My prior fear about AI, which is that it was just going to swamp our humanity and take over everything, new fear about AI is that it sucks, and our economy is about to take a huge dump because it has been built around the idea that it doesn’t, except I think it does. We’re going to find out, everyone.

[laughter]

Craig: Either way, we’re fucked.

John: Coming back to you,-

[laughter]

John: -the word we say way too often on the show is specificity, and specificity as in how is something unique to the writer’s own experience. That’s a thing that an AI just is never going to have. AI doesn’t have a point of view on anything because it doesn’t have any internal logic. It’s never in a space. It’s never in a body. It’s never that stuff. That’s why Craig and I were talking about doing a New York Times editorial and stuff, and we decided against it.

The thesis would have been screenwriting will survive AI, if anything. It survives AI because our job, weirdly, is to imagine a place, put ourselves in it, describe what we’re seeing, what it feels like, what’s actually driving, to be inside those characters, and that’s a uniquely human experience. Will there be AI-generated screenplays? Of course. Will there be good art made out of this? I don’t think so. I do feel some safety just because of the things that these systems are designed to do. I wanted to turn back a little bit towards you. Now, I do want to have a little discussion about cultural conversation and criticism.

Julia: Who will say in the future if the art is good? Segue man?

John: Absolutely. Oh my God, she stole the segue from me.

[laughter]

Craig: Dude, listen to the show.

John: Absolutely, as critics, on Slate Cultural Gapfest, which everyone should listen to. It’s phenomenal. By the way, Scriptnotes is completely ripped off from the Slate formula where they have–

Craig: We are?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, I gave you so much credit for this.

Julia: [laughs]

John: They have endorsements. We have One Cool Thing. The idea.

Craig: Oh my God. We stole it all?

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: It’s really very similar.

Craig: The credits work the same.

John: The setup of what we’re going to talk about on the episode.

Craig: My innocence.

[laughter]

John: The fact that we have some structure and it’s all not just one rambling conversation, that comes from Slate.

Craig: Thank you, Slate.

Julia: Slate invented it. No one else had ever done it before.

John: Every week, though, you have three topics. You’re picking what things in culture you want to talk about. Is it harder now? In the age of this infinitely generated artificial stuff, has it changed?

Julia: I don’t think we are yet beset by actual AI content. The content, the art that we’re talking about, the movies, the television shows, is written by humans for humans. I feel like one of the things that is a perverse possible upside of the rise of AI is that it forces us to really think about and understand what it is to be human, and what the point [chuckles] of it is, and what’s amazing about it, and to seek out and value the best part of it.

That’s what I love about art. I feel like most art is grappling with the question on some level of what is it like to be human, and some aspect of that, and some subset of that. The opportunity to consume it every week and talk about it with smart critics and try to understand what it means, and whether it’s good, and if so, why, and if not, why not, it feels like a real privilege and really fun.

John: Craig, you classically are not such a fan of-

Craig: Criticism.

John: -criticism. Talk to me about when Julia says that they’re grappling with, is this good? Is it resonating? What does it mean?

Craig: It means they’re figuring out if they like it or not. Who cares?

John: Isn’t there some meaning in how this fits into the larger picture of the art form?

Craig: Yes, there is. What you said that made my heart sing was, in a world where there’s a bunch of AI crap, maybe it’s going to make us appreciate the fact that all these things that are made by humans, there are things about it that are good or striving for something. It’s essentially looking for the positive impulse. I think a lot of times people presume that the only impulse behind certain things would be make money. People are like, “Cash grab.”

Somebody, the writer, almost certainly was really trying, even when other people were like, “Hey, we’re offering you a job, and you got to pay your bills.” That person tried to do something good. I think following that is a wonderful thing. My issue with criticism really does come down to the notion that some people have a privileged opinion. Really, it just means if you like something or not. If you do, you do.

I like watching critics fight with each other because I’m like, “There. There it is. There. They don’t agree.” In short, what is the purpose of it? Now, the purpose may be to find people that if you articulate a point that I agree with, that’s fun. Especially if I don’t like something, it’s disturbingly fun to watch somebody else beat up someone you hate, but it certainly doesn’t help the artists, I know that much. It has created a culture where everyone is now Roger Ebert. Everyone is looking for that fun thing to put on Letterboxd, and usually it’s a dunk. I don’t think that’s good for us.

Julia: Okay, wait.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: I have been having this argument with you at home by myself for a decade, Craig.

[laughter]

Craig: Here’s your chance.

Julia: I have to say, I really value your opinion so much. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I used to take homeopathic medicine when I thought I was getting a cold, and I don’t anymore-

Craig: Yes.

Julia: -because of how laceratingly, how viscerally, how trouncingly you demolished the idiocy of homeopathy.

Craig: I am okay with criticism now.

[laughter]

Craig: Honestly, that’s a huge win for me.

Julia: Generally, I find you so persuasive and right. Then, on this, I find you so wrong. Obviously, I have a stake in it because I am a critic, or at least I play one on a podcast. I think the thing that strikes me about your take on it is that you seem much more focused on the verdict.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: The idea that the point of criticism is a verdict, good, bad, up, down. To me, the point of criticism and the value of it, both as a practitioner and as a reader and follower of criticism, is the dialogue, is the conversation, the interpretation, the search for meaning. I think criticism is important because art is important. It would be weird if there was Congress and no one covered it, or said what was happening, or said if it was good, or bad, or surprising, or new, or breaking a norm.

Craig: We have too much of that, I think, as well.

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: I understand what you’re saying, and you’re right, I do focus on the verdict, but the reason I do that– First of all, there are critics who are smart and thoughtful, and you are one of them, whether I agree with you or not.

Julia: Have you ever listened to my podcast?

Craig: Not your podcast.

[laughter]

Julia: You just presume it because I seem like I’m going to be in conversations. That’s fine.

Craig: I’m a little bit of a transcript reader.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: The listening takes too long. I can read so fast. There are critics that I respect in terms of their analysis and stuff because I think they’re really thoughtful, whether I agree with them or not. Walter Cha, for instance, has written things about movies I’ve done where I’m like, “That’s amazing,” and he loves it, and also, “That’s amazing,” and he hates it.” That’s an interesting thing.

The reason I focus on the verdict is because that’s what the rest of the world focuses on. I think critics can say to themselves, “Oh, it’s all about everything right up to thumbs up, thumbs down,” but no one else is really listening. They’re going for thumb up, thumb down, and then they’re combining that into a huge tomato.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s the only thing anyone looks at. That’s what’s happened.

Julia: You are judging criticism by the worst commercial output of it and not what the critic is doing, which is engaging with the work.

Craig: That’s how gun manufacturers talk a little bit.

[laughter]

Craig: No, I’m serious.

[laughter]

Julia: God damn it.

Craig: You can’t ignore how the product is used.

[laughter]

Julia: It’s interesting, though. We are living in a world with less and less criticism. Alan Sepinwall isn’t at Rolling Stone anymore. There will be fewer paid television critics reviewing season three than season two, and season two than season one.

Craig: I’ll miss Alan, whether he liked season one better than he liked season two.

Julia: He’s a great critic.

Craig: He’s a thoughtful guy. I read all of that because I was interested in his–

John: Wait, Craig, you read it?

Craig: Yes. There are a couple of people I read. I’m very specific about it. There isn’t less criticism. There’s less paid criticism. The critic industry almost orchestrated its own demise by propagating and popularizing the verdict. Now everyone’s a critic.

Julia: That’s just opinions. That’s not criticism.

Craig: Oh, well, tell that to all the people that are opinionating.

Julia: Don’t pay attention to them. I have no desire to be a screenwriter, thank God.

[laughter]

Julia: If I were making art in the way that you guys make art, the good critics would be important to me. I feel like not following them or reading them would be like making a phone call and having no one pick up on the other end of the line, which is not to devalue the experience of the audience, which is they’re moved by your thing, and they take the ride of your thing, and they have feelings about your thing. What the good critic does is assess why it moved you and how it did that.

Craig: Or why they hate it, and why it’s stupid, and why it shouldn’t have been made.

Julia: You’re just not reading the right critics. It’s so beautiful.

Craig: That’s not beautiful, I assure you.

[laughter]

Craig: The experience of reading, sometimes it is so personal, and so mean, and such an exercise, and, “Hey, let’s just be a dick.” It really is. I understand that you practice a different sort.

Julia: Or advocate for, at least. I wouldn’t put myself up with the truly great critics of our age.

Craig: Some of what we call the truly great critics of our age, I can do a nice tight 40 on why Pauline Kael’s most overrated voice in cinema history and should have never been listened to by anyone.

[laughter]

Julia: [unintelligible 00:35:51] 40 minutes of the show.

Craig: [crosstalk] That’s the tightest 40 minutes I could do.

[laughter]

John: My natural instinct is to be the peacemaker who makes everyone happy at the end, but I’m not going to do that now because I’ve learned in this book that conflict is good.

[laughter]

John: I thought we don’t have to.

[applause]

Craig: So good.

John: Yes, we don’t need to resolve this thing-

Craig: Damn, this is good.

John: -because this is an open, ongoing fight between love-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:36:14]

John: -and is a perfect time to segue to something that Craig likes much more than rallying on critics, which is a game.

Craig: A game.

John: Craig has a game.

Craig: I have a game.

[applause]

John: We have at least two people out there who have starred books. Raise the house lights if we can. Did the third person find their star?

Craig: Yes. Great.

John: We’ll have the three people with stars come up these stairs.

Craig: Come on up these stairs here or those stairs there-
John: Is there a stair there? Yes, any stairs.

Craig: -and join us on stage.

John: [unintelligible 00:36:39] over here. Drew has a stool.

Craig: Ah. [crosstalk]

John: Hello. What’s your name?

Kayla: I’m Kayla.

John: Hi, Kayla. Hi.

Kayla: Hi.

John: Kayla, take a step by the stool. Hi, Kayla. And?

Valeska: Valeska.

John: Valeska. Valeska, very nice to meet you and hi. Sita. Oh my gosh, we have an amazing– All right.

Craig: Right.

John: Craig, you guys are going to be gathered around this one stool.

Craig: Gather around the stool.

John: This stool.

Craig: You’re going to want to be close to that bell.

John: If you have the answer, you are going to hit that bell.

Craig: Let me ask you a question, guys. How are we with Christmas movies? Okay.

[laughter]

John: As a reminder to our audience, don’t shout out the answer if you know it. Craig will tell you the answer at the end.

Craig: Yes. If you guys don’t have it, we can open it up to the audience. It’s no big deal. I’m just going to read. There are five quotes from Christmas movies. Each quote is from a real Christmas movie. It is exact. They’re a little odd in their own way. They’ll go from not so odd to odder and odder. If you know the name of the movie that this quote is from, you hit the ding dong. All right? Do you want to practice?

[bell dings]

Craig: So gentle.

[laughter]
[bell dings]

Craig: Even gentler.

John: Yes, absolutely.

[laughter]

John: You can hit it hard. Don’t worry about it.

Craig: Yes. Find the inner winner, the person that wants to take the other two down.

[laughter]

Craig: First quote from a movie. “Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as it does for all who truly believe.”

[bell dings]

Kayla: Polar Express.

Craig: That is correct.

John: Nicely done.

Craig: Way to go.

[applause]

Craig: We won’t have an 0 for 5 situation. This is great.

John: They got it.

Craig: Here we go. Next one. “If this is their idea of Christmas, I got to be here for New Year’s.” We’ve got some people who know out there.

John: I’m going to give you a hint. This was the subject of a Deep Dive episode.

Participant: 500 episodes. [chuckles]

John: [chuckles] Absolutely.

Craig: Fair point.

John: It’s in the book as well.

Craig: I’m going to turn to the audience.

John: It’s in the book.

Craig: You want to guess one? Then I’m going to go to the audience.

[bell dings]

Valeska: Die Hard.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, Die Hard.

[applause]

John: One and one.

Craig: This one’s really weird. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”

[bell dings]

Kayla: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Craig: No.

John: Ah, [unintelligible 00:38:52].

[laughter]

Craig: No.

[laughter]

Craig: No. It’s a hard one. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”

[bell dings]

Valeska: The Grinch.

Craig: No.

Kayla: Nightmare Before Christmas.

Craig: No. Now we’re just saying titles.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: I’m going to turn it over to the audience.

Participant: Miracle on 34th.

Craig: That is correct. Miracle on 34th Street.

[applause]

John: We’re still tied one and one.

Craig: Yes. I love this one. Ready? “Come here, little one. Papa wants to see you.”

[laughter]
[bell dings]

Kayla: Elf.

Craig: Yes, it is Elf. Last one. Longest one. My favorite one. Many of you are going to know it. Don’t say it. “Next to me in the blackness lay my oiled blue steel beauty, the greatest Christmas gift I had ever received–“ I’m registering that. You can ring it, and I’ll finish it. Yes.

Valeska: Christmas Story.

Craig: It is Christmas Story.

John: Christmas Story.

Craig: “Gradually, I drifted off to sleep, pranging ducks on the wing and getting off spectacular hip shots. Hip shots-“

John: “Hip shots.”

Craig: -are the last two words of Christmas Story. Now–

John: We’re going to tie two and two, so we’re going to do a tiebreaker.

Craig: Okay. Well, the tiebreaker question is, what interesting fact unites all of these quotes? They all share one thing in common. It’s not that they’re in Christmas movies. Yes?

Audience Member: The writer’s Jewish?

[laughter]

Craig: It’s a good guess. It’s a callback, and I like that a lot. That’s a very good guess. I wasn’t going to do that two years in a row. That said, probably yes. No, I don’t believe the writers were all Jewish.

John: Did you have a guess?

Audience Member: Were they all men?

Craig: Oh, hey. Maybe, but that’s not what I was looking for. We’ll go past white, male, Jew. No, something about their connection to the movies themselves, the context within the movies themselves. They’re all doing something similar in their movie. Yes?

Audience Member: They’re all said by the protagonists?

Craig: No.

John: Oh, I think I know the answer.

Craig: Okay, don’t say it. I’m going to give you three one last chance. One last chance. Yes.

Audience Member: The last lines?

Craig: The last lines of the movies. Each one of those was the last line of their movie. You know what? Good job, you guys. I think they did great. John, tell them what they won.

[laughter]

John: All right. Often when you’re putting out a book, you are creating extra merch for the book. For the Scriptnotes book, we have Scriptnotes stickers, but the stickers were there on the table as you came in. I have done three books before this. I did Arlo Finch merch, which I still have sitting on a shelf. You guys get Arlo Finch merch. As the winner, you get to pick your pick of these three things. Tell me what you get.

Craig: I got to tell you, you can’t miss on these. Each one of them, life-changing. First, we have an Arlo Finch neckerchief. Yes. Everyone’s Christmas dream. An Arlo Finch towel. By the way, I wish people could see their faces. They are either crying with joy or deep disappointment. Finally, an Arlo Finch water bottle because you can never have too many big, dumb water bottles.

John: Which would you like?

Audience Member: I’ll do the water bottle.

Craig: Yes, there you go. Congrats.

Audience Member: I want the towel.

Craig: Hey, that’s good news. You got the neckerchief, the one you wanted. Thank you, guys. Thank you for playing. I was really surprised by the writers were all Jewish, and I don’t know why. I should have seen that coming. All weird last lines. Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all as the last line of Miracle on 34th Street. It is the subject of debate to this day. You’ll see a lot of threads on Reddit. Why does he say this? What does this mean?

John: What does it mean?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: I thought they were all voiceovers. They’re not voiceovers?

Craig: No, they are not all voiceovers. Our next guest I’m so excited for, she’s a writer, comedian, performer whose credits include Ted Lasso, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Bad Monkey, and Shrinking. Welcome back to the program, Ashley Nicole Black.

[applause]

Craig: Hey. I hope you enjoyed watching Julia and I beat the fuck out of each other for about 10 minutes there.

Ashley Nicole Black: It literally took everything in me not to run out on stage and join the fight.

Julia: On which side?

John: Whose side did you fight on?

Ashley: Mostly Craig’s.

Craig: Oh, wow. All right. I’m so happy about that, but I would have been okay if you had gone– I mean, I like fighting.

John: Ashley, we’re in the Thanksgiving weekend. This episode will come out later on, but this is the Thanksgiving weekend, and often there are people gathering together, but there are discussions, debates around the dinner table. It can get a little bit heated. It’s not uncommon to have some heated words there.

Craig: Thanksgiving drama.

John: Did you have a good Thanksgiving, most crucially?

Ashley: I had a great Thanksgiving. I’m from here, so my whole family’s here. It’s really the best. I lived in Chicago and New York for a long time, then I would see my family once a year. It’s such a treat to be like, I can just see them whenever I want. Me and my uncle can get tacos. It’s pretty cool.

Craig: I love that you love your family, and you became a writer even though you–

Ashley: Well, my family is Black, and I do think that it’s a different thing. I think there is the stereotype of a writer as like, I was so sad and my parents didn’t talk to me. I just wrote in my room. I think Black people are just like, yes, I had cool shit to say. I wrote it down.

[laughter]

Ashley: Our problems are external for the most part.

John: Ashley’s book is going to be so much better than ours. It’s like, you have funny shit to say, write it down. It’s a simple book. She sold it.

Craig: I’m just terrified at how accurately you summed up my childhood with that mean voice.

Ashley: I work with a lot of writers.

Craig: You were tortured. Uh-huh. Well, all right. Congrats.
John: Ashley, you have your own chapter in the book. Thank you again for coming on the show. We are now a chapter in the book where we talk through your stuff. When you first came on the show, I remember dropping off with Mike at your apartment. Meeting your great dog, Gordy. Now you have a house. You’re a homeowner yourself. You’ve kept chugging along, series after series.

I’d love to talk to you about being that middle-of-your-career writer because so often we have the writers who are just starting out. You are consistently working on show after show. What is your life like? As you’re on a show, do you always know what the next thing is? What is it like?

Ashley: It’s so weird because when you’re young– and I was cute. I was so cute.

Craig: You were so cute?

Ashley: I was so cute.

Craig: You were cuter?

Ashley: You’re on set, and you’re a baby producer, and you’re like, oh, my God. This wallpaper, it’s not right. Oh, my God. The showrunner’s going to kill me. Do you mind changing it? They’re like, “Oh, you’re so cute. We’ll change it.” Then you get to a certain point, and you just have to be like, so this doesn’t work, and it does need to change.

I can’t blame it on anyone else because I’m a VP, and no one would believe that my boss was going to kill me at this point in my life. It’s just such a weird thing to be like, I have the answer to the question, and I am going to have to say it. People don’t like it when that happens to women, but I have to say it. It’s just such a weird position to be in.

Craig: The boss.

Ashley: But not, right?

Craig: Right. Sort of the boss.

Ashley: Yes. Sometimes you’re in meetings, and you’re like, oh, it should look like this. Then, “Oh, well, we’ll see what Bill says.” It’s like, I said it.

Craig: We don’t need Bill.

Ashley: I did it.

John: Since we’re coming out of Thanksgiving, we’ve been answering a lot of questions for the book, and we have a lot of leftovers. I thought that because we’re in leftoverville, you could help us answer some questions that came from our Reddit AMA and from other times where people were asking us questions online. Your answers are just better than ours.

Ashley: Do I answer as if I were a woman, correct?

John: No, we want your real answer here.

Craig: Wait, that’s an option? Kind of.

John: This is a question from Jeff A. When was there a time that has held you back from writing, from sitting in a script, going to a meeting? How did you get over or not get over that fear?

Ashley: Wait, say that again?

John: What was a time that a fear held you back? And what worked for you?

Ashley: I would say not a meeting or writing, but as an actor. A lot of times you come onto set. We were talking about Vince. The first scene that I shot on Bad Monkey, I literally had flown, arrived, put my things in a hotel room. Then we shot that scene at two o’clock in the morning, and it’s me and Vince.

You’re a very low-level actor who hasn’t slept in 48 hours, and you’ve never been on this set before. You’ve never met any of these people. The first thing you have to do is try to be funny next to Vince Vaughn. I would love to meet the sociopath who’s not fearful in that moment. I think the way you get past it is just to act as if it’s already happened.

A weird thing about being an actor is you can get fired at any time. It’s not like, oh, I got the job. I deserve to be here. No, you can get yanked literally at any point. It’s like, “Your manager’s on the phone.” Oh, did she want to congratulate me? “No.” You just have to go in and be like, we are in this scene together in this moment, so I’m going to act as if we are both top-level actors, and this is what’s supposed to happen.

I will say the great thing is that most of the really crazy high-level actors I’ve worked with will do the same thing. Just be like, “Yes, we’re supposed to be in this scene together. Let’s go.” You just do that until you get past that initial moment, and then do it.

John: That’s great advice for anybody going into a room to pitch, or you feel like you’re not supposed to be in this place. This is beyond where you’re supposed to be at. You just say, no, of course I’m supposed to be here. This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

Ashley: Yes, I am here.

John: You are here, so change the fucking wallpaper because I’m in charge.

Ashley: Wallpaper was the worst example. It was the hardest thing to change.

Craig: It really is hard. Yes.

Ashley: He’ll say curtains.

Craig: Easier.

John: Haley Huang had a question. What is your favorite genre to watch, and what is your favorite genre to write? I’m curious if they match up for you or not.

Ashley: No, my favorite genre to write is comedy, hands down. I really got into this to make people laugh. I’m really curious about how drama writers work because what is the point of a scene if not to get a laugh? I will say that I watch a lot of drama and crime, and I probably watch a lot more of that than comedy.

Craig: I think I’m probably the flip. I like writing drama because it means I don’t have to worry about the punchline, the button, any of that misery. Did it. Don’t want to do it anymore. Watching comedy to me is– that’s what’s fun.

John: I love watching comedy. We’ll do our third rewatch of 30 Rock, and it’s just so amazing, but I just could never do that. I just don’t have the stamina or the brain that creates that level of joke density. I just can’t do it.

Craig: Kind of why we enjoy it, right?

John: It feels like magic.

Craig: Probably is why all the Oscars should go to comedies.

Ashley: Also, by the way, no one does. In a room of 10 people who are creating that joke density, no one person does that.

John: Again, I feel like I should be able to do it. I feel like Tina Fey could do that. I’m, of course, comparing myself to a team of experts who spent years doing it. Noah L. asks, when you were first learning how to screenwrite– Screenwrite as a verb is just weird. No, don’t like it.

Craig: Do not like it.

John: Who were the writers you looked up to and whose voices really inspired you? Ashley, any screenwriters inspire you as you were coming up?

Ashley: Yes, Shonda Rhimes, for sure. I think Grey’s Anatomy came out when I was in college, and it was the first show that looked like the world that I lived in. When I was younger, Kevin Williamson, I loved Scream and Dawson’s Creek, and those just highly verbal, Aaron Sorkin, very writerly writers, and I still have the issue of overwriting to this day, thanks to my love of those writers.

John: Craig, did you have any screenwriters you looked up to?

Craig: I definitely remember seeing Ocean’s Eleven and saying, okay, I need to know who this Ted Griffin guy is. I remember seeing Out of Sight and thinking, I need to know who this Scott Frank guy is. I read the script for Jerry Maguire, and Cameron Crowe blew my mind, even more so than he had already blown my mind prior with Fast Times, and then also Sorkin. I think a lot of people giggle a little bit because he’s so prolific, and because there’s that super cut of him reusing dialogue and stuff, but it’s great dialogue.

Ashley: Our legs went all the way up to here.

Craig: Yes, exactly, but it’s great dialogue, and he’s written– that whole A Few Good Men thing, I just– Oh, my God. Yes, so good.

Ashley: I think it’s also– maybe because you said A Few Good Men, it’s very theatrical in the sense that as someone who started as an actor, I like it when characters are trying to get a response from the other one. It’s so weird to me in comedies where the actors don’t laugh at the jokes. In real life, like I’m in a room here with you, I would like to make you laugh, and you know that that’s my goal. It’s weird to pretend that characters aren’t trying to get something from each other.

I feel like Aaron Sorkin’s characters are always directly pursuing tactics in a way that–

Craig: The whole opening of Social Network, just watching that ping-pong. Apparently, I think it’s true that scene was, I don’t know, 14 pages long. Fincher was like, “Aaron, I can’t open a movie with 14 minutes of two people talking.” Sorkin was like, “No, it’s four minutes. You’re reading it too slow.”

[laughter]

Craig: Fincher was like, “Okay, record it for me at the pace you want it to be.” He did, and Fincher, apparently on the day, was with the script supervisor, like, “Are we on pace?” Then when you watch it back, the clip is insane. Oh, so good.

John: In answering this question, I would say there’s always movies I admired, and eventually at some point I realized, oh, people wrote those movies. I didn’t know that people had wrote those movies.

Craig: They screen wrote them.

[laughter]

John: Once you actually start reading screenplays, which are so much more available now. I remember reading Quentin Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers and going to the last page and like, holy shit, and going back to page one and re-reading it again. You realize like, oh, that’s what you can actually do on the page.

Reading James Cameron’s script for Aliens. It’s like, oh, that’s what a movie looks like when it’s in courier. It was just so revelatory. That thing, I think, is so much better now is that because of the internet, you can just read all the scripts, and you need to read the scripts and not just watch the movies. Let’s do one more little side dish of a question here. What do you got, Craig?

Craig: This is a multi-parter from Clara A. “I’m an extremely long-time listener who, by happenstance, has found herself in a weekly writing group with local sweetie Megana Rao for the past couple of years.”

John: Megana’s the best.

Craig: “My question, what is your favorite thing about Megana?”

John: She’s not even here to defend herself. She’d be so embarrassed.

Craig: “Alternatively, Craig, do you still love millennials?” I don’t remember professing that.

John: Yes, I think you’ve said it on certain transcripts.

Craig: I do. Well, let’s talk about it. I’ll do another question because I don’t know if you have a favorite thing about Megana. That seems unfair.

Ashley: I feel like she’s got great hair.

Craig: She does have great hair.

John: Great. Absolutely true. Yes, we’re incredibly thankful for Megana, but it’s a very specific–

Craig: Yes, the kindest and most positive person around. Just such a great person. Yes, I still love millennials. I like zillennials. I think that’s my groove. There you go.

John: We got a few of those.

Craig: If you’re 28, 29, 30, 31, that’s a good crew. Nitzen has a good question.

John: Nitzen has a good question. Do you want to try Nitzen’s?

Craig: Yes, sure.

John: Nitzen asks, “As a beginner, is a credit for a bad movie better than no credit at all? What if that movie involves problematic people? Ashley, what’s your opinion on this? Julia, I’m going to open this to you as well. Do you think it’s better to have no credits or a bad credit?”

Ashley: I’m curious what you guys will say. I really don’t know. I think I would lean towards it’s better to have a bad credit because the people who care about credits are the other people who work in the industry, and people who work in the industry know that the way the movie turned out is not the writer’s fault, particularly when it’s an early career writer.
I think having had the credit and the experience is a good thing. No one’s looking at that going, “Oh, he must be a terrible writer because the movie turned out bad.”

John: Absolutely correct. Julia, do you think about credits? As you’re talking about something on, say, [unintelligible 00:56:32] are you always mindful of the things they’ve written around it or are you just looking at that one piece of work, generally?

Julia: Well, a professional critic with some expertise would look at what the person has made in the past and think about how this fits into the history of their career and the genre and the actors. There’s different levels of comprehensiveness in that. Yes, I don’t think you would look at an early credit and be like, and thus everything they make from there on must also be bad. You take the work on its own terms, but I think the rest of the surrounding history is context.

Craig: What about this idea, what if the movie involves problematic people? That doesn’t seem like something that I would– It feels like writers really don’t get– We get blamed for things in reviews that weren’t our fault all the time. Of course. These actors did the best they could with a bad script. I’m like, oh my God. No, they didn’t.

It doesn’t feel instinctively like when you see movies that come out and there’s hints of some problematic people involved, does it taint the whole thing or–

Julia: We’re going to do art from the artist, the whole thing, right now?

Craig: Sure.

Julia: Yes, I don’t know. Yes, I think problematic is a word that can do a lot and go a lot of directions there for this question, but yes, I think you take the work as the work.

Craig: The work as the work.

Julia: I think also people know that writers don’t get to choose who’s in the movie. It’s really interesting because we do get blamed for things that we didn’t do or don’t have any control over, and then we also don’t get credit for the things that we do.

Craig: Unerringly.

Julia: The number of people asking a director, when did you guys decide when the character would do this in this episode? It’s like, he wasn’t hired yet. What are you talking about? We never met that guy when we made that choice.

Craig: There’s a whole booklet that tells him what to do. It is amazing.

John: He followed the instructions well.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right. Those are some questions that were leftovers. Thank you so much for helping us out with the leftovers. It is time for our one cool thing. All right. Julia Turner, do you have one cool thing to share with us? I will say this is completely stolen from the Slate Culture Gabfest because they do their endorsements.

Julia: I do and I’m going to say it on this show instead of on my show. Okay. I hosted Thanksgiving this week. I had some beloved family over. We made some pies. They brought some cakes because there were also some Thanksgiving week birthdays. One of the cakes they brought was the Tom Cruise coconut cake.

Craig: How does everyone know what this is?

Julia You don’t know about the cake? Has anybody here eaten?

Ashley: I’ve tasted it.

John: I remember hearing about this, but I don’t know what–

Craig: I feel so alone right now.

Julia: My knowledge of this comes from Matt Belloni, who to your point about specificity, he has such a good eye for the detail that makes you feel like he was inside a room that you weren’t. Although he’s very clear that he also is not on the list of people to whom Tom Cruise sends a particular white chocolate coconut bundt cake for Christmas every year. Has anybody in this room actually from Tom Cruise received this cake?

Craig: Yes, there’s not going to be a big chance of that.

John: For [unintelligible 00:59:53] it’s just in case.

Julia: I’ve gone down to Rabbit Hole. They send it to the whole staff of–

Craig: I think they’re still raising more lights like I know there’s one person. No, weirdly none of us got the–

Ashley: Tom Cruise repels in.

Julia: I’d heard about this. I never tried the cake. It’s from a bakery called Dones in Woodland Hills. Apparently, legend has it– This anecdote does not meet my journalistic standards of rigor. It comes from a light Google. According to a light Google, apparently, at one point, Katie Holmes and Diane Keaton proposed a contest where they would each present Tom Cruise with a cake, and then he would pick which one he liked better.
Diane Keaton brought him this cake from Dones in Woodland Hills, and he chose Diane Keaton’s cake. Now he sends it to everybody for Christmas, and you can get it on Goldbelly. Ashley Nicole, you’ve had it. What do you think of it?

Ashley: It’s really good. It was so good. Everybody says it is, and you’re like, oh, yes, well, you got a cake from Tom Cruise. No, it actually is really good.

Julia: Also, white chocolate is a big no-no for me. You tell me white chocolate is in something, and I’m like, forget it, I’m not a bunch.

Craig: You liked it.

Julia: This cake is delicious.

Craig: Wait. It’s not called Tom Cruise Coconut Cake, I assume.

Julia: It is called White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake, and you can either go get it at Dones in Woodland Hills, or you can order it on Goldbelly. It’s excellent. We were talking about things with problematic auspices, but I just can’t lie, this cake was excellent.

John: D&D next week, we’re having the– yes, absolutely.

Craig: Yes, I got to get on this right away.

John: I’m a big believer in, you’re making a feast, you’re cooking all the entrees, the sides, buy dessert. Desserts are delicious.

Craig: Oh, yes. No one’s upset with you when you show up with dessert.

John: You’re not going to be able to top that pie.

Craig: Melissa just texted me. Thank you, Melissa. We have gotten one of those cakes.

Julia: Oh, from Tom Cruise?

Melissa: I don’t know if it was from Tom, but it was from Dones.

John: All right. We have live updates. Craig’s wife, Melissa, is here. She reports that that cake was actually eaten in the Mason household.

Craig: Did I like it?

Melissa: It was delicious.

Craig: Of course it was. Well, that’s a little insight into how my life goes. I’m like, “I’m alone.” And I’m the only one here that ate it.

John: Yes. Ashley Nicole Black, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?

Ashley: Yes. I may have shared this on the pod before, but I’m on a board of a charity called Letters to Santa. It is Christmas time. Every year, we raise a bunch of money and we buy kids their Christmas presents, but we also give grants of substantial amounts of money to their families. We also did letters to Altadena after the fires. Our idea is that the solution to poverty is money, so we just give people money.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: We’re going to send some money to the charity. Yes.

Ashley: You can go to letterscharity.org and just donate money if you want to do that. Then closer to Christmas time, I will be posting wishlists of the kids. There’s nothing more pleasurable than having a glass of wine and buying a kid you’ve never met a bike. It’s the absolute best. Follow me, I’ll be posting those wish lists, and you can buy kids their presents if you want.

Craig: You’re a good person.

John: That’s a good person.

Ashley: It’s the one thing.

Craig: It’s a big thing though.

Ashley: Then I’m just walking through the streets, sticking out my foot, and tripping people.

John: Ashley and Nicole Black, we should all follow you on Instagram, which is where I follow you, and because we both follow the same person on Instagram, I can see when you’ve liked a post. We need to talk about Simon Sits.

Ashley: Oh, my gosh.

John: We’re both going to start crying now.

Ashley: I cry every morning now.

John: This is a woman who basically fosters dogs and has the most charming stories, but then she adopts them away. You’re like, but what’s going to happen?

Ashley: Oh, no. Then I follow those dogs. I now follow those dogs in all their new homes. Everybody’s doing great.

John: Everyone’s doing great. Simon himself has a disorder, but it’s hopefully going to be okay. Craig, what do you have for a wonderful thing?

Craig: I’m going to go with a little nerdery.

John: I love it.

Craig: This fall/winter, as I often do, I am working with some friends to solve Puzzle Boat, I think it’s Puzzle Boat 12, which is put out through Panda Magazine. If you love very hard puzzles, go subscribe. One of the puzzles referenced something called Day of the Tentacle. There we go, dork. Okay. You’re my kind of nerd. I actually was not familiar with it because when I was growing up, I didn’t have a PC. I just had Macs. There were a world of games that were just PC only, the pixely games that I missed out on. One of them was called Day of the Tentacle. It was published by Lucas Arts, sort of by the same team that was famous for Monkey Island and so forth.

Well, turns out you can play Day of the Tentacle now on everything, including your iPad. Writers Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Ron Gilbert, Gary Winick. It is adorable. It’s a lovely concept that involves you three different friends who are sent into three different time periods, who can send stuff back and forth to each other through their little time thing. It’s dork funny, nerd funny, which I love. It actually looks really good. I think they updated the graphics for the iOS version. If you’re looking for something, I don’t know, probably costs like $6 or something like that, and you like that kind of point and click classic ’90s adventure, check out Day of the Tentacle.

[applause]

John: My one cool thing is actually the very back page of the Scriptnotes book that you all have in your hands right now, which is the thank you page. So often you read through a book and there’s the thank yous at the end and you’re like, I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what they did. We try to be very specific about who these people were and the work they did that made the Scriptnotes book possible.

That, of course, starts with our incredible producers over the years who not only made the show happen, but also got our transcripts together, which without the transcripts there was never going to be a book. The whole team at Crown was fantastic from buying the book in the first place, but getting it through all the stages of production and getting it into your hands.
Jody Reimer, who sold the book for us, is incredible. We had just amazing people the whole time through. Including our audience the whole time through. If we didn’t have people who were writing in every week and providing questions for us to answer, letting us know that it was actually worthwhile for us to be doing this for 15 years, there wouldn’t be a book either. That’s why I think the final thank you is really to our whole audience for making Scriptnotes possible.

Craig: Without you, we’re nothing.

John: Thank you very much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you very much. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our intro or our outro this week. Thank you to Raven up in the booth, Mary, Dax, Brenna, Dan, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you, Pamela Christlieb, Patty Lombard, and everyone at Chevalier’s Books, our official bookseller for this event.

Chevalier’s Books is on Larchmont, and we signed some extra books. If you’re listening to this podcast at home and you’re like, man, I wish I had a signed book, they have some there at the large font location of Chevalier’s Books. Thank you to Matt Inman, Mary Motes, everyone at Crown Publishing for making tonight possible. Thank you to Julia Turner and Ashley Nicole Black.

[applause]

John: Who out here is a Scriptnotes premium subscriber? Any premium subscribers? A little over a hand. Thank you so very much. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. Thank you all very much for coming out this afternoon for our live show. Thank you.

Craig: Thanks, folks. Have a great Sunday.

[Bonus Segment]

John: We have an audience full of people who may have some questions here. We’re going to bring down a little microphone or raise some house lights, and I’ll answer a couple questions from our listeners now. If you want to ask a question, let’s have you line up in this isle here.

Ashley: These people got up fast. These questions are burning.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name and what your question is?

Jonathan: Hi, my name is Jonathan. My question is, if you’re working on a script that overall is serious in tone, say like a grounded action thriller, but you have an opportunity to inject some humor into a scene, how do you use your internal barometer to know when you’re keeping it engaging and realistic versus when it’s overall messing up the tone of the overall project?

John: It’s a great time to also bring up the observation that we don’t make comedies anymore, but all the movies are funny. Everything has to be funny, but we just don’t actually make comedies anymore. The Marvel movies are full of comedy, but they’re not supposed to be comedies. Craig, what’s your instinct when you have, there’s an opportunity for a comedy moment, but it’s not the overall nature of the–

Craig: Ideally, if it’s the sort of thing that someone’s going to say something that’s funny, you want that person, that actual character to be witty enough or naive enough or proud enough or whatever their specific characteristic is to actually say that thing. The worst situation is what I just call quipping, where people are just constantly quipping at each other, and nobody believes that.

Things that emerge naturally that make you laugh, that’s a good sign. If you’re manufacturing it and there’s some sweat coming down your head because you’re trying to figure out how to engineer the plumbing, probably not a good situation.

John: Our next question.

Santiago: Thank you. My name is Santiago. I teach filmmaking to high school students. Going back to what you guys were saying about AI, I’m sorry, everyone. I guess part of my job is to introduce these students as they’re learning how, from script writing all the way to editing and the full production, how to involve technology and everything in their work and I just wanted to know if you had any thoughts on that because as it changes, it’s definitely something I’ve been thinking about.

John: Santiago, thank you for the question. Thank you for teaching. Teaching is great. You obviously have students who want to learn about film and filmmaking, and the technologies will keep changing. I think there’s that uncomfortable line between where you’re using the tool that helps you do the thing, like an online editing software, that’s not cheating.
If it’s generating scenes or cutting scenes for you, that feels like, oh, are you really learning how something works? That’s the uncomfortable thing.

Craig: You know how we had to learn how to add and multiply, then they gave us calculators? If you just start with the calculator, you are missing some fundamental education. Maybe, considering I’m sure that Santiago, your students are very interested in using these things, to use them in a way where you can talk about after they used it, what pleased them? How did this thing deliver what they hoped it would, and how did it fail to deliver what they hoped it would?

What could they do that would, in their hearts, be better than what this thing did, so that you can put it in some context?

Ashley: I would say no. I taught for a long time before I started doing this. For me, one of the jobs as a teacher is to create space to be uncomfortable because learning is so uncomfortable. Writing a bad script is so uncomfortable. Wanting to do good acting and then watching the tape back and finding out you’re trash is so uncomfortable, but that’s part of the learning process.

You can’t become a better writer until you’ve written a lot of bad scripts and you’ve sat in the discomfort of the distance between the movie you see in your mind and the movie you’re currently able to create. If the idea of AI is that it’s going to close that distance, then where is the learning if you’re not sitting in that space?

[applause]

Ashley: The feeling of like, oh, I can perfectly picture this moment in my mind. I have to figure out how to write it properly, I have to figure out how to describe it to all the department heads properly, I have to figure out how to make it work on the bodies of the actors who are their own individual people. Gosh, I wish I could just push a button and get the scene out of my brain.

That’s the work. The work is all of that communication. I would err on the side of–

John: What Ashley said is exactly right. Hopefully, you’re teaching your students how to write a scene, which is what she’s describing, and not a prompt. It is so hard, it’s uncomfortable when you’re having conversations, but the things that we’re talking about in the book and in this podcast are about, well, who is in it? What is the conflict? What are they trying to do? Those things are not AI-able things.

Those things are great discussions to have and then figure out what tools you need to actually use to generate anything out of that. The scene is still the crux of everything.

Ashley: There’s also the discoveries of the process. We’re shooting a scene, and two of the actors went to walk out the door at the same time and bumped into each other. It was so funny. Then it just informed the annoyance these characters have with each other. It’s like a moment that you discover that changes the scene because you’re doing the process of doing it.

John: A question.

Katie: Hi. My name is Katie and because things have been too peaceful, I have a question about critique and film criticism. I wanted to know your thoughts on the difference or the line between criticism and analysis. If film criticism brings out, maybe evokes more personal feelings than other genres like books or just anything else that involves empathy and projecting yourself onto the script.

I was wondering if there were any parameters that could help maybe delineate where those lines between analysis and critique comes into play, just like journalism and yellow journalism. Is there a way that we could delineate between opinion and critique or analysis?

John: Great. Thank you, Katie. Some of what you’re asking there is my instinct was, oh, I need to try to make peace and sort this all out and define, oh, no, you really have more overlap and agreement between things. I’m going to see if I can do a little of this. Analysis, someone who’s taking, oh, let’s look at the films of the ‘90s and what the patterns are that emerged from that.

Who were the filmmakers and where things go to versus a thumbs up or thumbs down on this movie. Craig, I think you feel– is that analysis worthwhile potentially?

Craig: Certainly. I’m curious to hear what you think about this because in my mind, under your question, I wonder if there’s this sub-question of how do we delineate what you guys do, which is what I would call thoughtful, qualified analysis/critique versus other people who just saw a movie, hated it [onomatopoeia].

Julia: The sound effects are very crucial, I think, there. I think all good criticism is analysis, contains analysis and interpretation and judgment. To be making art today and have the possibility that Wesley Morris at the New York Times might look at it and think about it, he is such an extraordinary critic and you should listen to his new podcast, Cannonball, which is excellent.

It seems much more fun to make art with that potential wise, deep, empathetic, generous, knowledgeable, interpretive audience in mind. To me, all good criticism contains analysis and soul. I think maybe Craig’s just reading the wrong stuff. I think thumbs up-thumbs down, here we are in the Coliseum, everybody go kill that guy, that’s not criticism to me.

Craig: Literally, the most famous film critics did that. Literally.

Julia: Okay, but when we go see– Yes, that was the schtick for their show to get an audience, but if you go back and read all of Ebert’s old reviews, we can argue about Pauline Kael later, I’m not a particular Kael stan, but when we go see stuff at the Arrow or the New Beverly, to go back and read the contemporary reviews, often from Ebert himself because he wrote about everything, it’s so fun.

It’s fun because sometimes he’s really brilliant and smart. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to have gotten it and it isn’t that useful. Nobody bats 1,000 and you get a sense of how it landed at the moment. It’s also a record of how the stuff was received. That criticism of the past is valuable to me and so is the criticism of today.

John: Thank you for your question.

Ashley: Thank you.

John: I’ll take one last question here. What is your question?
O’Neill: Hi, my name’s O’Neill. I have ADHD, not the fun kind, but the kind that’s very debilitating. My mind moves a million miles per second, but I write very slowly. I’m about a page a day-er. My question for you is how should I manage all of these thoughts when my physical typing limitations are so slow?

Craig: Okay, we have something for you and it’s called learning how to type. Now, that in and of itself may be an arduous task, particularly if you have a debility or a neurological disorder, but learning how to type will speed you up dramatically because I also think fast and I type fast. I think if I could not type, it would be a real problem for me.

I feel the pain. Learning how to type is worth it. There are a gazillion ways to do it online. It will be uncomfortable. The learning will be uncomfortable.

Ashley: Oh, no. You get a Mavis Beacon who says she taught me good.

Craig: By the way, you know that she doesn’t exist, right?

Ashley: I know. They don’t teach kids to type anymore.

Craig: No. There is no Mavis Beacon. They invented Mavis Beacon.

Ashley: Oh, I know.

Craig: I didn’t know that. I believed in Mavis Beacon forever and then he told me and I was like, oh my God, and what else are you going to take away from me?

Ashley: Will you guys make the Mavis Beacon movie?

Craig: There’s no Mavis Beacon.

Ashley: There’s a documentary.

John: Crucial IP that’s being underserved.

Craig: See, by the way, whatever works for you, it will be annoying and frustrating. Give yourself because it’s magic. When it finally starts happening, you can’t believe it. It’s magic and it will make a huge difference for you.

John: I fully endorse the typing of it all. We did a Reddit AMA yesterday and we were answering a ton of questions. Craig was typing as fast as he could, but I could answer faster because I was dictating. The dictation software has gotten really good right now. It’s worth trying it. Again, it’s uncomfortable at the start because you feel like I’m talking to myself and Drew’s hearing me talk to my computer a lot.

For things like emails and stuff like that, it’s much faster. I can’t use it for real screenwriting, but for getting all that shit out of your head and onto a screen, it’s really good. It’s good for generating material, but also just silencing some of that noise could also be really helpful for you.

Craig: Which do you use?

John: The one I’m using right now is called Aqua Notes. It’s Aqua Voice.

Craig: They’re listening to our voice. They know.

John: I’ve been trying to Google it myself.

Ashley: That’s a level of fandom that is frankly a little scary.

Craig: Also dissapointing like Aqua.

John: I think it’s worth– in addition to typing, because I think typing is really important software to help just get stuff out of your head. It’s going to be really helpful as well.

Ashley: I would say also, do you outline? For me, because I have ADHD also, I do so much writing before I start writing. All that stuff that’s in my head, I just write it all down in a Notes app, anywhere, just to get it out of my head and then outline. Then it’s like you’re just getting more and more specific up to the point of actually writing the script.

Then I think also it’s working with your brain the way it works. Sometimes I write the punchline before the setup. I was in a writer’s room once where I was up on the screen. They were like, “Did you just write the punchline first?” I was like, yes, that’s how my brain works, so I have to get it out in time.

I think instead of feeling like you have to start at the beginning of the first scene and work your way through the script, write what you know, write the punchline, write the last line of the scene if that’s what you have, and feel free to go back and fill in.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thank you for the great questions.

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