Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/anti-villains).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 590 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why do some people do bad things. More specifically, why does past trauma lead some characters to become villains, while others become heroes? We’ll wrestle with good and evil, right and wrong, and how that impacts the choices our characters make. We’ll also be answering some listener questions on character jobs and getting paid. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we will talk tattoos. I’ve now had mine for 30 years, but Craig, you are a newbie to the whole tattoo world.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Excited.

**John:** We’ll get into it. Now Craig, a few episodes back we were talking about phones and devices that executives used to have on their desks to tell their assistants about who’s calling in or, “Bring me a Coke.” We couldn’t think what they were called. Charlie wrote in to say those old things were called AmTels.

**Craig:** Yes, AmTels. It was an AmTel. Boy, I feel bad for the AmTel company. Where are they now?

**John:** They still sell them.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** We’ll put a link there. It’s amtel.com, A-M-T-E-L dot-com.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** They still make them. If you click through, they look kind of the same.

**Craig:** I’m looking. Oh my god. Oh my god. By the way, this website tells you everything. This website is like an incredible time capsule of what websites looked like in 2004 maybe.

**John:** It’s built with tables, the old way of the tables. You had to structure things with tables.

**Craig:** The little side menus that pop up and these weird window style boxing. This is nuts. They can’t still be in business.

**John:** I bet they could still make money.

**Craig:** I think this is a ghost.

**John:** I may get you one for Christmas, Craig.

**Craig:** If they can only sell one a year, that one might cost seven million dollars. Gotta keep them in business, John. You know what? They’re not in the business of going out of business.

**John:** That’s what it is. Flashback to Final Draft.

**Craig:** Oh my word.

**John:** Good lord. Back in the day, this is how an executive would know who was calling in, so they could see whether they want to answer it, hit a little button, say yes, reply, or, “Bring me a diet Coke.” Thank you, Charlie, for reminding us what these things were called and, wow, just a good flashback memory.

**Craig:** AmTels, wow, how about that?

**John:** That was all part of a discussion because I had asked listeners what should I do about my office phones, because they don’t ring anymore. There’s just really no sense in having them. Our listeners are the best. They have a lot of good suggestions, which Drew sorted through. One was a service called Dialpad, which is replacing a traditional office thing.

One that I found was most fascinating was, Adam wrote in to say, “I’m currently working completely remote as a producer’s assistant. We’re using an iPhone as our office line, and it’s been great. We can easily save contacts, merge calls with my boss and additional participants. I’m logged into my company email so I can quickly retrieve any relevant info if I’m away from my desk. I just turn the phone off during off hours so I’m not constantly checking two phones.” Essentially, Adam just has a second phone, which is the office phone. That’s the number it rings to there. He just does everything from that phone.

**Craig:** That is a very attractive solution, because the issue with the old phones is they simply weren’t connected to the systems that everything else is connected to. This is the physical object hardware version of the software solution of getting a separate Google account which I have for my business. That Google account is where we keep all of our contacts and we sink through all the things that I need to share with my assistant or my partners. This makes sense. It’s a little annoying obviously for an assistant to carry around two phones at the same time. You need more pockets. That’s attractive. That’s an attractive thought, although honestly, we just use our own phones.

**John:** The challenge is though, when your current assistant, when Bo is no longer your assistant, then who are they calling? They need to have a new number to call.

**Craig:** It’s the handover process of, Megana hands it over to Drew. A lot of emails have to go out saying, “Here’s the change.” There’s a few weeks of adjustment, but then it all adjusts.

**John:** Also, Drew shouldn’t have to be answering that phone at 1 in the morning.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, he should.

**John:** Oh, yes, he should.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, he should!

**John:** Crisis.

**Craig:** Drew, get me a diet Coke! I’m gonna ruin him for no reason at all.

**John:** Also, if Drew has that phone, what am I gonna throw at him?

**Craig:** Exactly. Now John, what I would suggest is you go and get some old phones that maybe are on sale for 20 bucks that don’t function at all, that are just being sold for parts. Just get 12 of those and just have them in a holster.

**John:** You’re set.

**Craig:** Yep, perfect.

**John:** The other solutions people suggested, and thank you for writing in, included Google Fi, Verizon One Talk, Webex, which some people are using. I think some agencies have moved over to Webex. We’ll see, but we’ll report back with whatever we decide as a solution for this.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Last bit of follow-up here, we talked about government influence on films, because we had these script consultants who were being paid by foreign powers. Phillip in Los Angeles wrote in. Craig, do you want to read through this?

**Craig:** Sure. Phillip writes, “In Episode 587, you spoke about how state influence on film is bigger in Europe than America. In many ways, you downplayed the US government’s role in films, specifically even military. The Department of Defense has a Hollywood liaison office that is more involved in scripts than the contractors hired in Europe. While this isn’t government dictating all scripts with military themes, access to military vehicles, equipment, and technical expertise saves studios millions of dollars and grants authenticity they couldn’t get otherwise. See Top Gun: Maverick.” There’s a link to an LA Times story covering that very thing. Phillip, agreed, but this isn’t about funding. That is not specifically funding. It’s about access, which is different, I think, than what we were discussing.

**John:** It is. I can also think that access to a lot of places where you want to film or things you want to use, yeah, you are gonna be consulting those people and probably even getting scripts cleared through those people. If you wanted to set a film on specifically a Native American reservation, you’re gonna have to go through the tribal governments there, and they might actually have some ability to say no, we don’t want you doing that. You can envision a lot of scenarios beyond just the military where there’s gonna be approvals that are gonna have to happen.

**Craig:** Tons of those things. Just in case people are wondering, there are always trade-offs. Like John’s describing, most places that are in a position to gatekeep are going to want to take a look at the material. Certainly, the Department of Defense very famously wasn’t going to let Top Gun or any of the movies that Jerry has made that connect with the military… None of them can say things or depict things that paint the military in a particularly negative light. Obviously, the military has no interest in funding something that makes it look bad.

Similarly, like you mention, we were all over Alberta. Our upcoming episode that’s coming out on Sunday was partly shot in Waterton, which is a federal park in Canada. There were all sorts of restrictions that came along with shooting there that we had to make sure we obeyed. Lots of trade-offs, but those are the decisions you make as a production. That said, Phillip, not quite what we were talking about.

**John:** On the issue though of military portrayals, it got me thinking back to an article I read a couple weeks ago. I’ll try to find a link and put it in the show notes about how the Army’s using these influencers who are TikTok star kind of people who are specifically there to sell how great it is to be in the military or the military lifestyle. “She’s an influencer, but she’s also in the Army.”

**Craig:** Vaguely insidious.

**John:** Insidious. It feels like propaganda. It feels like [inaudible 00:08:14]. That’s a different kind of thing than what we’re talking about with a script approval. I think that’s what we were worried about. That’s what we were worried about when we heard a script consultant from Europe, being like, oh, no, it’d have to include exactly these messages. These are going to be state propaganda films.

**Craig:** There is no free lunch, my friends.

**John:** If you’re trying to shoot a movie in Turkey these days, I bet there would be a lot of concerns and restrictions.

**Craig:** Yes, pretty much anywhere. That’s how it goes.

**John:** We have a bit of follow-up here from Pay Up Hollywood. Drew, could you help us out with this?

**Drew Marquardt:** Sure. Rekha writes, “Three years ago ish, during the beginning of the movement that would become Pay Up Hollywood, you mentioned Rob McElhenney as a positive example of how you treat your staff. On that same episode, you read from my anonymous letter as an agency assistant. At the time, I was so terrified I created a fake email so it couldn’t be traced back to me.

“As I’ve grown older within this industry, I’ve become much more outspoken about the realities. I moved out of the agency life, worked for some incredible writer/showrunner-led production companies, and now actually work with Jackie Cohn and Rob McElhenney. I’ve experienced Rob’s kindness and generosity firsthand. The environment he creates is so incredible and warm.

“I just wanted to point out this small connection, because it almost feels like fate. Technically, we were mentioned in the same episode, Rob as someone who is a great boss, and me as someone who’s really struggling, but years later, the universe actually put us together. I know the value of hard work and perseverance, but being raised in a lot of Indian and Hindu cultural influence, I can’t help but shake the notion that everything happens for a reason and some things are meant to be.

“Your work and your commitment means so much to me. Back then, even though you didn’t know who I was, I felt like someone was listening to me for the first time. Most people didn’t know that I was writing in at all. Sometimes I’m still scared because I’m still on the lower level side, but I think it’s important that we keep talking about it and all things affecting the treatment of people in our industry. Thank you all for being the first to listen and a force that kept me going.”

**Craig:** Wow, that’s amazing.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Rekha, thank you. I immediately tensed up at the beginning of her letter, because I’m like, “Oh, no, what did Rob do?” As it turned out, what he did was what he always does, which is be awesome. Rekha, you mentioned Indian Hindu cultural inference. I’m gonna teach you a word in Yiddish. Beshert. Beshert means fate or destiny. This is cross-cultural. Do I believe in supernatural fate or destiny? No, but it’s a nice feeling. It’s comforting. I don’t believe in ghosts, but it’s comforting sometimes to think of my grandmother watching me.

This is beautiful. I swear to god, I forget all the time that people even listen to this, much less are impacted and affected by it, but then I’m reminded all the time. Thank you for writing this. This is gorgeous. I’m just very happy.

**John:** I’m also pointing out, Rekha, just don’t sell your own agency short here. That agency may have started with you writing in anonymously to this podcast about what your experience was, but in sharing that story, not only did you put down in words what you were experiencing, you started to recognize that there were other people having the same experience. You got yourself out of that situation, into a better situation, then to a better situation, into where you are right now, which is just a steppingstone to wherever you’re headed next. I’m glad we were able to help, but we were only able to help because you spoke out and noticed what was going on around you and said, “Hey, this is not cool.” It does come back to you.

**Craig:** To be clear, when you say agency, you mean her volition and individual willpower, not the agency she worked at, which was apparently terrible.

**John:** No. That’s absolutely true. We want the good kind of agency, not the oppressive kind of agency.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Your self-determination is what we applaud.

**Craig:** I might actually feel good about myself until lunch today.

**John:** Nice. That’s all we can aim for in these troubled times.

**Craig:** It’ll go downhill.

**John:** The last little thing before we get into our main topic is, did you see the stuff about Dick Tracy?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do you remember the movie Dick Tracy at all?

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Dick Tracy, it’s a very brightly colored comic book adaption. I remember seeing it in theaters. I remember Warren Beatty starring in it. I remember Madonna was the woman in the film.

**Craig:** Tess Trueheart.

**John:** Tess Trueheart. I remember almost nothing about this film at all, but you know who does remember this film is Warren Beatty, because he continuously releases new things that are sequels to Dick Tracy, so that he can hold onto the rights. I just find it fascinating.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because he can and because he would. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that’s speculating how he’s doing it and why he’s doing it. This most recent thing was a Zooming with Dick Tracy, where it’s a split screen thing where it’s Warren Beatty and Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy and Leonard Maltin and another film critic.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** It’s just long enough that it actually counts as a sequel. It shows up on Turner Classic Movies.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it’s a legal thing to just…

**John:** It’s a legal thing. It’s also clear that he actually has an artistic pride to it that’s interesting.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because this was a comic book adaptation before they were all out there, so maybe it’s meaningful to him. Also, he just seems like, “Goddammit, no one is… “ He’s going to die owning this thing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s what he wants.

**Craig:** Dick Tracy, it was such a strange… Even when it came out. It was 1990. I was 19. Geez, Louise. I would read the comics in the paper. There are still comics in newspapers that are still newspapers, but back then a bit more common to read comics. Some of the comics were these ancient holdovers from my dad’s time, which you could tell were just soaking in this anachronistic, old-school way. It just was so old-fashioned. Dick Tracy was definitely one of them. He was a 1940s, ‘30s, ‘20s, 1920s-ish kind of guy. There were a bunch of Gasoline Alley and the girls in Apartment 3-G and Mary Worth.

**John:** Mary Worth.

**Craig:** Where you’re like, what the hell is-

**John:** I can’t do comic book guy’s voice, but he has, “This is the-“

**Craig:** “That’s the rare Mary Worth where she advises her friend to commit suicide.”

**John:** “Commit suicide.” Yes.

**Craig:** Mary Worth. I’m just like, “What is this?” Then when that movie came out, I guess I was like, “All right.” This is why these days when people are like, “Oh, we really want to make a Hungry, Hungry Hippos movie,” and I’m like, “It’s Dick Tracy. It’s old. Nobody now cares.” The point is, Dick Tracy was old-fashioned and out of date in 1990, which is why the movie was kind of a flop. What’s the point of holding onto it? Nobody knows what it is. It doesn’t matter. He has a wristwatch that’s a two-way radio. That was considered forward-looking technology.

**John:** Maybe it’s like holding onto intellectual property as actually just property, the same way people collect plastic cars. Maybe he just wants to hold onto this piece of IP for as long as it can be a piece of IP, because a copyright will expire. It will become public domain at a certain point.

**Craig:** This is like a very elaborate NFT.

**John:** That’s what it is. It really is an NFT before its time. I just thought it was great. I don’t have any particular comment on it. This idea of you have to keep making a thing to hold onto the rights is a real thing in Hollywood. Spider-Man famously, you had to make a Spider-Man movie every once in a while, or else the rights would all kick back to Marvel. Sony had to keep making Spider-Man movies.

**Craig:** I think lawyers have become much more savvy. The lawyers back when they made that deal in the ‘80s for the rights probably never considered that there was a loophole in which Warren Beatty could appear in the costume for five minutes in an interview and renew the rights for another 12 years. People have gotten smarter about that stuff, precisely because of things like this.

**John:** Probably the most famous example I remember is there was a Fantastic Four movie made by Roger Corman-

**Craig:** Yes, there was.

**John:** … which was just to hold onto I think Fox’s rights to it. They had to film it and then shelve it. It’s never been seen.

**Craig:** Somewhere on YouTube I think I’ve seen bits and pieces of it. It’s startling. Startling.

**John:** Startling.

**Craig:** Startling.

**John:** To our main topic today. This all comes out of Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and how villains come to be. When he laid them all out side by side, I realized they’re really talking about character motivation overall, whether they’re heroes or villains. So often what we think about, like, oh, that’s the reason why they’re the villain, you could just turn around and say, oh, that’s the reason why they became the hero. It’s basically the reaction to the events that happened or what’s driving them.

I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then in the lens of these articles, peel apart what are the choices that characters make that cause us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling.

**Craig:** Great. I love this topic.

**John:** Cool. We love villains. Craig, let’s just make a list of things that villains do, what we’re talking about when we talk about villains in the course of a story. What are villainy things?

**Craig:** In the very basic sense, old-school way, you’ve got cops and robbers. Villains break the law.

**John:** They break laws that are there to help society. We also have heroes that can break laws. Villains break laws in ways that harm society or harm the community. They oppose the hero. Sometimes they seem to enjoy causing suffering or misery.

**Craig:** Villains oftentimes are marked by cruelty or sadism. Like you said, it’s something that undermines the social fabric of things.

**John:** They are selfish. They may steal. They can cheat. They will lie. They’re power-hungry. Yet all those things are things that sometimes heroes do as well. Maybe we’re sussing out the motivations for why they’re doing the thing that they’re doing. Do they have a noble purpose behind it? What’s the explanation? This all is against a backdrop. So often in these times we’re talking about antiheroes rather than villains and heroes. These are the Catwomans, the characters who are doing bad things, but for reasons that we as an audience relate to.

**Craig:** Sometimes villains are presented as people who maybe had a righteous grievance but are taking things too far. That’s a very typical Batman villain, not so much the Joker, but a lot of other villains. They start righteously. They’ve been hurt or wounded or offended. They want revenge, but they’re just going too far, whereas Batman was wounded and hurt and decided to make sure that nobody else got hurt again. These are the two different paths sometimes that heroes and villains go down. Heroes supposedly are doing things to care about others.

In a Judeo-Christian, emphasis on Christian, founded country, the notion of sacrifice and sacrificing yourself for the betterment of mankind is a very strong one for heroes, whereas villains are interested in either accruing power for themselves or healing themselves at the cost of anyone else.

**John:** Absolutely. Both heroes and villains may have trauma, but it’s what they’re doing with that trauma. That trauma caused them to lose hope or it’d inspire them to do things down the road.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** That’s a factor. Also, look at the axis between conformity versus individuality or nonconformity. How willing is this person to stand up against the system? So often, we think about our heroes standing up against a tyrannical system. You can look at so many villains that are essentially the same kind of thing, where they believe they have the moral certitude that what they’re doing is correct and everybody else is wrong and therefore they will do what it takes to enact their vision. They’re not afraid of pissing everyone else off or blowing everyone else up in order to achieve their vision.

**Craig:** This is how you end up with that scene where the villain explains why they’re doing what they’re doing. “I’m gonna tear the whole thing down! I’m gonna make everyone pay!” and blah blah blah blah blah. This happens all the time with large-scale villains that, as you say, are nonconforming.

We have this impulse to both conform and nonconform. We want our heroes to save us all and keep the conformed society together. We despise our villains for nonconforming to the extent that they tear it all down, but we also want our heroes to nonconform so that they’re not like the rest of us.

Heroes and villains really are just reflecting the push and pull inside of our own minds. That’s why we’re attracted to the story over and over and over. It’s Punch and Judy. We have been watching this story forever, since there was fire and caves.

**John:** Absolutely. Just because it’s a great article on Wile E. Coyote, The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote, I would say perseverance is a thing to think about with villains as well. We think about heroes persevering, but in many cases it’s the villain who has persevered against all these obstacles in front of them that is the real story of, you keep knocking me down and I’ll just keep coming back stronger.

**Craig:** This is obviously all colored by the presentation of the narrative. It occurred to me after many years after watching Star Wars that we actually didn’t quite understand what was particularly bad about the Empire. We were told they were bad, but how? Why? Then later, that got filled in a bit. Mostly it’s just, man, it seems like they’re really mean to each other. It’s a really over-trained, corporal punishment-emphasizing, military group. What is exactly happening on the ground? What is it that these Rebels are fighting for?

You could certainly turn it around and go, wait, what if we were telling a story about America and Al-Qaeda? Now who’s the Empire? Now who are the Rebels? Which side are you on? It’s all about how you present these things, always.

**John:** I think Star Wars is a fascinating case, because you have the Empire, which is this giant bureaucracy but also has this supernatural power at the center. The Emperor is this supernatural figure who can do these magical things. In later Star Wars we see the supernatural Emperor. You also have a series like Andor, which is just about the Empire as this tyrannical bureaucracy. We see the actual human beings who are cogs in that machine and feel a sympathy for why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s trying to do both things, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Let’s start with this article by Daniel Effron here, we’ll put in a link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. He’s an ethicist. He’s really talking about we think that people would make a logical decision about the cost and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don’t. Mostly, it’s not about the act itself. They’re doing things or not doing things based on how they’re going to be perceived by others. It’s that the spectator thing is a major factor. If they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. Cheating is not just about whether you can get away with it. It’s how will you feel if you do this thing.

**Craig:** Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined solely by our deeds, the things we do. It doesn’t matter how you feel. If you do something bad, you are a bad-doer. That is true to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care why you killed that person, as long as it wasn’t self-defense. He made you nuts, and you couldn’t handle it anymore, and you killed him. You had perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn’t care. You killed him. You’re a murderer.

What is interesting about our villains is often there’s a phrase that you and I have heard executives say four billion times, mustache twirling. The mustache-twirling villain is a reference to the old silent films where the bad guy in the Old West would steal the good guy’s gal, and he would tie her to the railroad tracks for some reason.

**John:** Why would he tie her to the railroad tracks?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** I never understood that.

**Craig:** Because he wants her to die but he can’t do it himself. He would rather watch a train do it, I guess. That train will be arriving at some point. He never checks the timetables or anything. He ties her to the rails, which actually is probably very difficult to do. Then he waits. While she’s like, “Please, no,” he has this nasty

Mustache with little handlebars at the end, and he twirls them and goes, “Meh-heh-heh.” It’s just shorthand for an incredibly broad villain. Broad villains don’t worry about feeling like a bad person. They are a bad person, and they are celebrating it. They love it, which is actually not very recognizably human. It’s just not a human thing to be like, “Oh my god, you know what I want to do today? Something bad, because I love being bad!” That’s not really how it functions, generally speaking.

**John:** We’ve talked many times about character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero, if they even have a sense of moral compass at all. We’re leaving out of this conversation these supernatural alien creatures, the degree to which we can apply motivation to those kind of characters.

In Aliens, we see that it’s a mother against a mother. That makes sense. That tracks. We can understand that. In most of these supernatural, demonic things, there’s not really a moral choice there. They are actually just true villains. Even the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up what their past trauma was that’s made them this way, but we don’t really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They’re not choosing to do these actions.

**Craig:** They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. Freddy Krueger was burnt by a Lynch mob. He made a choice in his supernatural return to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. He’s good. He doesn’t wake up going, “What should I do today?” He’s like, “Good. One more day to do the thing I decided to do, that I will do every day. Ha ha.”

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn’t there?

**John:** It is. In some ways, you could say that he’s cursed. Basically, he’s living out this thing. He can’t escape this. He can’t choose to get out of this. A curse is the opposite of a wish. We always talk about what is a character’s want, what are they actually going for. The curse is the mirror opposite of that. They are bound by fate to do this thing, and they can’t get away from it. There’s a kind of freedom in that.

**Craig:** There is, because as a human, you’re really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There’s no questioning of self. Sharks kill. When I say shark, I mean the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, “I’m full. I’m not going to do anything.” You are a creature that is designed to kill, and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person.

Those characters often do feel like they become part of nature. Zombies, whether they’re slow or fast, whether it’s a virus or it’s supernatural, they ultimately are will-less. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.

There’s a wonderful place for those kinds of things, but I think ultimately we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us, that they are dark mirrors that say, “Hey, you might feel these things. Don’t end up like me.” They are almost designed to be negative instructors to make people identify with the villain, to make us understand why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, to make us think, “I actually have felt the same things, I’ve wanted to do the same things, but here’s what happens if I do,” because typically, the villain will fail.

**John:** Let’s talk about some villains. I have a list of 20 villains here for us to go through. Let’s talk about what’s driving them and what’s interesting and what could be applied to other things. We’ll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. Of all the folks in this list, he’s maybe come actually closest to seeming like the mustache-twisting villain because of that amazing performance. His actual motivations are more calculating. He doesn’t seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel.

**Craig:** He’s a thief. He wants to steal money. That’s as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he’s a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn’t mind killing a bunch of people to do it.

**John:** He gets indignant when somebody gets in his way. He will lash out when his plans are forded. I think of him, just because of that performance, as being grand and theatrical, but actually, he has a purpose and a focus. Also, I think he very brilliantly, in the course of the structure of movies… We talked about the false idea of what the actual motivation is is great. It seems like they have some sort of noble purpose beyond the money, and of course they don’t. It’s all just a ruse.

**Craig:** That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. For us growing up, that was a startling one, because we had become so trained to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. Terrorists are an easy one. They’re always taking hostages. They often in bad movies were taking hostages because they were associated with, like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, Flaming Dragon, just some rebel group that was trying to do a thing.

The fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that’s what he was doing, and then the big surprise was, “No, I’m simply a thief,” was actually quite clever. Alan Rickman, I think his performance in no small part elevated what that character was into something that felt a little bit more wonderfully arch.

**John:** Let’s talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. You have Buffalo Bill, who’s the serial killer, kidnapping people. You have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different kind of serial killer. They’re two monsters, but with very different motivations. They’re very different fill-ins in the course of the story. How do we police them, and how do we think about what’s driving them?

**Craig:** Buffalo Bill to me, because he’s portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He’s no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he’s stopped. There’s nobody who’s going to have a sit-down with Buffalo Bill, and he’s going to be like, “You’re making a really good point. I’m going to stop killing all these people.” He’s not going to do that.

Hannibal Lecter you get the sense absolutely has choices. What is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that’s so beautiful is the notion that he might be some kind of avenging angel, that maybe he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. What’s interesting about the story is they tease you with that, but then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse’s face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn’t do anything to him. He kills a guy in an ambulance. He will kill indiscriminately do protect himself.

As Jodie Foster as Clarice says at the end of the movie, she doesn’t think he’s going to come kill her because it would be rude. We get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn’t want to kill us.

**John:** Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he’s cursed with that. He’s not made a single choice. He is who he is.

**Craig:** He’s bad to the bone.

**John:** Born into it, as opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she’s doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic… I don’t want to say narcissistic personality disorder. I wouldn’t want to diagnose her with that specifically. She has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated.

**Craig:** Why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done, so she’s formidable. This is something that you’ll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it’s really hard to win against somebody like that. I think also there’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment there, because she is occupying a place in society that typically isn’t in charge, isn’t the one that comes out on top. We get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win to an extent. That’s always fascinating to me.

**John:** I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff. In executing her plan, she ends up becoming trapped by someone that she shouldn’t have trusted and then has to break herself out. We see, “You think you’ve caught me, but I’ve actually caught you,” is ingenious, so smartly done.

**Craig:** I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!

**John:** Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street.

**Craig:** Oh, bros.

**John:** Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. There’s more to it than that one speech, but essentially that whatever it takes is what’s worth doing. That is an American value, but it’s pushed to an extreme degree.

**Craig:** Which is the point. When you mention the Daniel Effron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that’s when they start doing bad things. What Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to commit crimes. The license is through philosophy, that in fact he’s helping people. If you think about it, really I’m the hero. Somebody naturally is like, “You really convinced yourself of this.”

We always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that. Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don’t know. That is a great example of somebody articulating a value that we all have ad absurdum to force us to examine ourselves.

**John:** Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day. An amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power inside a structure, but of course, that’s not his true source of power. His true source of power and wealth is all the ways he’s subverting all that and breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan Hawke’s character in what he’s doing.

**Craig:** An excellent film. What I remember feeling when I watched Denzel’s portrayal of Alonzo, was that he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy, because it’s attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome. The idea that if you go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it’s exciting.

On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it, that in fact, like I said, there’s no free lunch, that you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you’re brought low. It’s inevitable. You will come down to earth. Gravity applies to you. It’s wonderful. It’s a great lesson, which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. It’s just such a great lesson. We’re all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.

**John:** We should put that on the shortlist for a future deep dive, because it’s been a while since I watched it. Two more I want to go through. Gollum from The Lord of the Rings movies.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Gollum, I think he’s unique on this list, because you pity him, and yet he’s also a villain. He’s also dangerous. There are other examples of that. They’re usually sidekick characters. Here he is in this centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need and yet he’s pathetic. It’s just such an interesting choice.

**Craig:** Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction. He will do bad things to feed his addiction. Where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he’s Slinker and Stinker, and you can see him arguing with himself. That is so human. It’s just so wonderfully… We can identify. We feel bad for him, because we know that inside, there’s somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time, and then that was it. He’s essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness.

**John:** I think that’s the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see, oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote. It’s arguing essentially Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He’s demonstrating all the addict’s things. He’s going to keep trying to do the same thing, even though it’s never going to work. It’s always going to blow up in his face, a different form of the thing. He’s always chasing that high, which is the roadrunner. If he thinks he can get it, he won’t get it.

**Craig:** It’s rough, man. He needs a program.

**John:** He does need a program, 12 steps there. Finally, let’s talk about Annie Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. You look at the setup of her, and that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be someone, you know her, you understand her. She’s annoying, but she also probably bakes really well. You get along fine with her. It’s that worry that you push somebody, given the chance, some of these people would go too far and they would Annie Wilkes you.

**Craig:** That’s a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes, and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman, is that in society we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone. It becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly. Women are very often the victims. Here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.

I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that held me back from love, love, loving Misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. There was part of me that was like, “No one’s really like that.” Now we have Twitter, and we know that there are. Stephen King was right.

**John:** She’s out there.

**Craig:** Oh my god, she and he. There are many Annie and Andrew Wilkeses out there who attach themselves so strongly to characters. The whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book, and she snaps. We have seen that a lot in popular culture. That form of love that has gone sour, that has curdled into obsession, is something that’s very human. The story of that villainry is you must get away from that person, because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. That’s terrifying.

**John:** It’s fascinating to think, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Is this the only bad thing that she’s done?

**Craig:** I would imagine that she’s probably done a few other things, but nothing like that.

**John:** This transaction would not have happened if not for fate putting him right there. If the book had come out, and she would’ve read the book, she would’ve been upset. She would’ve been angry for weeks. She probably wouldn’t have stalked him down at his house and done a thing. The fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity.

**Craig:** The woman was definitely off to begin with. Anybody that says dirty birdy as a phrase, you can imagine people are like, “Here comes Annie.” She’s gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this.

**John:** Let’s try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. As we’re talking about these villains, I think it’s important for us to stress that we’re looking at what’s motivating these iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn’t exist if you didn’t find a hero to put opposite them, if you didn’t find a context for which to see them in, because they can’t just float by themselves. You can’t have Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without a Clarice Starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who’s letting us into their world.

I see so often people try to creating this iconic villain who has this grand motivation. Terrific. Who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? How are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this?

**Craig:** We need somebody to identify with. We don’t want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that’s when things get really interesting to me, because there is a kind of story where we just give up on the whole hero, villain thing entirely. We ask ourselves, in these situations, what would you do?

When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that’s when their relationship with the material becomes a little bit more complex. It doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like them messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well.

**John:** I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character was a great messy relationship with Black Panther, because they both had strong points. While we wanted Killmonger defeated, we always say, “You know what? He was making some logical points there.”

**Craig:** He’s a good example of gone too far.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s do two quick listener questions. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Ida asks, “I’m having issues when it comes to establishing basic things about characters, especially choosing a career for them in stories where the profession doesn’t necessarily affect the story but I do need to see them in their workplace. Any tips on making this kind of decision?”

**John:** Listen. I’m assuming that you’re writing the kind of story where there’s a workplace but the workplace is not the important central point. We’re going to see them there, but that’s not where we’re spending most of our time. Get them someplace visual where they can talk. If [inaudible 00:45:36] get them a place where they can talk, where we can see them moving around through a space, if they’re supposed to working with other people.

If they’re supposed to be working by themselves, think of some sort of craft kind of thing where as an artist, an artisan, as a solo worker, as a cabinet maker, where we can see them in an individual space. I would just say look for something that’s interesting and distinctive but not so distracting that it becomes the focus of the movie. Craig, any tips for Ida here?

**Craig:** I guess, Ida, it does sound like because their profession doesn’t necessarily affect the story, that you’re probably going to be looking for something fairly mundane. If you can tell me anything about her character from the place she works… Let’s just start with, how much money does she make? How much money do you want her to have? What’s her education level? Has she given up on things? Is she coasting? Is her dream to be a this, so this is just a day job that she’s doing while she has to, for money? All those character things should lead you towards a general sort of thing. Then make a list of all the things that are like that, that fit in that, that you’ve seen in movies before, and don’t do any of them.

Now take a walk around your town. Look for weird things, candle shops, psychic palm readings, a place that repairs vacuum cleaners. Whatever it is that you could also imagine somebody else being in there that might be an interesting bounce-off character or some comic relief or a place where she might have to confront a customer asking for something annoying. These are the things that I think help you get specific.

A great example is, in Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan needed to establish this mundane life for Saul Goodman. He could’ve picked all sorts of places, but he picked manager of a Cinnabon, not just employee at a Cinnabon, manager, which is worse than employee, because employees come and go. The manager, that’s his career. His career is Cinnabon.

By the way, if you’re a manager at a Cinnabon, I’m sure you’re doing fine. I’m not making fun of you. If you were a lawyer that was on top of the criminal world of Albuquerque, and now you’re a manager at Cinnabon, you can see how things have changed dramatically for you in a very specific way. That’s what you’re hoping for is something that feeds back into our understanding of who this person is and where they are in their life.

**John:** I would just emphasize that when we say pick a mundane job, that doesn’t mean boring. It can be boring for them, but it can’t be boring for us. There’s nothing worse than seeing a boring workplace where it’s just like, this is a boring scene because we’re in a boring place. Make sure that whatever you’re picking is going to be able to keep the ball in the air, so the scenes that do need to take place wherever they’re working actually can still land and that will make it so the movie won’t get cut because it’s dull.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Drew, one more question.

**Drew:** A WGA Member asks, “Has the Guild ever tried to force studios to pay penalties to writers for late payments? It’s often a months-long wait between delivering a script and receiving payment.”

**John:** A WGA Member, yes, they do have to pay. They have to pay a penalty per week or per month. There’s a percentage penalty too for that stuff.

**Craig:** I think it’s weekly. There is an interest rate that compounds. The Guild has not ever, forget tried to force studios, first of all, force is the wrong word, compel studios or require studios to adhere to the terms of the contract they’ve signed with us. The Guild has an entire department that does nothing but this and has successfully collected millions of dollars on behalf of writers.

**John:** Millions and millions of dollars.

**Craig:** Millions and millions over the course of decades.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to the Late Pay Desk. I have friends who work in that desk. All they do is just go after writers’ money. Here are pros and cons. The pro is you have to speak up and say, “Hey, this person owes me money. Go get my money,” and they will go get your money. It can be tough for a writer to raise their hand and say, “Hey, this is a problem here.” The writer can do that. Also, you have reps. Your reps are theoretically only getting paid when you’re getting paid. Send your reps on this.

I think so often as writers we feel like we need to be meek and not make waves, but if people owe you money, they should pay you money. Not only is there structures in place for the WGA, but there are structures in place as a system that you should be getting paid. If you’re not getting paid, it’s outrageous, so speak up.

**Craig:** Understand, no matter how cool your agent or your lawyer is, your lawyer has 5% of the total amount of caring about that money coming in, your agent has 10% of the total amount of caring, and you have the rest, 85%.

Also, they probably have more money than you do. The agency is a large business. The lawyer’s working for a large firm. This money means way more to you than it means to them. They don’t really actually care if the money comes in a month or two late. They don’t care, but you do, because maybe you need it for rent. You can try and say to them, “Listen, this is really important that I get paid on time.” They have to work with that studio for all of their clients. It’s much easier for them to go, “It’s fine.” The Guild does have a dedicated department that just handles this stuff.

**John:** I will say that I suspect you are a feature writer, because it’s feature writers who are classically not getting paid on time. That’s just what it is. Sometimes pilot writers, but really it’s feature writers. Time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Jennifer Senior. It’s in The Atlantic. The headline is The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are. Craig, I’m going to ask you, in your head, how old are you?

**Craig:** Oh, man. It depends. Sometimes I’m 14, and sometimes I’m 51.

**John:** The phrasing of the question ends up being important, because they’ve done studies on it. If they ask how old you are in your head versus how old you feel, you get different kinds of answers from people, because there’s definitely days where I feel 50, but I would say consistently I do feel like I’m probably 31, 32 at a place. The studies they’ve done on this, it looks like people anchor themselves about 20% younger than their actual chronological age. They tend to peg themselves back at a moment where they feel like they are themselves, the first version that they were themselves.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** It’s after you’ve had your first kiss, first foray out into the world without your parents’ supervision. You feel like an adult with most stuff figured out. That tends to be the moment. Going back to our villains discussion, people who have big traumas in their past tend to get stuck at those ages too. It’s a good article overview of this mental self-perception of how old you think you are. What can be useful for people who are in their 20s or early 30s is that the people who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, internally they still think of themselves likely as closer to your age than you would guess. Useful.

**Craig:** It is. I’m not a huge backwards-looking person. What I do know is that no matter what age I perceive myself to be, while I have changed in certain clear and I think positive ways since I was, say, 35, I haven’t changed that much. I’m still basically who I was, whereas when you’re coming up, you’re changing a lot.

I remember when I was in my 20s, looking at people who were in their 30s and feeling, “Okay, you’re a little bit older. You seem like you’re more settled down and established. I’m a bit jealous of that kind of peace.” People in their 50s were just old. The truth is, those people in the 50s did not probably feel any different than the people in their 30s. They really didn’t. I don’t feel that different.

There is a wisdom that comes with age. It’s weird. I don’t feel old, but I know that the people I work with, who are much younger than I am, look at me and think, “Old,” like parent old, which is fascinating.

**John:** The parent thing is really interesting, because at a certain point, I realized, “Oh, I’m now older than my parents were at this point.” It’s weird, because I always think of them as being older. When I was a kid, they were not any older than I am currently right now. That’s strange to me. I forgive them more.

**Craig:** How old was your dad when he passed away?

**John:** My dad was 67.

**Craig:** At some point, you’re going to hit 68.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** That’s going to be interesting, because you’ll know an age that he didn’t even know, which is fascinating. I have this memory of my mother throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for my dad. That just seemed like the most faraway number possible. That’s in my rearview mirror by a decade. Time.

**John:** Time, time.

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** I have this very distinct memory. We went camping every summer. We were in the trailer. I asked my mom how old she was. She’s like, “I’m turning 37.” That number anchored for me. It’s just wild to think, oh, wow, she was actually a 37-year-old. That doesn’t feel that old to me.

**Craig:** If you were with a 37-year-old right now, you’d be like, “They’re on their way up.” So strange.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** You’ve got one here.

**Craig:** I’ve got my One Cool Thing, which is gonna feed directly into our Bonus Segment. My One Cool Thing is a woman named Yeono, Y-E-O-N-O. That’s a combination of her full name. She is a tattoo artist from South Korea. Just side note about South Korea. Tattooing, you have to have a medical license to do it.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** The legal structure is really designed to discourage tattoo work. A lot of South Korean artists come to the US to work. Yeono gave me a tattoo. I think it’s amazing. She was a lovely person and an artist and meticulous, which I thought was wonderful. She has a particular style, which is photorealism. If you are in the LA area, or I believe she also works out of Brooklyn, so she goes back and forth, and you are looking for a photorealistic tattoo done by a very obsessive, very careful, attention to detail type person, then you should take a look at some of the work that Yeono has done. She’s terrific.

**John:** Fantastic. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help from Chris Csont. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Dilo Gold. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, last Wednesday you came over to the house, and we were gonna play some DnD. You had on your arm a dagger. I asked, and you showed it to me. I said, “Oh, how long is that gonna last?” You said, “Forever.” The reason I asked how long is that gonna last is because it looked like a sticker transfer thing, because it was so incredibly photorealistic, and your skin was not all puffy and red in a way. I assumed you just applied a sticker to your forearm, but no, you’d gotten a genuine tattoo.

**Craig:** It’s actually a switchblade. Neil Druckmann and I made an oath when we were making The Last of Us. We said, “If this show works,” and we define works vaguely as either got good reviews or a lot of people watched it or both, that we would each get a tattoo of Ellie’s switchblade. She stabs a lot of people with her switchblade. It’s cool. The show worked.

**John:** The show worked.

**Craig:** I followed through. Neil has not yet followed through, I would like to point out.

**John:** Coward.

**Craig:** He is. He says he’s gonna. He’s waffling a bit about the design he wants, which I understand. I’m just going to continually shame him until he gets it. Regardless, it was my first tattoo. I’ve never had one before. I never really wanted one, but this felt significant. This was a long process. I cared very much about it. It just seemed like I had earned it in a way. I knew I wanted a photorealistic tattoo, which is why I find Yeono. The process was fascinating. I enjoyed it, actually, quite a bit.

**John:** The advice I gave to you on that night, and which other people around the table echoed, is you have to wait at least another year before you get another tattoo, because inevitably, people get a tattoo, and the experience is so cool that they want a second tattoo and a third tattoo and they end up with a bunch of dumb tattoos all over their bodies. I have so many friends who that has happened to.

**Craig:** I will try to avoid that. I think if another season of The Last of Us does well, I’ll probably get another one for that. I like the idea of tattoos commemorating large events, as opposed to just, “I want a dolphin on my ankle.”

**John:** I have exactly one tattoo. I got it 30 years ago. I was in the Stark Program at USC. Friends came down from San Francisco to visit. We were out on Venice Beach. They all had a bunch of tattoos. I said, “You know what? I really want to get a tattoo.” We went to the tattoo place, and I got the one tattoo. It’s on my ankle. It was great.

**Craig:** Is it a dolphin? Please tell me it’s a dolphin.

**John:** It’s a dolphin on my ankle. No, it is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase, tibbium nihil, imagus quiddum, which is, “Let me fear nothing, not even fear,” which was just a mantra I wanted to live by and honestly, genuinely helpful way of thinking about things. Most of the stuff in my life that I’ve regretted are the things I regretted not doing, that fear kept me from doing, and so to be less fearful of things ahead. It was good, useful advice.

It hurt like hell on my ankle. We can talk about this, Craig. It’s a very sharp, very specific pain, in a way that is so different than other pain, because I can see why it hurts, and it doesn’t bother me, because it’s just a very sharp pain at that spot. I know it’s not actually bad for me or my body. It’s not a warning sign the way I think pain generally is.

**Craig:** There are different parts of the body that respond differently. Interestingly, men and women have different responses in general to certain areas of the body. There are areas where men are more sensitive. There are areas where women are more sensitive. It’s curious. The ankle is a tough one. There are areas by joints, basically. When you’re dealing with joints, those tend to be more sensitive. Then the ribs apparently are the worst. That’s what I was reading.

**John:** I can absolutely see that.

**Craig:** The tattoo that I got is on my forearm, on the inside of my forearm, which is, generally speaking, one of the less painful places to get a tattoo, particularly if you can avoid getting close to the wrist or the inner elbow.

The pain, which I was obviously curious about, it was fascinating. It reminded me initially of a little bit of the pain of an electric shock, a steady electrical current, because there is a vibration to it. It’s like a vibration and a scratching at the same time, but I didn’t mind it, and that’s a good thing, because as you said, my tattoo is this photorealistic image of a switchblade. It took nine hours to do that. If it had been excruciating for nine hours, I think I would’ve lost my mind.

Honestly, the part that was the most annoying physically was that the position my arm had to be in on the table for her was slightly rotated to give her a flat inner arm surface. After a few hours, my shoulder started getting really stiff. I would take little breaks and just move my shoulder around and then hand the human canvas back to her.

Here’s an insight into me, John. About seven hours in, she’s like, “When it’s a long tattoo, when it takes a long time, I give my clients a little massage just to loosen them up, because they’ve been tight the whole time.” I said, “That’s right.” She gave me this wonderful shoulder, scalp massage. It felt great. That said, I was so much more comfortable being hurt than I was being helped. There’s something about people making me feel good that makes me feel uncomfortable and something about people hurting me that feels great. I can’t imagine why. Nothing happened to me.

**John:** Nothing to unpack there. Nothing.

**Craig:** Nope. We will not open the box full of bad stuff. I thought it was a fascinating process. Here’s where I’m at now. It’s been basically a week since I’ve had it. It is healing beautifully. There’s no more redness, happily no signs of infection or anything like that. I’m in the skin flaking stage.

From a medical point of view, what happens is the top layer of skin is going to heal faster than the lower layers of the epidermis. The top layer of skin is now healing. The way it’s healing is by flaking away the dead skin as the new skin on top regenerates. The skin underneath is still putting itself together. From what I understand, once all this sunburn style flaky stuff flakes away, the tattoo will then look a bit blah for another couple of weeks. After about a month from the beginning of the tattoo to then, things should be back to where they were when I first showed it to you, which was fresh and startling and vivid.

**John:** Craig, what is your opinion of actors having tattoos? I actually have some strong opinions about this, but I’m curious what your instinct is, because obviously, all human beings should be free to adorn themselves however they want to adorn themselves. I find it really frustrating when actors have a bunch of tattoos. I look at them like, “Man, we are going to have to get around a lot of your tattoos, because they do not fit in the world of our movie.”

**Craig:** I actually don’t mind it, as long as there’s not a facial tattoo. If there’s a tattoo and your face, that’s a disaster. Everywhere else on the body, if something is not covered by clothing, our makeup artists were extraordinarily good at covering up little tattoos or large ones. It didn’t take that much more time in the morning, obviously. The bigger issue is copyright, as it turns out, which is something Warner Bros found out when we made the second Hangover movie.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Tattoo artists that design original artwork are protected like the rest of us, under copyright. They own the copyright. If you’re going to put that on film, we need to clear it. Nick Offerman, for instance, has a tattoo. In our third episode, there’s a moment where he emerges and he’s wearing a towel but nothing on top, so you can see his chest, and he has a tattoo. He had already been in something where that tattoo had been visible, so he had already handled the whole clearance thing. I think he had gotten the artist to basically sign something that said, “I am licensing you to do this wherever you want to do it on camera.”

When it’s a new one, when it’s a fresh one, you do have to ask, and we have to get approvals and sometimes negotiate some fees. That part can actually be more annoying than the extra 10 minutes, because here’s the deal. If it takes 10 minutes to cover that tattoo up, we’re just calling the actor in 10 minutes earlier. It’s on them. They’re just going to be a little bit earlier on their call time to get that covered up. It doesn’t bother me too much.

**John:** As an actor, you’re appearing in TV shows, you’ll have to decide are you wearing some long sleeves, are you covering that up, are you getting a license from Yeono for perpetuity.

**Craig:** Here’s the interesting thing. I haven’t actually talked about this with her, but I’m going to. I’m going to go and see her again after a month, because she’s gonna look at it and see how it’s gone. She may want to touch up a couple of spots, depending on how it’s all healed.

The interesting thing about this tattoo is the artwork is basically a direct duplication of the artwork from the game, because I gave her these digital files of images of the switchblade that was originally designed for the game The Last of Us. Other artists had done this. Technically, I probably should’ve gotten permission from Sony, but I didn’t. Whoops. Sorry. I don’t think she would have the copyright on this, because essentially, this is a derivative work.

**John:** It’s derivative work. It could also arguably be work for hire. I’m curious how that’ll [crosstalk 01:07:40].

**Craig:** It could be, but I did not impose any of that paperwork upon her. There is an interesting legal question about how to handle this particular tattoo. You know what? I’m going to find out, because I’m going to be doing a little actoring on a show, not Mythic Quest, but a different show, in a month or so. I better dig into that or wear a long-sleeve shirt, but I don’t want to.

**John:** You don’t want to. You want to wear a Scriptnotes T-shirt. We cleared the Scriptnotes T-shirts for when you were on Mythic Quest.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** You’re set for that. Sweet.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Craig, congratulations on your tattoo.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Don’t get another one at least until Episode, let’s say-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … 650.

**Craig:** Good lord. Okay, I give you my word.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [Amtel Systems](amtel.com)
* [The U.S. military’s Hollywood connection](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-military-movies-20110821-story.html) by Rebecca Keegan for Los Angeles Times
* [How E-girl influencers are trying to get Gen Z into the military](https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/57878/1/the-era-of-military-funded-e-girl-warfare-army-influencers-tiktok) by Günseli Yalcinkaya for DAZED
* [Warren Beatty Appears in Bizarre Dick Tracy TCM Special in Apparent Film-Rights Ploy](https://www.tvinsider.com/1081220/dick-tracy-special-tracy-zooms-in-warren-beatty-tcm/) by Dan Clarendon
* [The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote](https://thanksforlettingmeshare.substack.com/p/the-1000-deaths-of-wile-e-coyote) by T.B.D.
* [Why do good people do bad things?](https://ethics.org.au/good-people-bad-deeds/) by Daniel Effron
* [Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-some-people-are-willing-to-challenge-bad-behavior-despite-personal-risk) by Catherine A. Sanderson
* [WGAw Late Pay Desk](https://secure.wga.org/contracts/enforcement/get-paid-on-time/writers/contact)
* [The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/subjective-age-how-old-you-feel-difference/673086/) by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic
* [Tattoo artist Yeono](https://www.10kftattoo.com/team/yeono/)
* [Craig’s Tattoo](https://www.instagram.com/p/CpEtzF6uC3L/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Dilo Gold ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) with help from [Chris Csont](https://twitter.com/ccsont) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/590standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/changing-of-the-guard).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 588 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what happens when a beloved character leaves a long-running program? How should writers think about replacing them, and does it have to change the fundamental dynamics? We’ll look at examples from the past 50 years and the past few days, because Craig, I have to tell you something. Megana Rao, our producer, she’s gone.

**Craig:** Now, when you say she’s gone, is she dead?

**John:** She is not dead at all. It’s actually very good news. She has been staffed on a television program. She’s now on the writing staff of a show. We’re so excited and happy for her, but also sad that she’s not here to laugh at all your jokes and be awesome.

**Craig:** Basically, we’re going to go back to the old days where I say something that I think is legitimately funny and then there’s just-

**John:** Silence.

**Craig:** … a weird, creepy, silent pause. I have to tip my hat to the great Megana Rao. We’ve had a lot of terrific producers along the way, a lot of people doing excellent work. Obviously, the legendary Stuart.

**John:** The legendary Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Here’s a question for you, John. It’s related to Megana. You watch Saturday Night Live, I assume.

**John:** Of course. Of course.

**Craig:** You have for so, so long, like so many of us. Most valuable player, and the way I’ll define it is the person that-

**John:** Kenan.

**Craig:** There’s quality and length. We’re going to use two things. You can absolutely say Kenan. It’s for how good and for how long. You’re saying Kenan.

**John:** I don’t think you can top Kenan Thompson. I think he was the glue that has held together through so many cast changes. That’s my guess. Tell me who you think is the MVP there.

**Craig:** For me, the MVP is Kristen Wiig.

**John:** She was amazing, but yet the show has continued without her.

**Craig:** Sure. Look, the show will continue without Kenan. The show will never end.

**John:** It will never end.

**Craig:** I guess the interesting thing is you can absolutely make a great argument for Kenan, and he’s still there. There are some people that through quality and time put in become MVPs. Megana’s going to be a tough person to beat.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** She was great.

**John:** I think we have to acknowledge that the job of producer for Scriptnotes is really a behind-the-scenes role, and Megana was the first to really step forward, because her laughter permeated through, and then she started reading questions, and then she just became a regular fixture on the show. We are sad to lose her.

I want to talk a little bit about the moment she left, because it was a Tuesday afternoon. We’d done our normal staff meeting Zoom. She’s like, “Hey John, can I talk to you a little bit afterwards?” After everyone dropped off the Zoom, she said, “Hey, so I had a really good meeting with the showrunner this morning.” I was like, “That’s great.” She’s had a lot of showrunner meetings, so I knew stuff was percolating. Then she Slacked me later that afternoon and said, “They want me to start tomorrow.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s how it goes. That’s how it’s gone with previous assistants. That’s how it’s gone with Megan McDonald. I was prepared for it, but also you’re never quite prepared. This person who is invaluable to you is now moving on to another thing. That was how quickly it can happen, where you go from, “Hey, I’ve never heard of this show,” to suddenly you need to be in Glendale tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

**Craig:** Wow. I am so proud of her and happy for her. I can’t think of a better addition. She’s going to be a delight, obviously. Not only did Megana read questions, but eventually Megana started having questions, which is also great.

**John:** She did. Oh, gosh. We need to get her back. There’s an open invitation. We’ve both extended an open invitation for her to come back-

**Craig:** Oh, of course.

**John:** … just so we can sing…

John and **Craig:** (singing) Megana Has a Question.

**Craig:** I will say, should one of us be struck down prematurely, I’d be perfectly happy with Megana filling in.

**John:** I get you there. I haven’t updated my will in a while.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. Should I leave everything to Megana?

**John:** Forget your family, Craig. Everything goes to Megana.

**Craig:** I think they would really struggle with that one. I gotta be honest. Like, “Wait, what?” She has that infectious laugh. I think that’s what I’ll cite in my will. She had an infectious laugh.

**John:** Indeed. She Slacked this morning and she said, “I will be back soon, so don’t get used to my absence.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “Same to the listenership. Please remind Craig that I love him and I am validating his feelings/laughing at his jokes from above in the Valley.”

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** “Also, I am very excited for more folks to meet Drew, because he’s lovely,” which is a great segue.

**Craig:** Let’s talk about Drew. Drew’s right here, right?

**John:** Drew’s right here.

**Drew Marquardt:** That’s really nice.

**John:** Drew Marquardt, you’ve heard him on the podcast before. He was our Scriptnotes summer intern who has been helping out with the Scriptnotes book. He is now going to be producing the Scriptnotes podcast. Welcome, Drew.

**Craig:** Welcome, Drew.

**Drew:** Thank you so much. It’s bittersweet. I miss Megana, but I’m very excited to be here.

**Craig:** We get that.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Quick question. Your name is interesting. I like it. I assume that it’s Scandinavian of some kind.

**Drew:** I think it’s French German, and I think I pronounce it wrong is basically what I’ve learned.

**Craig:** When I see that name, I think MAHR-kahrt. What do you say?

**Drew:** I think that’s the correct pronunciation. I say mahr-KWAHRT, like a qu.

**Craig:** Oh, you go qu.

**Drew:** We lean into the Q-U, yeah.

**Craig:** Fair enough. I’m glad that I’m doing it right at least, because that’s how I would guess. I guess if it’s French, you would… No, French would be qu, right? Mahr-KWAHRT. Oh, no, but then it’s kahrt if it’s… I don’t know. You know what? You get to decide how your name is pronounced. It’s your name.

**Drew:** The Midwest changed it. I think it’s mahr-KWAHRT. Running with it. It’s mahr-KWAHRT.

**Craig:** Oh, isn’t that a university, Marquardt?

**Drew:** There’s a Marquette.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s what I’m thinking of, Marquette. Either way, you’re the producer now. Oh, man.

**John:** Drew, we’re going to be hearing from you later on in the podcast, because you’ll get to ask the questions that our listeners have asked. We have a whole big mailbag to get through of those. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about drugs. Specifically, Craig, I want to talk about prescription drugs and the best ways to navigate our dumb drug health care system in the United States, because we’re doing it wrong.

**Craig:** I’m excited for that conversation. I am armed with interesting insight from spending so much time in Canada and so much time with my Canadian friends. I used to over-romanticize the Canadian system. My Canadian friends have been giving me a different point of view on it. We have pluses and minuses on either side of the border here.

**John:** For sure. From my time living in Paris, try to get an Advil, good luck. Pluses and minuses. I think I actually have some more pluses to offer our listeners-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** … because everyone has to get prescription drugs.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** We’ll talk about that. First some follow-up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** A few episodes back, I mentioned that I was having some trouble some mornings looking at my monitor. Things were fuzzy, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on, did I need to go get medium distance reading glasses. Several of our brilliant listeners wrote in, including an actual ophthalmologist, who said, “John, what you actually have is dry eyes, and you just need to put in some eyedrops.” They were absolutely correct. Now I have this little thing of eyedrops by my monitor. If I can’t read, I put in some eyedrops, and it’s better.

**Craig:** Suddenly you can. Nice. How about that?

**John:** I needed no surgery, need no glasses. I just needed some eyedrops.

**Craig:** That’s the way we like to imagine medicine works. We have this very complicated problem that some city slicker doctor would send you into the MRI for. Then the old country doctor’s like, “Kid, you just need some cinnamon,” and then you’re fine. I like this.

**John:** I tried putting cinnamon in my eyes, and it just didn’t work.

**Craig:** Try harder. Put in more. That’s the answer. Really rub it in there. Kids at home, do not put cinnamon in your eyes.

**John:** There’s no new cinnamon challenge that Craig is offering. Don’t do this.

**Craig:** For the love of God.

**John:** When Aline was on two episodes ago, we were answering a listener question about staffing while pregnant. We invited our listeners to send in their experiences, and two of them did. Craig, I thought maybe you’d take this first one.

**Craig:** This is from A Formerly Pregnant, Current New Mom, Television Writer. She writes, “I stopped my walk while listening to this episode to write this because I’m a TV writer who was pregnant a year ago and had the same concerns about telling my reps. I did tell them early on, but I wish I had handled it differently and wanted to share my experience.

“Most of my reps are women and some others, so I thought that when I said I wanted to work in staff, they’d believe me, but turns out unconscious biases about pregnant women are everywhere. I soon realized my agent saw my due date as my end work date and weren’t putting me up for rooms that overlapped with it. They were sending far few open writing assignments and development opportunities my way. It took several follow-up conversations to correct course and I missed opportunities in that time.”

What she’s suggesting here is that, “When you do tell your reps, be extremely clear about what you want. Over-communicate, check in regularly, and even stretch the truth. If you want a couple of months off, tell you plan on one month and then you’ll assess. Remind them you can take eight weeks leave from a show with protection thanks to our union. My agents didn’t know that.

“One thing I was reminded of during this experience is that our reps have a very different work life. The moms on my team have stable jobs that afforded them long parental leaves. They projected their experiences onto me and assumed I’d want the same. While I would’ve loved more time off, we simply don’t have that luxury as contract workers. Ultimately, I think it’s a good idea to loop them in, since you want people in your corner to plan your year with. Remember, they will make their own assumptions about what you want, and you just can’t let them.” That’s very good insight there, I think.

**John:** We have great listeners. I want to thank her for sending that in. A second listener wrote in. This is Claytia. She writes, “A few years ago, I was a pregnant PA who wore baggy clothes to keep it concealed. When everyone found out, they made it a big deal and I hated it. Damn maternity pants. Flash forward to pregnancy number two, which overlapped with me getting staffed on my first show. I chose to notify my agent and manager in my second trimester when I was actually going out for staffing, and I was eight months pregnant when my room finally opened. I did call my showrunner before the room, and I told him, very enthusiastically, ‘We’re having a baby,’ and that was that. The AP knew my due date. I had the baby and was able to be back in the room virtually with accommodations. It was okay if I needed to be off camera, take time for doctor’s appointments, etc.

“I’ll admit I was nervous about how everyone would handle it, but I worked with some amazing folks who valued family and I made it my personal duty to bring my A-game to every meeting. My rule has always been to keep my pregnancy on a need-to-know basis. I’d play a game where I’d ask myself, if I were a non-gestational parent with a baby on the way, when would I share? Equality, you know. I just wanted to share that a pregnant lady in a room is possible, even at the lower level. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

**Craig:** That is very interesting. Thank you, Claytia. I don’t know if it’s KLAY-shuh or KLAY-tee-uh. It’s spelled C-L-A-Y-T-I-A. I haven’t encountered that name before. This is really interesting. When we had this question posed to us, the three of us gave our best insight. You and I gave it as current dads but former baby dads, and Aline gave it from the point of view of a current mom and a former baby mom.

All of us are 20 years away now or whatever, 18 years away from our last birth. The world changes, obviously, and so we’re all kind of guessing a little bit. This is really interesting to get these perspectives. I like the fact that there’s a little bit of an emphasis on open communication. I think that’s really great.

What’s striking me about this is this interesting point Claytia makes about non-gestational parents. First of all, I actually haven’t encountered that phrase before. I think it’s brilliant. I presume this means, for instance, if you have a surrogate or if you’re adopting and you know that there’s a child on the way.

**John:** Or if you’re a father.

**Craig:** Or if you’re a father. There you go. That’s interesting. We used to say expecting, but I guess that implies you’re actually carrying the baby. This is a great point. If you have someone who’s a surrogate or you’re a dad and you’re not carrying the baby yourself, it does seem like, yeah, I probably would mention that sort of thing. I think equality is exactly right, Claytia. I think that’s a great point.

**John:** Our friend Travis, I remember him having his first kid. He was on the WGA board. He had his first kid the day before his first WGA meeting. He’s also a staff writer in a room. There’s just a lot. Being a new parent is a lot, whether you’re actually physically giving birth or not. The difference is Travis was not visibly pregnant going through all that, but he was going through a big life change there too.

It’s a question of would he have necessarily told his reps about that? Would he have told his showrunner about that? I think it’s a great question. I think Claytia frames it really nicely.

**Craig:** If anybody is enterprising enough to dig back through very old published minutes of WA board meetings, they will see that in the board meeting of December of 2004, there’s an agenda item mentioning that I was not there before I was at the hospital where my second child was being born.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** How about that? Eighteen years ago.

**John:** That’s crazy. Other good, happy news, my previous One Cool Thing, the thing that makes Craig giggle every time he sees it, My Year in Dicks, Pamela Ribon’s Oscar-nominated animated short film. It’s now streaming on Hulu. If you’re curious about it, and you want to watch it, it’s on Hulu now, so you should just watch it, because it’s so damn delightful.

**Craig:** Can I tell you something? I think it’s going to win.

**John:** I think it has a really good shot of winning. I don’t want to jinx it.

**Craig:** I don’t believe in jinxes. I honestly think it’s going to win. I’m not promoting one thing over another. I’m just saying I think it’s going to win.

**John:** I think it could. It has a buzzy title. It’s really, really well done.

**Craig:** Pam, what a deserving person. She’s just a wonderful person and an excellent writer, and this is very exciting. Very exciting.

**John:** We have a little bit of update about script consultants in Europe. We have letters in from Lorenz and from Sean. I’m just going to summarize here. Basically, script consultants aren’t employed by the state, so essentially, Lorenz is saying that you’re submitting a project for this program, you can go in with a script consultant attached to it. Basically, they have to be someone who’s qualified to do it with certifications, but you go in together, so it’s not like the state is going to apply one to you in the Austria system.

Then Sean wrote in saying that he got his first state-funded script editing job in Ireland. They paid him for the work that he did. Screen Ireland paid him, but they weren’t controlling him, because I think one of the issues we raised is if you have the state paying for things, they can try to influence how stuff is depicted. Both Sean and Lorenz said, “Yeah, I understand that concern, but that’s not actually how it works, because it’s not like there’s some government official who’s now going to come through and edit your script.” It seems like a better setup system than that.

**Craig:** That’s great. Listen, if it works to the benefit of the writers there, then fantastic. It’s a strange thing for us to wrap our minds around here, because Hollywood is such a privatized, corporate, capitalistic system, and not really subsidized much by the government. To the extent that the government subsidizes anything, it’s subsidizing the studios to get tax money back when they’re producing things.

It’s an interesting marriage of state and artist in Europe. I think it comes with benefits. It clearly comes with some limitations. I think the fact is we just have a much larger pool of financing to draw from here in the U.S., which is why Hollywood is the predominant television and film industry in the world and always has been.

**John:** Indeed. Two last little bits of follow-up. On Episode 587, we talked about these doppelganger murders, basically this woman who found somebody who looked like her and killed her to try to fake her own death. Megana saw a similar story. This is a woman who is convicted for poisoning her lookalike with cheesecake in order to conceal her identity.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Really, I think the cheesecake was the missing element of this. A poison cheesecake.

**Craig:** What the hell? This is amazing. This is, it looks like two women in Queens, in New York. It looks like they’re both Eastern European, possibly Russian, from the names. Yeah, she’s Russian, and she had already done this once before.

“Viktoria Nasyrova was accused of fatally drugging a neighbor in her native Russia in 2014. She denied killing the woman.” Now she’s done it again. You know what? I feel like if you get picked up for the second time, you probably did the first one. It’s not like, “You know what? I got unfairly accused of something, but that gives me an idea.”

**John:** Unless you were a framer the second time because there was already suspicion the first time. It could be an extra level of deception there.

**Craig:** Listen, you’re right. There could be many layers to this cheesecake.

**John:** That’s terrible.

**Craig:** This is terrible. I retire.

**John:** Scriptnotes voted cheesecake as the 2022 best dessert. Remember our sweepstakes, our brackets?

**Craig:** Great. I’m completely there for that. I know it’s a little bit divisive. I know. I know it’s divisive, but cheesecake is one of the great desserts IMO.

**John:** Craig, speaking of Russia and Russians, have you seen the trailer for Tetris?

**Craig:** No. Is it about the creation of Tetris?

**John:** It’s about the creation and licensing of Tetris. It’s basically if you took the origin story of Tetris and did it as Chernobyl, kind of.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** I think it’s a really good trailer. Apple bought the movie. There’s a new Apple trailer out today for it, so take a look at the Tetris trailer.

**Craig:** I will jump on that after we finish recording.

**John:** “In the episode with Sarah Polley, Craig briefly mentioned having some problems with using child actors. How did those concerns impact the way you write scenes for child actors? For example, in Episode 5 of The Last of Us, it was amazing, but I would never let my 10-year-old watch scenes that the 10-year-old Keivonn Woodward acted in.”

Craig, I’ll just ask. Can you talk about your process of working with actors that young? What did he see? What did he know? You weren’t doing The Shining, where this kid doesn’t know that he’s actually in the movie. What was your process with working with him?

**Craig:** My kid was much younger. It’s a great question, Spencer. First things first, I don’t worry about those things when I’m writing the script. I think when you’re writing the script, you write the best script you can. Then you deal with the practicalities of how to work with child actors.

When it comes to content, one of the things we have is camera angles. If through editing, Keivonn stares at something and looks at it in horror, and then we see what he’s looking at, he may not be there to see that thing. In fact, he probably isn’t, because any time a child actor, the camera isn’t actively pointing at them, they’re not there, because you’re on the clock with kid actors. Every minute is precious, because you get so few of them, as opposed to adult actors that they show up and they put in their 12-hour day. A lot of times they’re not seeing the things you see.

In the case of Episode 5, so much of the stuff that was going on there, he was not there to see, or it was greatly enhanced by visual effects, so it wasn’t as gory or as horrifying. That’s it. There were a lot of people running around in pretty intense Cordyceps prosthetics, because we like to do as much as we can practically.

You can actually see, there’s this beautiful little video that HBO put together, a nice behind-the-scenes video that’s all about Keivonn and how we worked with Keivonn and how our director of ASL, CJ Jones, worked with Keivonn and us. It’s beautiful. I’m going to see if I can dig up the link to that thing, because it’s out there. I’m pretty sure that in that video, you can see we’re introducing him to a lot of the stunt actors, and he gets to feel the prosthetics. We invite him behind the curtain to see the backstage of it and to see that it’s make-believe and it’s pretend. That was great for him.

We also make sure that we’re communicating constantly with his guardian. In this case, it was his mother, April, who’s wonderful, and so we just check in. We just make safety a priority, and then a child isn’t terrified or scared or getting nightmares or traumatized by any of the things they see. You just make it a priority to take care of the kid. Why wouldn’t you want to? In this case, it was great. I think we did it really well, and Keivonn had a fantastic time and was very sad when it was all over. I think we all were. It’s a great question, Spencer. Too long didn’t read: put their feelings and thoughts first as you’re planning things out, and take care of them.

**John:** Indeed. I think I might’ve talked about this when Sarah was on the show. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory obviously had a ton of kids in it. One of the things we had to figure out early on is that the only way we can shoot with these kids and make our days work is if they are only shooting the kids in the morning. The kids go off to school in the afternoons. We shoot all the Oompa Loompa musical numbers. It was such a weird process. That’s how you can actually make your days make sense is by, in the afternoons it was Deep Roy doing a thousand Oompa Loompas every afternoon, just to do the musical numbers, because the kids had such restricted work hours. Of course, Augustus Gloop doesn’t really drown, and Sophia Robb didn’t swell into a blueberry. No actual kids were harmed.

**Craig:** That’s a bummer.

**John:** It’s a bummer. Maybe it’s a betrayal to Roald Dahl’s vision that we did not actually harm [crosstalk 00:21:45].

**Craig:** I think if Roald Dahl were alive today, he’d probably be like, “Bring in more children. Punish them.” Charlie and the Chocolate Factory really is just fetishizing the punishment of children.

**John:** Terrible children, yes.

**Craig:** Or not terrible. What’s Augustus Gloop’s crime? He’s just heavy.

**John:** He’s [crosstalk 00:22:06].

**Craig:** Or he just overeats. It’s just his brain is different.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** It’s one of those stories where today, I don’t think anyone’s writing that story.

**John:** That’s true. That’s true.

**Craig:** So many Roald Dahl things. Also, not a big fan of Jews, as it turns out, Roald Dahl. Not Augustus Gloop. I’m sure he loved Jews.

**John:** He was German but the good Germans.

**Craig:** Yes, the good one.

**John:** Let’s talk about our main issue today, which is changing of the guard. This of course is inspired by our losing Megana. I got to thinking about a lot of programs have gone through transitions where a major character is no longer there. Either the actor’s left or there’s some other transition that has to happen.

You can break it down into two categories. There’s cases where an actor left and they just put a different actor in the role, so the classic Bewitched situation. There’s other times where a character goes away and you retool or you find a functional replacement for that. The show pivots without that character. This is a very dated reference, but Valerie’s family starring Valerie Harper, she left and it became The Hogan Family, and Jason Bateman was still there and other folks were still there, but the actual title character went away. Same case with Roseanne. Roseanne went away, and it became The Conners.

I thought we’d just talk through that and maybe some of the decisions you would make as a writer in these situations. We’ve never had to do it ourselves, but we can certainly theorize what it would feel like and what you would have to do as the showrunner facing that type of challenge.

**Craig:** There are probably two circumstances that lead to these things. One is that something’s just not working well, and so you need to make that change to keep the show going and make it go well. You’re fixing things. The other circumstance is either somebody important quits or dies. Then you have no choice. The show was working, but you have to figure out how to regroup.

For instance, the one that always comes to mind for me is Cheers. That was the first, because I watched Bewitched when I was a kid. I barely noticed the difference between the Darrins. Cheers, Coach was Coach. He was this lovely old guy. He was this central mentor figure for Sam Malone, Ted Danson’s character, and then the actor died. They incorporated that storyline, of course. They acknowledged that he died. Then in comes this new ding-dong played by Woody Harrelson. Woody Harrelson was so good that you felt okay. Not only will it be fine, hey, maybe this is better. You never know. It’s at least as good. That was a choice that they had never wanted to make. That happens.

In your list here, you’ve noted Aaron Sorkin leaving The West Wing. Even Aaron Sorkin didn’t die, happily, him leaving The West Wing is a kind of, okay, now what do we do? It’s similar to death. What do we do now? We weren’t expecting this.

**John:** Absolutely. I want to go back to Cheers for a second, because the bigger change there was Shelley Long leaves and Kirstie Alley comes in. Diane is replaced. That central dynamic was crucial to those early seasons of Sam and Diane, and they made it so when she left, her character didn’t die, her character just went away, because the actress wanted to leave. They had to figure out what is the new dynamic, what was she providing that we need to find a different way to do. It’s not just Kirstie Alley’s character who could be a foil for Sam, but I think Frasier got elevated a little bit more into that spot.

Frasier still stuck around after Diane left. Then of course, Frasier ultimately spun off into his own show. I’m sure the creators in the room were figuring out, how do we make this work with the people who we have and what do we need to bring in to make the dynamics pop.

**Craig:** You can see how in work where a character is constantly being re-portrayed, it’s a little bit easier. There have been a lot of Batmen.

**John:** A lot of James Bonds.

**Craig:** A lot of Bonds. If you’re making a show about Batman or James Bond and somebody needs to go, it’s okay. We’ve all gotten used to this. We don’t even expect that somebody will just stay there forever for us. In other things, we do.

In the case of Sam and Diane, the big challenge for writers, and if you find yourself in this position, this is what you’ll have to grapple with, how do we replace her without replacing her, because you can’t replace her. You don’t want to just bring in the same thing, because that person is screwed. They don’t want to just do a Diane impression. They will always suffer from comparison.

Also, dramatically, it feels bereft. You couldn’t think of any other kind of human being that could possibly be in that bar? Kirstie Alley was a different kind of character. The relationship, even though it heads towards the same place, starts very differently and feels different. That’s the big challenge is figuring out how to fill this gap with something that isn’t quite the same.

**John:** I suspect what it involves is really taking a big step back and looking at it overall, not looking at the events of any given episode, but out of the whole, what functions did that missing character portray and how can you reapportion those functions among the existing people or bring in a new person who can do some of those functions, but in a different way, because I agree, just swapping in one for one is almost never going to work.

In the case of Charlie’s Angels, the original TV series, you could just swap a different Angel in, but that was always the conceit of the show. The conceit of it is that they are these women who work for Charlie. You knew them as individuals, but they were functionally working for him. One of them could leave, and a different person could come in. It would still basically work.

A bigger challenge on Three’s Company where they have contracts [inaudible 00:28:02] Suzanne Somers, you have to bring in somebody to just do that, but it can’t be exactly that. Anyone is going to suffer by comparison to what she specifically was doing.

**Craig:** In that case, that was one where they did try to just sort of duplicate it. They didn’t go fully into duplication. That’s the issue. In the older shows, I think back in the day, where in sitcoms and dramas, characters were a bit thinner. Let’s just be honest. They were. The characterizations have become much more complicated, particularly on television across the board, in all of its varieties. It was maybe a little bit easier to say, look, this person played this type, the whole point was that they were playing a type, so let’s throw the type back in there. It’s much harder to do now.

If anything, I think now, rather than doing that, you would look at a big change as an opportunity to ask what would I have done differently or how can we make ourselves a little bit uncomfortable again with the way things are, how do we lean into the discomfort of change, which I think has been done very effectively on a lot of things. They have the big differences. Back then, when there’s a change on NYPD Blue, for instance, there isn’t a billion people on Twitter arguing about it. We just watched it. We talked about it amongst ourselves and we kept watching. It was fine. Jimmy Smits was cool. Nowadays, you just have to know with all these things, there’s this very vocal discourse about all of it.

**John:** Your earlier point though about leaning into discomfort of change I think is really important though, because it helps keep things fresh. It helps you really re-evaluate what it is you’re doing and how you could improve what you’re doing. I think that’s part of the reason why Megana moving on or Megan McDonald before her and Stuart before them, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s a chance to look at what we’re doing on the show, what we’re doing in the office, and try some new things. We’re breaking up some responsibilities a little bit differently, for example. It’ll be nice. I think some stuff will work, some stuff won’t, but we’ll make the change.

**Craig:** Obviously, I’m terrified. I just remember this moment in Wayne’s World where Garth is alone. He’s rarely alone. This guy’s explaining to him that now that the show is going to be on a real channel, that there’s going to be some changes. He just goes, “I fear change,” while he’s beating this weird hand that’s moving around, this animatronic hand. It’s a very strange moment. I always think of Garth going, “I fear change.” I do too. We all do. I think that’s why… Isn’t fear at the heart of so much of what we do? Hone it and embrace it.

**John:** Own it. Hey Craig, one of the changes I would love to make in my life, and you may have an opinion, but also our listeners may have answers for it, is in my office, the home office, originally we had five telephone lines coming in. This is how long we’ve been in this house, 20 years. We had two home lines, two office lines, and a fax line. Obviously, the fax line went away. We’re down now to just a home line and an office line.

When the phone rings, we basically don’t answer it, because it’s always spam. There’s really no good reason to answer these phones. I’m wondering about maybe getting rid of the phones all together. During the pandemic, everyone just started calling me directly me on my cellphone, which was mostly fine, but I don’t want that all the time.

Craig, what are you doing with… Someone calls the office. Are they calling a physical office line number? Are they calling some virtual number that goes to your assistant? What are you doing? Because I need to do something better.

**Craig:** I hear you. When we started doing this podcast, like you, I had an office line. I didn’t have multiple office lines. I had an office line, I had a home line, I had a fax line. All those are gone. I did have some phone lines in my Pasadena office, which we almost never used. I eventually got rid of those too. Because I’m a bit nomadic now, where I live here, then I live in Canada, then I live here, then I live in Canada, it doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Right now in our current offices in Hollywood, we don’t have phones. We just have our cellphones. What I do is see who’s calling. If I am able to or have a desire to talk to them in that moment, I answer it. If I can’t or don’t, I don’t. The thing is, that’s how our kids do it. We were raised to think that not answering the phone is the pinnacle of rudeness. It’s not. It’s just how it goes. There’s so much texting. There’s so many ways to get in touch with us.

Basically, I just have my phone. If I see somebody calling and I know who they are but I don’t know what they want, I might hand it off to my assistant, I might hand it off to Allie, or I’ll just deal with it myself, but no landlines, no ringing in the house, none of that stuff. It’s all gone.

**John:** That may be where we ultimately get back to. If listeners have a suggestion for here’s how you transfer your office line number to a virtual thing that during certain hours rings to Drew and certain hours just goes to voice mail or rings to my phone, I’d love suggestions on that, because it feels like that may be a middle ground and we’re transitioning here, because it was nice for someone to be able to answer the phone and for Megana or Megan before her to say, “Oh, I have Ken Richman calling,” and I can pick up the phone.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. Our phones now are almost like the old… Do you remember way, way back when? Hey, let’s go back in the time machine, shall we? Let’s jump in the old time machine back to the ’90s.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** I know, Drew, this is going to rock your world. Here’s how we used to work. There’s a person in an office, and then they have their assistant in another office. There are office phones. The assistant has the phone. The person in the back has the phone. Somebody calls the office. It doesn’t necessarily ring in the, we’ll call them the principal’s office.

Then they had this thing where they would type onto a little machine. I can’t remember the name of it. It looked like a little mini typewriter. It would say something like, hey, Ken Richman is on the line. That would go bloop on the other machine on that person’s desk. It was this really bad green texty readout. Then there were these pre-programmed buttons they could hit, like call back, I’ll take it, take a message, not here.

That’s how that shit would go. Our phones do that now for us. Culture has changed to the point where nobody really cares, I don’t think. Say you call your agent, John. What’s your agent’s name?

**John:** Bill. I have three agents. Let’s say Bill.

**Craig:** Bill. Let’s say Bill. You call up. They say, “Oh, it’s Bill’s office.” You’re like, “Hey, it’s John August for Bill.” What do they say back to you?

**John:** “One moment, let me see if I can get him.”

**Craig:** “Let me see if I can get him.” “Let me see if I can get blank” became the all-purpose… Drew, I’m going to take you back again. The way it used to be is they would be like, “Hold on.” Then they would come back and say, “Sorry, he’s not available.” You’d be like, “If he’s not available, why were you saying hold on?” Everybody knew that meant just, eh, he doesn’t want to talk to me. Then they, “Let me see if I can get him,” as if everything is like, “Oh my god, I gotta run up to the top of the hill and find him. Oh my god, I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t get him. I couldn’t get him.” Lies. That culture’s gone. Even though they still say that as agents, everybody knows. Everybody knows.

**John:** I think “Let me see if I can get him” also was part of the pandemic, because no one was in the office. It was basically like, can I actually reach him on this conference calling or whatever we’re using.

**Craig:** I gotta then hand it to Todd Felton’s assistants, because they’ve been saying, “Let me see if I can get him,” for 15 years. He’s trained them well.

**John:** It’s been a growing thing, but the pandemic fully broke it.

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** Listeners, if you have suggestions for me or if I should just [inaudible 00:36:28] just do what Craig says and get rid of your phones, that’s also possible.

**Craig:** By the way, what if I don’t know that Drew is actually 63?

**John:** Wouldn’t it be great?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** You’re assuming he’s a young, spry person.

**Craig:** I haven’t met him in person yet, so I’m like, “Hey, let me blow your mind.” He’s like, “Let me blow your mind. I was in Vietnam.”

**John:** He’s months away from retirement.

**Craig:** Look, I got my first laugh out of Drew. Yes! Yes!

**John:** He’s trying so hard.

**Craig:** Megana, there’s hope. There’s hope.

**John:** There’s hope. Let’s do some listener questions.

**Drew:** Great.

**John:** Drew, can you start us off?

**Drew:** Yeah. Max asks, “Right now I’m an assistant for a writer/producer working on a pitch for an original series. This would be her first network show if it was picked up. At this point, I feel like I’ve contributed a good deal creatively to the project. That being said, we don’t have any type of contract drawn up. Should I be worried that if the show was picked up, I’d be cut out in some way? I’m only 22, so even though this has been a great experience for me, I don’t need to be naïve. Do you think I need to approach this conversation with her, even if we’re not in talks with the network yet? If I want to speak with her about this, how should I go about it?”

**John:** All right, Max. I would just say frame what your expectations actually are, because it’s a little unclear from your question. You contributed a great deal creatively, but also, are you contributing it as a writer or are you contributing it as an assistant or a sounding board or other things? If you’re as an assistant, and you’re wondering, will I stay on to be a showrunner’s assistant if this thing goes, how do I stay involved, great. That’s a probably reasonable expectation. If it’s that you were some co-writer on this thing, that’s a whole different thing. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** Slight red flags here, because of how vague you’re being, Max. Let me tell you what the nightmare is from our side of things, Max, and then we’ll talk about the nightmare from your side.

From our side, the nightmare is we’re sitting there talking about stuff out loud, and we’ve asked our assistant to write stuff down on cards and put them up on the board. Then you may say to your assistant, “By the way, do you like this? What do you think? Do you think this is good?” They may say, “Yeah, although I’m wondering about this.” You may go, “That’s an interesting question. I don’t know,” blah blah blah.

That to us isn’t really contributing. That’s just us being nice and doing a job of including you and helping get you introduced to this process. It’s not necessarily like, hey, we’re writing partners. Then that person comes later and goes, “Hey, I did this too, and I should be a blankety blank.” They’re like, “No, don’t punish me for a good deed.”

Now, the nightmare on your side is sometimes writers do take advantage of their assistants. They do have their assistants doing real creative work. Then they jam them later and cut them out.

Here’s what I would suggest. First, really examine the situation and ask yourself what is going on exactly. Then two, I think it probably would be good to have a conversation here, but to have it carefully and to acknowledge that it’s an awkward conversation, because it is, and say, “I would love… ” You can always put it in the positive. “I love doing the job of being your assistant. I really love doing this stuff. I would love to, for whatever use my contributions are, continue doing that and to be included if this goes further.” You can say that, but I have to tell you, if she wants to cut you out, she’s going to cut you out. There’s another potential course here where you just don’t do anything and you see what happens. I’m torn.

**John:** I’m torn too. It’s because I don’t know what Max is actually contributing and how realistic Max is being here. The other thing I would recommend Max do is to talk with other people at his level in his position. Meet some other assistants and see what they’re doing. If you’re doing 9,000 times more creative stuff, you’re writing stuff for all this, and you really should be a co-creator of this thing, that’s one thing.

More than likely, you are a person who she is allowing into the process. You’re giving some good hands-on experience. What you should be hoping for is to be that showrunner’s assistant as the show gets picked up or if something else happens. I just think that’s more realistic for you.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Drew, what do you got for us next?

**Drew:** Jacob from Chicago asks, “In the companion podcast for The Last of Us, Craig tells the story of pitching the show to HBO. By the end, they all shake hands and HBO buys the show in the room. How much value does this handshake traditionally have? HBO hadn’t yet secured the rights to the IP. A budget wasn’t set. Who has the power when it comes to salary negotiations? Can’t lots go wrong in between agreeing to buy the show and actually buying the show? As someone with dreams of shopping my own IP, how is one supposed to act in this dream scenario when plenty of details haven’t been discussed in the room?”

**Craig:** I can give you the specifics of that, and then we can talk generally, because the specifics in this case don’t always exist in other circumstances. In this case, they didn’t have to worry about salary, because I already had an overall deal at HBO, which meant that all that stuff had been predetermined and they were paying it anyway. That part was easy.

You’re absolutely right that they hadn’t yet secured the rights to the IP. What we knew going in there, because we did our homework first, was that the IP was available, that the owner of the IP, which is Sony, had agreed that HBO would be a good place for the show to be, and it was understood that a good faith negotiation between two very large corporations would occur.

Before we went in the room, Sony knew we were going to HBO, and HBO knew that Sony Television specifically was going to be involved in some aspect, from a financial or ownership point of view. Everybody knew that. Everybody said, “Understood. We still would like to hear it.” We pitched it. They said, “Great.”

Now, yeah, what happened after that, Jacob, was a very long negotiation between corporations to figure out how to do all that. While they were doing all that, Neil and I just sat on Zoom and thought about the creative part of it, because that’s our job.

**John:** When you say a very long time, it was months and months, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was months. The wheel turned slowly on this stuff. There were moments where it seemed dicier than others. In the end, like everything else, when people want to do something, when there’s a will, there’s a way, and they figure it out. I think it is not unheard of that things fall apart because of unrealistic demands or an inability for two entities to mesh, but it’s rare, generally speaking, because hearing yes is such a rare word in our business. When you get it, everybody’s incentivized to figure it out.

**John:** I’m trying to think of a situation where I’ve sold it in the room, the equivalent of that handshake there in the room. That handshake, for Jacob’s question, it’s probably not a legally binding handshake. It’s just that good faith, like, “We’re going to try to make a deal here.” I’ve had a fair number of I sold it in the parking lot. I was in the room. I walked out. I got a call from my agent saying, “Great, they want to buy it.” That’s more commonly the situation.

There’s still going to be a negotiation to get you to that point. Maybe you will get to that point, and maybe you won’t get to that point. It’s going to happen. It’s exciting when you get that confirmation. Yes, it’s worthwhile, because it really does mean that they want it, but it’s no guarantee it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** There’s this fun little dopamine rollercoaster where you go in there, you pitch something, and a company says, “Yes!” Everyone’s like, “We did it! Let’s go out to dinner and champagne. We sold it.” Then three days later, somebody else entirely, who was not in that room, who doesn’t know anything about the show, just knows that they want to buy it, that person in Business Affairs calls and is like, “Got it. Our offer is this old dirty shoe and a half-eaten apple.” Then you’re like, “Wait, what?” Then everything gets dark and ugly and you feel insulted and hurt and confused. In your brain it’s like, “It’s never going to happen.” Then it all works out and it’s fine, and then you’re back again.

Just understand it’s going to be a party, a funeral, and then the thing in between, which is a mature understanding that we’ve arrived at a reasonable place and now the work must begin.

**John:** Sounds good. Drew, what else you got for us here?

**Drew:** The follow-up to that. Jason says, “I’m part of a writing trio, one of which is an established Big Five author. His UTA agent sent out our TV pilot and pitch deck, and we’ve landed six meetings with shockingly legitimate production companies, many of which have first look deals with a streamer. They’ve all been friendly, getting to know you affairs. Often, they ask what else we have or are working on. In a highly unlikely best-case scenario, what would the next step be? Are original projects optioned like novel adaptations? If a production company is interested in developing our concept, would we be evolved or cut out? How many projects should new writers be expected to bring into a meeting? Should they all be written and polished with a pitch deck?”

**John:** A whole slough of questions here. Let’s go through this best-case scenario. It’s this writing trio. One to them is a Big Five author. Writing trios are unusual but great.

**Craig:** They exist.

**John:** They exist. You’re going in with this project. People seem to be excited about it. That should be your priority going into those rooms. Maybe one of them will say, “Yes, we really want to do that,” in which case they will either buy it or they will option it. You will be involved at some capacity. They may say, “Oh, we need to bring in an established showrunner at some point.” Sure, great. That’s your project. That’s great.

The second part of the question here though is, what else should you be saying in that room, like what else are you working on? I wouldn’t bring in some other polished deck for the second project or the third project, but be ready to talk through two or three other things that you are working on. Give the 30-second, one-minute version of it. Just throw out that line and see if they bite on that, and maybe talk to them about it a little bit more. The first thing you should really be talking about is the project that got you in there.

**Craig:** Completely agree. Just understand, Jason, that when they say, “Hey, so what else you got?” what they’re saying is, “We don’t want this.” That’s kind of implied. It’s not completely implied. It’s not an automatic, like, “We don’t want this thing.” It kind of might be like, “Hey, look, we really like the writing. We think you guys have an interesting voice. You’re clearly capable of putting together something that might interest investment, but we’re not going to buy this, so what else you got?” Just know that that’s there.

I do agree with John. You want to emphasize what you are selling in the moment, because what can occur from “What else you got?” is a fishing expedition. It cost them nothing to have you guys just start spinning in a circle to come up with something else that makes them happy, cost them literally nothing, so why wouldn’t they?

If you can concentrate on the people that seem specifically interested in this, that’s great. Otherwise, what you’re really having are general meetings. General meetings, yeah. Then like John said, you can absolutely talk about some areas of interest.

You can also ask them, “Hey, do you have things that you think we would be right for?” because sometimes they have projects that need rewriting or re-conceiving or they’ve bought a book that they need somebody to adapt.

Yes, they can option things, but what you’re looking for these days is somewhere where you can actually get a commitment to make a show or, at least to start with, to get a commitment to write another episode or give a full bible or whatever it is. No, you don’t want to waste a lot of time dressing everything else up. You want to really concentrate on the one you’re bringing.

**John:** You’ve mentioned here that you have a UTA agent, or this Big Five author does. That agent will tell you before any meeting, “They’re thinking about optioning or buying this project. They want to talk to you about that.” Great. That is your point of focus. That’s your pitch deck. That’s your everything. You’re going in there. You’re making the presentation.

The agent may also say, “Listen, they’re not going to buy this, but they really like you.” That’s your opportunity to go in and press them about what you guys together can do, what you’re looking to do. That’s when you’re really thinking about the next project, the other project. It’s a really good sign when they volunteer, like, “Here are the things we’re looking to do. Here are the things that we’re interested in.” Take that, because that means they are thinking about you in those future projects.

With Go!, I went out on a zillion meetings when we first sent that out. My agent could tell me, “Listen, they are not in a position to buy the scripts. They’re just not going to do it, but they really liked it. This is your chance to make connections, make relationships, and find some stuff you can be paid to write.” That’s exactly what happened.

**Craig:** Hell yeah.

**John:** Hell yeah. Drew, let’s take one more question.

**Drew:** Cecilia asks, “Most aspiring screenwriters write under their birth name, right? The thing is that I’m a well-known wedding photographer. My website is under my name, as well as on my social media and communication avenues. If you Google my name, a lot of wedding photography images, interviews, awards come home. I want to start on a clean slate and be taken seriously as a screenwriter. Should I write under a pseudonym? My concern is that people might then think I’m not real, and it might damage my credibility even before I start. Will my name influence how I’m perceived as a professional writer? If I write under a pseudonym, should I explain why?”

**Craig:** John, what’s your instinct here?

**John:** I changed my name before I moved to Hollywood.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** My original name was unpronounceable, German last name.

**Craig:** John Meise [MEE-zee]. MEE-zuh.

**John:** MAI-zee.

**Craig:** MAI-zee.

**John:** MAI-zuh.

**Craig:** Goddammit.

**John:** MAI-zee.

**Craig:** You can’t even pronounce it.

**John:** Our family pronounced it MAI-zee the same way Drew’s family pronounces it MAHR-kwahrt even though it could be MAHR-gahrt. It just was not a useful name for me to have, so I took my dad’s middle name, which is August. I am a big believer in picking a name that works for you.

In your case, Cecilia, you have a name that works for you as a wedding photographer. I don’t know that’s a huge problem that you’re a little bit famous in that space, because I think it’s okay. They’re orthogonal to each other, but it doesn’t mean that people won’t take you seriously as a writer. As long as your name isn’t Cecilia Deathbringer or something, I would maybe stick with your real name. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** If her name is Cecilia Deathbringer, she has to stick with her real name, because that’s awesome.

**John:** She does.

**Craig:** I get the instinct here, Cecilia, I think what you’re concerned about is that there’s a slight cheese factor associated with wedding media, so wedding videos, wedding photography. All that stuff has a little bit of a cheese vibe, even though a lot of the people that work in that industry are very talented and very well paid. I presume you’re one of them, since you mentioned awards.

It really comes down to actually how you feel. If you write a great script, the fact that you’re a wedding photographer becomes part of the interesting story. If you write a bad script, the fact that you’re a wedding photographer is something that they could add on to why they don’t like it. “Oh my god, this wedding photographer script reads just like you would imagine a wedding photographer writing a script.” You can hear it, right? It’s actually mostly about your comfort level. You can write under a pseudonym. You need to start that at the beginning.

**John:** Yeah, definitely.

**Craig:** Otherwise, it becomes an issue. You actually have to make a little bit of a permanent choice here, the way that John did. It can’t harm you. The only harm that it would do to you is if you ultimately regretted it. I don’t think that the perception will impact you as much as the quality of your work.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** If it makes you feel more comfortable and confident to write under another name, why not?

**John:** I would say as you’re looking at alternative names, it could just be one you pick and make up. It could be you and your middle name. It could be your married name. If you want to differentiate between the two brands of Cecilia, great. Just have something that makes sense. Have something that you’re going to be comfortable with for the rest of your writing career. It can definitely work.

I’ll also say that having worked in middle-grade fiction, the idea of using different names for different kinds of properties is really common there. Particularly, women will… JK Rowling. Using initials or some other way to not identify yourself as a woman is a common thing too. You don’t see it as much in screenwriting, but it also does happen. You have choices. I would say whatever you do, don’t make a choice that calls attention to it. Make it a choice that feels natural, like, “Oh, of course this is Cecilia last name. I love her script.”

**Craig:** This is very common. Just so you know, Cecilia, this happens all the time. People, sometimes all they do is change their names for practical reasons, like John, because his last name was just leading to a lot of Who’s On First conversations about how to pronounce it.

David Benioff, his actual name is David Friedman. There are about a thousand of those, incredibly common name. If you show up, and if your name is Cecilia Gomez, there are probably a thousand Cecilia Gomezes just west of the Mississippi. You’re not going to be able to use it actually. One of the things that you’re looking is to avoid marketplace confusion. Actors have to do this all the time. It’s incredibly common. It’s Hollywood. Elton John is not Elton John’s name. You know what his name is?

**John:** I don’t know what his real name is.

**Craig:** Drew, do you know what his name is?

**John:** I saw Rocketman, but I forgot.

**Drew:** It’s Reginald something, right?

**Craig:** Yes. You get half points. You get one half point to Gryffindor. Reginald Dwight I believe is his actual name. David Bowie, his real name is?

**John:** No idea.

**Craig:** Davey Jones. Davey Jones. There were two Davey Joneses.

**John:** That’s weird.

**Craig:** Can you imagine a more common name that David Jones? Yeah, David Bowie made sense.

**John:** Hey, Craig, do you remember my husband Mike’s original last name?

**Craig:** I don’t even know if I… Have I ever heard it?

**John:** I don’t know if you ever have.

**Craig:** I don’t think I have.

**John:** My husband is Michael Douglas.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. I must’ve heard this, because you’ve heard the story where Chris Miller and I were on a plane, and Michael Keaton was on the plane.

**John:** Oh yeah, of course, because Michael Keaton’s real last name is Douglas.

**Craig:** He’s Michael Douglas. We did not know that. We weren’t traveling together. There’s this LA-to-New York flight that a lot of people end up on. I’m like, “Oh, look at you.” He’s like, “Hey, look at you.” We’re just chitchatting. Then he’s like, “Hey, check it out. Across the aisle there is Michael Keaton.” I’m like, “It’s Michael Keaton.”

The flight attendant comes by, and she’s like, “Oh, Mr. Miller, what would you like for lunch? Mr. Mazin, what would you like?” She says to Michael Keaton, “Mr. Douglas, what would you like for lunch?” Chris and I were like, why would a famous person use one of those names to avoid being noticed but pick another famous guy’s name? It turns out he didn’t. That’s his actual name is Michael Douglas, and that’s why he has to be Michael Keaton, because there was already a Michael Douglas. I love that the world is full of Michael Douglases and you found one of them. That’s beautiful.

**John:** It’s lovely. Thank you for the questions, Drew.

**Craig:** Great job, Drew.

**Drew:** Of course.

**Craig:** You know what? Drew did a really good job.

**John:** Did a nice job. Good start there. Plus, a half credit on the quiz, so love it all. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Caitlin Moscatello. It ran in The Cut. The headline is “The Fleishman Effect: In a city of Rachels and Libbys, the FX show has some New York moms worried they’re the ones in trouble.”

We had Taffy on the show a couple episodes back. We talked all about the Fleishman Is in Trouble series and book. This article is a great examination of the way that people see themselves in media. In this case, it’s a bunch of New York moms and women who find themselves on the same treadmills and traps that the characters in Fleishman Is in Trouble find themselves in, and just a good reminder that sometimes the art we make is helpful for people framing the experiences that they’re having, and that sometimes what we create lets people put a name to what they’re feeling. I love this article. Just another reason why I loved Taffy’s show.

**Craig:** No better reason to do what we do. We’re trying to connect with people, and when you do, that’s exciting. It’s an interesting feedback loop. You observe, you describe, and then you impact. That’s very exciting. I read this independent of your recommendation. I did read this. It was recommended. I thought it was very good.

My One Cool Thing is a thousand cool things all at once. We’re recording this on February 16th, which is a Thursday. This past Monday, I approved the final VFX shot for The Last of Us. It is done.

**John:** Congratulations, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you. One of the benefits of running a show the way HBO does, episode a week, is that the run of the show covers a span of time, which gives you extra time to finish the visual effects for the final episodes, because you got some time. We finished.

I just want to acknowledge the amazing work of our visual effects team on the inside, led by Alex Wong, our visual effects supervisor, and Sean Nowlan, our visual effects producer, their team, all of the men and women that worked with them from our production, and then I’m not sure exactly how many, but I’m just going to say a thousand people and maybe more, all around the world, from Wētā in New Zealand and DNEG in the UK and Vancouver. We had teams working in Sweden. We had teams everywhere. There were so many vendors working on the show, all of whom just poured so much time and energy and effort into it, which I think shows and I think is reflected in the show. They did tremendous work. They’re all artists, and I am incredibly grateful for all they’ve done.

One reason I think we, people like you and me who are in this position, are obligated to call out our visual effects teams is because it’s one of the few jobs where if you do it perfectly, no one knows you were there.

That sometimes leads to situations where people, they just don’t know what you did. I can say for a fact that I read a lot of things where people talked about, “Oh my god, it’s incredible. Look at this practical thing they made.” I’m like, “Nope, that was not a practical thing.” I’m not going to talk about it, because I don’t like bringing people backstage too much.

I just want to acknowledge all of these men and women who worked so, so hard to deliver all of this on time and at this ridiculous level of quality. I’m amazed. I would constantly say wow. Thank you to our team and thank you to all the teams across all the vendors all over the world.

**John:** Big love for everyone in post.

**Craig:** Big love.

**John:** Such a hard job.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** Big love. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont. It’s edited this week by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by David Kawale.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them all at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on drugs. Drew, welcome, and Craig, thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you, guys.

**Drew:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, let’s talk prescription drugs, prescription drug prices, availability. You and I are both in the Writers Guild. We’re on the Writers Guild health plan. We can get stuff at the pharmacy if we need to, but then longer-term medications, the things that you take all the time, we have to get through Express Scripts, which I find to be one of the worst places on earth.

**Craig:** Interesting. I have had no problem with them, but I will tell you that you and Scott Frank can have a wonderful discussion with each other on how much you hate that. To clarify for people, and I think a lot of plans work like this, we can go into a CVS or a Walgreens and say, “Here’s the prescription,” or our doctor phones it in, and we get it.

What happens is, we can keep getting it there, we’ll get an insane amount of annoying messages saying, “You know it’s going to cost a lot less if you got a 90-day supply of this stuff that you take every day and get it mail ordered through Express Scripts,” because it saves the plan money, because it’s in bulk, and because it’s cutting out a lot of the stuff that… They don’t have to maintain a whole store like CVS does, the brick and mortar thing. I have to say I’ve never had a problem with them, but I’ve heard a lot of people have.

**John:** Here are the problems that Mike and I have with Express Scripts. They will call constantly. We still have phones in our house, which is part of the problem.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** They will call to say, “Hey, we’re going to fill this prescription for you that we’ve been filling for the last 10 years. Is it okay for us to send this through? Can you verify your address?” Jesus, yes. I’m always going to be taking Atorvastatin, Lipitor. I’m still taking it. I’m going to be taking it for the rest of my life. Yes, you can send it. It’s so, so, so maddening.

**Craig:** They’ve never done that with me, although they have done this other thing. My oldest kid has a lot of just medical issues because of Crohn’s disease. When you have Crohn’s, there are all these medications that you have to take chronically. Some of them are injected. Some of them are infusions. There’s all sorts of stuff. My oldest is now 21, and they’ll call me. I’m like, “I’m not even allowed to talk to you about their health. They’re an adult. They’re on my plan, but you can’t do this.” I don’t know what to tell… I don’t know how many times I’ve had to say it to them. They just keep calling. I’m like, “You guys are I think legitimately breaking the law. This is a HIPAA violation.”

**John:** HIPAA violation.

**Craig:** They really do struggle with some of the basics. That said, like you, I take Atorvastatin every day, and it shows up. I have thousands of Atorvastatins.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** My doctor says, “Send him 90 days worth of Atorvastatin. Then when you’re getting close, send another 90 days worth.” I feel like they send them every 12 days. I’m drowning in pills.

**John:** I’m a little over supply on some of those things. This is not just a bitch solution. I have some solutions for certain things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** First off, if you are in Los Angeles or a market that has Capsule Pharmacy, it’s really good for the things that you would normally go into CVS, because you can have your doctor call into Capsule, and they will just deliver it to your house for free. It is so incredibly super handy. The things actually, some of them are cheaper. I don’t understand how it works. It’s probably one of those things where it had VC money and will ultimately go bankrupt. Until it goes bankrupt, it’s a giant savings for me of time and money, so Capsule if you’re in LA.

**Craig:** Early on, I think in the early days of our podcast, we were talking about Webvan. We were like, “How the hell is this company going to work?” It turned out it couldn’t. This may be the MoviePass of pharmacy, but still, that sounds awesome.

**John:** For now it’s really good. There’s some things we get, that I get or that my daughter gets, that just get delivered from Capsule. It’s better and it’s faster. It’s filled in like an hour.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** Love that. I was reading articles online. I talked with Mike. We decided, let’s explore. Amazon has a pharmacy for generic drugs. Mark Cuban, the billionaire Mark Cuban, has Cost Plus Drugs. We ended up using Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs. We’ve figured out the generics that we get are actually much, much, much cheaper to get through him. They came. It all works. Exactly one delivery from them, but it was cheaper and better than my Express Scripts experience.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** I would say if you’re on regularly occurring generic drugs… I’ve put it in the Workflowy here so you can see the differences for Atorvastatin, what you and I both take the generic version of Lipitor.

**Craig:** This is per 90 pills or something?

**John:** Per 90 days. Express Scripts is not too expensive. $9.53 on Express Scripts. $23.10 on Amazon. $7.50 on Cost Plus, so cheaper. That same thing, if I got it at Walgreens, $136.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Crazy.

**Craig:** That’s why our system is bananas. Our system is full of pretend numbers. In the long run, I’m not sure what the major differences are and how much we all spend on these things, but my guess is ultimately the cost of things are the cost of things. It’s just that more of it is shouldered by private citizens here in the U.S., but the cost is the cost. Then you could say, okay, but in the other place, the taxes are high. Everybody’s paying for it somehow. I don’t think there’s any question that our system is not without major and correctable flaws. I have to say, if I’m getting 90 days for $9.53, I’m not sure I want to go through the heartache and the potential screw-ups to just save $2 every three months.

**John:** A hundred percent that. For us, it was like freeing ourselves from the hell of Express Scripts. It was really we hated Express Scripts, and that’s why we wanted to change. Finasteride, which is the generic version of Propecia, is a huge [01:06:53]. Express Scripts for 90 days was 62 bucks, Cost Plus $7.50.

**Craig:** You take Propecia?

**John:** Yeah, Mike and I both take Propecia. I’ve been on Propecia since before I lost all of my hair. I take Propecia, and Mike does too.

**Craig:** What is the hair that it’s giving you?

**John:** The hair that I have left would go away. My doctor wants me to stay on it because once you’re on it, it’s probably better to stay on it.

**Craig:** I see what you’re saying. That’s a major difference. I gotta be honest with you.

**John:** Is it worth it?

**Craig:** It’s worth checking out. For me, what I want to take a look at is, we do have some more expensive things. I take a medicine for my chronic back pain because of spinal stenosis. That’s not the cheapest one through Express Scripts. It’s not brutal. It’s covered. Particularly interested in the Crohn’s medicines to see if there’s a major difference there. Interesting.

**John:** I bring this up as a bonus topic just because whether it’s these services or GoodRX… Megana put GoodRX in the show notes. Megana, who clearly today must’ve logged into the Workflowy to add something in, she misses us. She mentioned GoodRX.

**Craig:** She can’t let us go.

**John:** There are other services that are worth checking out. I would just say don’t assume the default price for a medicine is the right price for it, because it’s probably cheaper someplace else. If you like a service that is more convenient or better, I say switch.

**Craig:** Hey Drew, you know you’re hearing messages from the future right now, right?

**Drew:** I’m 63 years old, so this is very helpful.

**Craig:** “We didn’t have any of this stuff.”

**Drew:** Online prescriptions?

**Craig:** “We didn’t have online. We didn’t even have medicine. We had bourbon.” I just had my annual physical the other day. I was saying to my doctor, “Shouldn’t there just be a pill call middle-aged man that has Atorvastatin and Lisinopril for your blood pressure and an aspirin for your heart, just one horse tablet every guy gets once they hit 50?” I don’t know anybody our age that isn’t on one of these things.

**John:** It’s incredibly common and sort of ubiquitous. Anyway, just my advice, just shop around, and don’t assume that the price you’re getting is the right price for a drug, because it’s probably a lot cheaper.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Interesting.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Thanks, gents.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Thank you so much.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Woman who poisoned lookalike with cheesecake to steal identity convicted](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/09/woman-poisoned-lookalike-with-cheesecake-convicted) from The Guardian
* [‘The Last of Us’ Featurette with Keivonn Woodard](https://twitter.com/hbomax/status/1626340644288331779?s=20) from HBO
* [The Fleishman Effect: In a city of Rachels and Libbys, the FX show has some New York moms worried they’re the ones in trouble](https://www.thecut.com/2023/02/the-fleishman-is-in-trouble-effect.html) by Caitlin Moscatello for The Cut
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by David Kawale ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) with help from [Chris Csont](https://twitter.com/ccsont) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/588standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 538 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is something new for us. One of our listeners, Jake Kelley, he wrote in to say that, “Many of my favorite episodes are the ones focused on craft, yet I find myself drawn to those discussions on being a screenwriter, which offer so much insight.” I put this show together to be somewhat the antithesis of a craft compendium. It won’t help you on your script right now, but offers a way to becoming a rounded and mature creative thinker. Jake provided the episodes and time codes for his vision of what this episode could be. Megana and Matthew took those suggestions and a few other bits to come up with this compendium of our conversations, not about screenwriting per se, but being a screenwriter.

If you’re Premium member, you of course have access to the backup episodes, all 537 of them. Today, Premium members should stick around for my conversation with Jake about why he picked these clips and how Scriptnotes has influenced his work as a visual artist, so enjoy. This first clip comes from Episode 6: How kids becoming screenwriters.

What we might talk about today is how people become screenwriters. I don’t mean how to become a screenwriter, because there’s countless books you can buy on any shelf in a Borders to tell you how to be–

Craig Mazin: I would take my microphone off and leave this podcast.

John: Another podcast we’ll talk about the so-called experts and our fury about some of the screenwriting books out there. Rather than talking about how to become a screenwriter, I want to talk about how a person becomes a screenwriter and the paths to that, because if you talk to a professional tennis player and say like, “Hey, how did you become a professional tennis player?” they’ll say something like, “Oh, when I was eight I started playing tennis, and I just played tennis for forever, and now I’m a professional tennis player.” It’s not that they were 21 and they picked up a racket for the first time and became a professional tennis player. That just doesn’t happen. Or if you talk to a doctor and you say like, “Hey, how did you become a doctor?” maybe they were interested in medicine growing up or maybe thought, “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,” but they didn’t really do anything serious about becoming a doctor until they went to college, and really until they went to medical school. They might’ve studied the sciences they needed, they got prerequisites they needed, but they didn’t do anything serious to become a doctor until quite late in the game.

Screenwriting is not really either one of those paths. There’s not a thing you could point to where you say, “I’m an eight-year-old who wants to become a screenwriter.” Not only does that not really happen, there’s not even a meaningful way to think about that.

Craig: True, true. It’s the difference between the word “career” and the word “vocation.” “Vocation,” the “voc” root is designed to imply a calling, that you’re called to this somehow by–

John: An evocation.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. Screenwriting falls into that area. You have this innate desire to tell stories, but when does that come, where does that come from, and how do you know you have it, and all that?

John: Malcolm Gladwell famously has been trumpeting this idea of 10,000 hours, that if you look at people who are very successful in any field, you can track back and they’ve put in 10,000 hours of practice to get up to that point. It applies particularly well to sports figures, but even other professions, like musicians and other artists. You can really see that they’ve put in the 10,000 hours of time to get up to their mastery of something. No screenwriter I know, at least no screenwriter I know that’s ever getting started, has put in 10,000 hours of writing screenplays. That just doesn’t happen. You don’t start writing screenplays when you’re six.

Craig: That’s right. If you’ve put in 10,000 hours of screenwriting and you’re still not a professional screenwriter, you suck.

John: That is true. You’re sad, and you probably suck.

Craig: You’re sad and you suck.

John: It’s just a tragedy that’s happened there, because 10,000 hours is a lot of time.

Craig: That’s a huge chunk of your life.

John: I’m not gonna open my little Solver program and tell you exactly how many days and weeks and moments of Seasons of Love that is, but it’s a lot of Seasons of Love to get to 10,000 hours. As I’ve thought more about how did I become a screenwriter, where did I get that experience… The first thing I wrote wasn’t great, but it wasn’t, like I said, I put 10,000 hours in between my first screenplay and Go. Go was a pretty good screenplay. It’s that I think I can make a good argument that I actually had my 10,000 words of experience and exposure in there. It wasn’t all writing, and it certainly didn’t look like screenwriting.

My first memory of this storytelling kind of stuff that I do now is, as a boy I would often… First off, I always woke up really early, and my parents wouldn’t let me come out of my room, so I had to stay in my room and play with all my toys. I would always line up my little toys. There’d be two rival faction armies. Actually, not really armies. They were sort of like Battle of the Network Stars. They’d be on the other side of the river and they’d have to come some competitions and things. I’d always have my favorites, but my favorites wouldn’t always win, because that’s the way the narrative should play.

I’d always have this ongoing narrative of the battle of the network toys, that later progressed once I was allowed to stay up to watch the James Bond movies on Monday nights right before school started in the fall. Again, James Bond and new fall TV shows coinciding in the fall, it was an important season for me. Once I was allowed to watch the James Bond movies on ABC, a lot of my imagination play became James Bond. I was on the speedboat. It was really my bed. I would build myself a graveling hook out of a hanger and some string and do James Bondy kind of things. I think that my early narrative development in the sense of figuring out how this action sequence worked was really as a six or seven-year-old playing James Bond in my room.

Craig: I know exactly what you mean. There’s a way to practice the art of storytelling without actually writing. My experience was around the same time as you, six, seven years old. First of all, I saw Star Wars, which blew my brain open. Then I had a clear memory that almost every night when I would go to bed, I would stay up for about 30, 40 minutes, with the lights out, in my bed, just I guess you’d call it daydreaming, although it was evening, just imagining scenarios. Just imagining. Just envisioning little movies in my head. I would make little sound effects to go along with things. My dad would come in and say, “Stop making rocket noises.” I remember that was the phrase, “rocket noises,” because everything was blowing up all the time. I would do that every night. I don’t know what it was. I was just compelled to tell stories in my head.

John: There’s an assumption that it’s all about how much you read as a kid. I was certainly a big reader, but I wasn’t a bigger reader than many of my peers, most of whom aren’t involved in any sort of narrative writing capability. I read a lot. I read the same kinds of things. I read a lot of the Encyclopedia Browns and the Three Investigators and the things that people read, but it was the imagining my own stories constantly that was more important. I did write. I did some creative writing. I probably wrote stories earlier than other kids might have done that. I was rewarded with teacher praise for doing a good job with it. I can’t chart that writing, my ability to put some words together, with my interest in telling movie style stories later on.

Craig: I’m with you. I remember always having a sense of narrative structure. I read a lot when I was a kid. I would say movies certainly inspired more of my visual sense. In my mind I would tell stories in a very visual way. The books that I did love would inspire those things. The Three Investigators, I remember the thing about them I loved the most was that Jupiter Jones had his headquarters underneath the dump.

John: Uncle Titus’s dump, which is –

Craig: There you go. Thank you. That was awesome to me. I desperately wanted my own headquarters under a dump, because it was so visual and it was so cool.

John: I tried to put on weight in 3rd grade so I could be more like Jupiter Jones.

Craig: I was always more of a Pete guy. Pete seemed like the cool one. I think he broke his arm at one point though.

John: Yeah, and therefore was slightly handicapped, and therefore–

Craig: Yeah, and thus an object of pity.

John: Pity/lust, I get it.

Craig: You feel me on that one. I love those. I remember in 5th grade I had a facility for language. I found reading and writing just came easily to me. Words came easily to me. In 5th grade they asked me to deliver the graduation speech. I remember that I wrote a speech that was rather mockish and infantile, in the way that a 5th grader would. It was a lot of bad metaphors about going through doors, opening doors and closing doors behind you and nonsense like that. It had a structure. I remember that I just innately understood that there should be an introduction where you establish this metaphor of doors opening and closing in your life and then three examples and then a final conclusion where the door closes behind you and you step out and you begin again.

John: That sounds very Toastmasters.

Craig: It was as paint by numbers as you can be, but the interesting thing was there were no numbers. I just had that. I was born with formula. I don’t know, maybe you need to start there. It’s a weird thing. Instead of having to learn it, it’s already in your DNA or something.

John: I think what I can also chart as probably the biggest influence on my development that way, and where I logged a lot of my 10,000 hours, was in Dungeons and Dragons, because D and D is one of those things where on the surface of it, it just seems like you’re pretending to play with swords, and it’s a bunch of people rolling dice and sitting around and table and drinking too much Coke.

Ultimately, when you’re playing a lot of D and D, especially when you’re playing at that age, you recognize that there’s two distinct phases to Dungeons and Dragons. There’s the social aspect where you and your friends are sitting around with your parents at a card table, and you’re playing a game, and one of you is the dungeon master. The other two or three of you are playing. He’s the fighter, he’s the thief, and that’s the wizard over there, the magic user over there. You’re trying to get through this dungeon. It’s very graph papery. You’re looking at a bunch of charts. That’s the part that feels baseball statistics-y, where there’s math involved and you’re trying to win a game. As you play more of it, you get a little bit more sophisticated, you start to really focus on the story and the role-playing aspect of it where you’re pretending to be… You’re this character. You’re this character in this situation. What does this character want? You start to think about your characters independent of this dungeon that you’re going through.

My friend Jason and I had, he had his character Garrett Darkhorse, who was a ranger. We started to build out these elaborate mythologies for the Darkhorse clan and who all the people were in the different generations. Suddenly it was about your character who would have a kid, and that kid would marry the other girl from over there. You started to look at the death of your character being part of the overall arc of the thing. It’s this sophistication that came only as you got to be more sophisticated, thinking about the narrative beyond this one specific game, this one specific dungeon that you were playing.

Craig: I didn’t quite get that massively nerdy, although I did play the… Marvel had a role-playing game.

John: I remember that.

Craig: A few of my friends and I played that. I remember not caring so much for the game, which I thought was just a little odd. I never quite got into the actual game part of it, but I loved making the characters. Everybody had a character and they had a name, and then I typed up backstories for all them, sort of like what you were describing, and actually tried to make sense of their… What happens is you roll dice, and they’re like, he’s really strong and he’s really fast, but he’s stupid. That’s interesting. Now, how can I create a narrative that explains that? I remember doing that and typing it up and printing it out on my daisy wheel printer.

John: You would print out these character backstories for the people who were playing your Marvel role-playing game.

Craig: It was interesting, because what they had were like, he’s got a power and he’s this old and he’s blond. Then I would try and explain where he was from and is he a human and how did he get this way and is he related to anybody and what does he fear, and come up with… The idea I guess was that there was a narrative puzzle presented. I always thinking of screenwriting as just endless puzzle solving. The puzzle is how do you make logical sense of this, some sort of dramatic, compelling theory that makes sense of the character you just created with dice. That was fun. I don’t know so much that I spent a lot of time practicing that is why I do what I do today. It’s that I felt the need to do it in the first place that explains why I do what I do today.

John: You felt a compelling need to create narrative meaning out of this thing that actually didn’t have a lot of meaning because it was rolled by dice. You wanted it to make sense and to exist in a way. It was probably one of the earliest occasions for you to see that the decisions you were making about who the characters were would influence the kind of stories you’d want to tell with those characters. Were you being the equivalent of the dungeon master for this, where you were leading the games?

Craig: No, my friend Dave Rogers was usually the dungeon master. Interestingly, he is a Emmy award-winning director now. He’s a very, very well-regarded director in television, directs a lot of episodes of The Office.

John: I’ve noticed several people who are involved with big TV shows right now come from D and D background. John Rogers, who does Leverage, who’s done a lot of other great shows, still writes for… I guess it’s not TSR now, it’s Wizards of the Coast, who bought out the D and D franchise. I first noticed, oh, there’s this… I was looking through one of the new manuals. I noticed his name. I was like, “I wonder if that’s the same person.” I Googled, like, oh, that’s just so strange that he still is doing that. In fact, he’s doing the new Dungeons and Dragons comic book, which is great. It’s like Firefly, but with swords. If we were to have him on the show, I suspect he had a similar experience where that experience of developing characters and developing a world for characters to run around in is really similar to developing the world of a movie, or even more so, developing the world of a TV show, is that you have a sustainable world that goes beyond the adventures of this one week’s play but has an overall narrative, an overall arc. I haven’t talked to David Benioff to see whether he played much D and D, but I’ve got the feeling that it’s probably true.

Craig: Knowing David, I would guess that he did. Knowing Dan Weiss, I would guess that he did as well.

John: It’s a pretty safe bet. I’ll also stump for the new D and D manuals. I don’t actually play D and D anymore. I wouldn’t have time to. I feel like so much of what I do and get paid to do is so similar that I would be burning out that part of my brain to try to DM a session. I’d still buy the new manuals. The new manuals are fantastic. Anybody who’s listening to this who played in the past and has seen those manuals, and like, “Eh, I wouldn’t go into them,” they’re remarkably well done. It’s Gary Gygax’s sort of legacy but sort of brought through to make a lot more sense. They made very smart choices in the new books. I have a ton of them that are all sitting on shelves and I read them as leisure time books.

Craig: That’s where I would fall apart. That’s why I can’t do that sort of part of the game because I don’t understand all the rules and my mind could not wrap around on that stuff.

John: One of the things I think is interesting about where we are right now is the online games, Diablo and World of Warcraft, that seem to be very similar, where they’re doing a lot… You’re running around and you’re killing things. They don’t develop that same instinct, really, because in those games you are optimizing, because ou are trying to figure out the best kind of character to make, but the character is really just a collection of statistics. The character has no backstory. The character has no motivations beyond the quests that are assigned through the game. You have goals as a person, but that character, individually, has no goals.

Craig: I like the Bethesda games. The main quests, at least, give you some sense of identity and sense of purpose.

John: In terms of choices you make?

Craig: Even in terms of your goal. In Oblivion you are tasked with a job by the dying king. In Fallout 3 you’re actually murdered in the beginning of the… Isn’t that right, in Fallout 3? No, no. That’s not Fallout 3. That was the other one.

John: Fallout 3 is an example of a tremendous–

Craig: Oh, it was in New Vegas you’re murdered.

John: New Vegas, yeah.

Craig: In Fallout 3 you’re actually born and you’re raised by a father and then he disappears and you have to go find him. There’s some sense of character.

John: There’s a sense of character, but you’re not generating that sense of character.

Craig: No. You’re right.

John: You are essentially an audience to that character development. While you might learn a lot by observing it, you’re not responsible for the making of it. You’re not making choices about how that narrative is going to be shaped.

Craig: That’s correct. That is the difference between the passive act of playing a video game that’s presented to you and scripted for you, and the idea that you’re going to make your own story as you go along. No question. No question.

John: Our next clip is from Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing.
Craig wanted to talk about positive moviegoing, which I’m not even sure what it means, so Craig start us out. What is positive moviegoing?

Craig: It’s this thing I’ve been thinking about lately because this is the time of year when all the so-called good movies come out. A lot of them are actually good movies. I think it’s just we live in a time of snarkiness and suspicion and nobody seems to want to like anything. People a lot of times go into theaters with their arms crossed, especially in Los Angeles. We’re all in the business. I think people go to movies and they’re demanding to hate them and they’re prejudging them. You name any movie and I could just sort of come up with some pretext for hating it.

What I really have been trying to do is when I go to movie to go wanting to love it and accepting everything about it for at least 20 minutes. I don’t care what happens in the first 20 minutes, I am on board. I will accept it and I will attempt to enjoy it as best I can. I will give myself to the movie. Then at some point, okay, listen, sometimes you just don’t like movies. Sometimes they disappoint. Sometimes they anger you because you hate them so much, and that’s okay. I’m not denying that that can happen. I’ve really been trying to just give myself over to movies.

I went and I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I went in, just gave myself to the movie, and I loved it. I think I would have loved it anyway, but I think it helped that I wasn’t judging. I just decided nobody else goes to movies to judge. Why do we go to movies to judge? Can’t we just enjoy them? Anyway, that’s my thing, positive moviegoing.

John: What you’re describing is almost like… I can picture the body language of it. It’s like you’re sitting down in your seat. You’re not crossing your arms in front of you saying like, “Okay, impress me.” You’re saying, “I’m here. I’m eager to be entertained. I will follow you wherever you go. Take me on a journey.” That’s the message you’re trying to send to this movie.

Craig: That’s right, sort of like meeting somebody at a party and they start to tell you a story. You’re standing there, so be nice. Listen to it. Give it a shot. I get so depressed when I see people ripping movies apart before they even see them.

Aline Brosh McKenna: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s easy to hate things and to bag on things. I think it’s just, it makes people feel fashionable and intellectual. It’s harder. It takes more effort to go out there and say, “You know what? Even if it wasn’t perfect, even if things aren’t prefect, sometimes things that you love are the imperfect perfect thing.” Going in there with an attitude of like, “I’m going to enjoy this. I paid my money to enjoy this, not to find something that I can sit down with my friends later and pick to shreds.”

Craig: Yeah. It will happen that we will encounter movies that infuriate us. And we will pick them to shreds and we will pick them to shreds. If you’ve earned that experience, so you’ve earned it, but there is something to be said for letting yourself be entertained and not attempt to make yourself feel better by pushing a movie away. Frankly even the feeling that, okay, it’s not perfect. How often does that happen? Movies win Oscars and people go, “Oh my god, that piece of crap won an Oscar.” Perfection is irrelevant. I almost think, okay, mistakes aren’t really mistakes. It’s just no more than I got from here to there on a road and it was a really enjoyable journey and there was a pothole. It’s just part of it.

Aline: I like it. I also think it’s very Christmas-y.

John: It’s very Christmas-y. Now, on some level are we talking about expectation? I find that a lot of times the movies that I enjoy most were the ones where my expectations were not set too high going into them. That’s why I love to see a movie during its opening weekend before everyone has sort of told me what I’m supposed to think and feel about it, because when I come into a theater with a set of expectations, nothing can surprise me. I’m sort of preconditioned to think this is how I’m supposed to feel about this particular entertainment.

Aline: Yeah. I miss the days of just going to see a movie and knowing nothing about it. My parents would drive us to the Paramus Park. We used to call it the Millionplex. It had 14 theaters. They would just drop us off there and we would see the 7:30, whatever it was, and just be happy. That’s how I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which pleasantly surprised us. We laughed, fell out of our chairs laughing. We also saw Yor, The Hunter From the Future that way.

Craig: Good one.

Aline: You don’t have that surprise anymore. You’ve been so inundated with media before you go to see a movie now, that I miss the days of just thinking like, “I just want to see a movie. Let’s see what’s out there.” I miss that.

John: Yeah, I remember seeing 9 to 5 that way. I was a kid dropped off at the theater, and the theater we were supposed to go to… They just dropped us off at the wrong movie, essentially, so we saw 9 to 5. I was far too young to see 9 to 5, which is the best way to see 9 to 5, because they’re smoking pot and having sex and all these things.

Aline: Stringing people up.

John: I also remember in college going to see… We ended up seeing The Handmaid’s Tale because the other movie that we wanted to see was completely sold out. We had no idea what the movie was. That’s so incredibly rewarding when you sit in, the only information you have is what the filmmakers are giving you frame-by-frame as the story unfolds. You had that experience of positive moviegoing because you weren’t preconceived with what we were supposed to feel. There was no expectation about what to —

Aline: You haven’t checked a review aggregator that’s given you 60 opinions before you even set foot there.

Craig: Yeah, or your Twitter feed, or comedians teeing up, or whatever, anything, or even articles that are insisting that it’s the most important thing of all time. It’s funny. 9 to 5 was the first movie I think I was dropped off to see on my own. I remember it was like a weird triple date, like a weird triple fifth-grade date. What were our parents thinking? I really make an effort now when I sit in the movie theater before the movie starts to blank my mind completely. I just say, go ahead movie, write all over me and let’s see where this goes.

John: Some of my favorite experiences are actually like when you see the three trailers, or the four trailers, and then the real movie starts and you’ve forgotten what the movie was that you [unclear 00:25:40] what movie is this. Oh right, it’s the Muppets. It is very exciting.

Now, let’s talk for a second as filmmakers, as screenwriters. Is there anything we can do in those opening pages or in the opening minutes of a movie to get people in the positive moviegoing experienced? What is that like from our side as writers to hopefully foster that good spirit?

Craig: I do have one thing that lately I’ve been tending to do, and that is write a credit sequence. It became out of fashion. Originally movies used to have these opening credit sequences that includes even the credits that we now call end credits, where there are logos and rosters of people. Then there were the standard opening credit sequences. That became out of fashion. For a long time, all the credits went in the back of the movie, so you just started the movie. I really like credit sequences. I like opening credit sequences. The opening credits for Mitty are beautiful. I think that that helps kind of get everybody situated and in the mood, so I’ve been doing that lately.

John: I will also write credit sequences in movies where I feel it’s appropriate. More than anything I try to make sure that the reader and therefore the viewer feels confident, like, trust me, this is going to be a ride that you will enjoy taking with me. You’re going to feel rewarded and smart on this journey. We know what we’re doing. Everything is going to be okay. That shows up in your word selection on those first pages, but also just making sure no one is confused in a bad way in those first pages. If it’s a funny movie, you need to have something funny happen really quickly, so everyone sort of gets what the world of your movie is.

Aline: My husband has a thing where we’ll go to see a movie, and sometimes movies take forever just to get going, and he’ll turn to me at some point and say, “When does the movie start?” 20 minutes into the movie, because sometimes it just seems like, especially because we do know what movies we’re going to see, it does seem like if you’re taking 15 minutes to get us acquainted with what we’ve seen on the poster, that makes me a little itchy. I think our attention span for that has probably changed a bunch, too. I think it’s great to see if you can get to the heart of the matter so the audience knows what movie they are seeing.

John: Let’s segue to our next topic, which you brought up also, which is why it’s important to be friends with writers. My recollection, and my early days in Hollywood, I was friends with a bunch of people who were starting out in Hollywood, but they weren’t necessarily writers. I went through a graduate film program, so everyone was trying to become a producer, a film executive. Some people became writers. I didn’t necessarily seek out other writers. What was your history going to–

Aline: I feel really strongly about that. I think that people sometimes misunderstand what the idea is. The idea is not to be friends with writers who are going to network for you, or who are cool, or who are writing, or who are employed. That’s not really the critical thing. The critical thing is to have friends who do what you do and are engaged in the same kind of work that you are.

A couple of my writer friends are from the very, very, very beginning of our career before we had any success or barely any work. We don’t have workplaces in the way that… My husband works at a mutual fund. He has a workplace. He has coworkers. We don’t have that. Even when we do for a specific project, they’re just for that specific project. My ongoing workplace, my Cheers, my group of people that I check in with, are my other writer friends that I talk to on the phone periodically, or have lunch with.

John: Aline, you talk on the phone?

Aline: I talk on the phone.

John: Wow.

Craig: Who talks on the phone?

Aline: I do.

John: Wow.

Aline: We can check in on what we’re doing and say, “Hey, I was working on that. What do you think of this? Is this a good idea? What do you think of this person?” That network is invaluable. You will grow with these people. It’s less important to seek out people who you think are going to connect you with a job and more important to seek out people whose process you find productive. Gatins refers to it as lab partners. Finding a lab partner who does their homework and has a neat notebook is important.

John: I don’t think Gatins has a neat notebook. I think Gatins’s notebook is one of those PT folders that he’s like sort of half colored in as he fell asleep.

Craig: Gatins’s notebook, it’s like a folder that you open up and it looks like it’s full of stuff, and you open it up and there’s nothing in there.

Aline: It’s so brilliant.

Craig: It’s all in his head.

Aline: It’s like a workbook where he didn’t do any of the math, but around the margins are those amazing drawings and thoughts. He’s a good example. He’s a great lab partner. Also, something another friend of mine said, which is easier said than done, we were talking about having your friends read stuff. I said, “Who do you go to for that?” He said, “It’s very simple. Send it to someone who roots for you.”

Craig: Perfect. He’s exactly right.

Aline: I don’t know, it was something I hadn’t really thought of in quite that way, because I think we all have friends that we love, but maybe we have other friends who we think root a little harder.

Craig: You mean to say, “Maybe some of them are rooting against us.” That’s what you mean to say, which I think is real, by the way. Listen, it’s human. It bums me out, but I sometimes sense it.

Aline: It’s funny, I have the opposite.

Craig: Same thing about the positive moviegoing.

Aline: I have the opposite of that, which is I really like everyone around me to be really successful because I think it makes me look better.

Craig: Exactly.

Aline: It gives me more names to drop. Sometimes it’s even on a specific project. Sometimes you can have a friend who is really supportive but they don’t like an idea that you have. There was just a friend that I had that I pitched him a few things I was working on, and one of them he just thought was a terrible idea. That’s not somebody who I would ever go to and say, “Do you want to read this?” It’s just find somebody who really wants to see you do well, or find someone who really roots for that specific project, because that’s positive moviegoing. You want to share your work and share your career with people who are going in with the best possible intentions.

We generate enough of our own schadenfreude towards ourselves in this process. You don’t really need it from other people. I have lots of friends who are producers and executives and agents, and actors too, but your writer friends understand your struggles and your travails and they can really be there for you. I think if you look around, you can find people to link arms with, and you will all come up together.

John: My friend, Andrew Lippa, who did the music for Big Fish, he has this group of composers, lyricist composers, and they get together once a month and they have to show the work that they’ve been working on. As a group they have to perform the thing and they talk about it, which just seems amazing. There are obviously screenwriter groups that can do the same kind of thing, but it’s different to show your written pages versus actually performing something. It’s that trust element that kicks in.

You were talking about how you might have directors or producers or other people who can read your stuff, agents, but all of them have some vested interest in maybe how they’re going to associate with this project. The great thing about another writer is the writer is just the writer. They’re not trying to take your project. They’re not trying to do anything.

While there’s still sometimes that, it’s not even schadenfreude, but that realization of there’s only so many musical chairs, and that sometimes you’re competing for the same spots, in general we can be very supportive of each other because we’re not trying to do the same thing. We’re all working on our own projects.

Aline: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I know you guys have talked about this too, but the three of us all met at different phases in our careers.

John: We should talk about how you and I met, because that’s a strange version of how you and I met. Let me tell my recollection of it, because I’m really curious to hear your version of it. Aline and I met on the phone because I was coming in to rewrite a project that she had written as a spec, correct?

Aline: No, I wrote it on assignment for New Line. Then John rewrote it and he cold called me and said, “I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m rewriting this.” I said, “Sure.” Then John did a draft of it, and never to be heard from again, that thing.

Craig: John, you killed her movie.

John: I probably killed her movie.

Aline: They were bringing in the big guns, and I got pushed down the stairs. John was the first person, I think might have been the first person ever to call me and do the gracious thing. I was outside on my deck and I remember he said, “Is it okay with you if I do this?”

John: I remember you also saying like, “Somebody is going to do it, and I’d rather you do it than somebody else,” which is honestly the reality of most of these situations. The answer is not going to be they’re going to go back to you, the original writer. If they’re looking for another writer, they’re going to hire another writer, so you want the writer who actually has the ability to make the movie be good and not ruin the movie. Those are the situations you want to have. That was a strange project, because the reason why I was able to get a hold of you is because we both had John Gatins as a friend. I called Gatins to get your number and said like, “Is it going to be cool if I call?”

Aline: Oh, that’s nice.

John: It was this movie that you wrote that I really liked. It was just a really good idea. Suddenly Dustin Hoffman was attached, and so I went to this lunch, this crazy lunch with Dustin Hoffman. Suddenly, this is a movie, and then it just disappeared.

Aline: Yeah, it got complicated in that way those things do. We already knew each other, and I knew Craig already when the strike happened. The strike was really the thing where writers really connected in a different way. I think it was sort of the convergence of the strike plus the internet. All of a sudden people really got to know each other in a way that I had not experienced previously in my career where people really know each other now in a different way than they ever had before. I really think it’s for the good. I always find it funny when you’re talking to an agent or an executive or a producer and you say, “Oh yeah, I talked to so-and-so about that project. Oh, yeah, she did a draft on that. So-and-so is directing it.” They’re like, “How do you know that?” It’s because, I think, we know each other more now than we did.

Craig: We know more than they know sometimes. We know so much more than they think we know. We talk to each other. I have a lot of writer friends. I like writers. It’s been a wonderful thing for me for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years to get this coterie of writers around me that I admire and that I trust and that I can learn from. We share and talk about everything. I think we do so in a way that is informed by our experience of being safe with each other, that over time we haven’t screwed each other over, that the narrative that we just feed off of each other and compete with each other and undercut each other is essentially bullshit, and that, in fact, we are supportive of each other because the pain that we feel is the most salient thing about the job we do. When we see somebody else feeling it, naturally we just want to help them. There have been a couple people here and there, but for the most part I have found screenwriters to be incredibly generous and incredibly empathetic, and sweet and encouraging, to me at least.

Aline: I’ll tell you a good story. On this spec that I was working on, I wanted to give it to somebody who didn’t know me and didn’t know the situation and didn’t know anything about it that I could give to cold, who I really respected. I gave it to a writer who I really, really respect but don’t know super well. I maybe hung out with him a dozen, no, half a dozen times. I sent him the script, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while which is always the thing where you’re like, “Oh god, he hates it and he can’t figure out how to tell me.” Then I get an email from him that says, “Look, my dad was sick, he was in the hospital. I’m just about to read the script,” whatever. I was like, oh no. Then a couple days go by and I get a set of notes, seven pages of notes–

John: Wow.

Aline: That are the most amazing thoughtful, heartfelt–

Craig: You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

Aline: Well thought out. Including like, “Page 26, you could be doing this. Page 43, you could be doing this.” Sometimes you get notes from people and it’s like they’re fighting what the movie is. This was just a writer understanding like, oh, this is what she’s trying to do. You are trying to do this. Let me help you. You’re trying to get to such and such a place in five hours. Let me give you the best directions on how to get there.
I was so moved when I got that notes document that I was in my office and tears sprang to my eyes. I know how hard it is as a writer to turn your attention from your own imagination and delve into another person’s script. That he would do seven pages of these incredible notes really blew me away. It’s professional camaraderie. Man, the more of that you can find the better. It doesn’t have to be somebody famous. If you’re 23 years old, it can be somebody else that you know who wants to do this, who will read your stuff and put their heart into it.

John: It’s also back to the issue of as writers we want movies to be better. When I’m advising on projects at Sundance or other places, everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s a tremendous amount of your time that you’re spending.” It’s like, yes, but it’s a chance to make movies better. It’s a way to sort of see what a person is attempting to try to do and help them get to that place that they’re trying to get to.
Seven pages of notes is above and beyond the call. That’s terrific. Really only a writer could do that, because only a writer could understand what you were trying to do and provide specific ways that you could get to that place.

Craig: I would also say that only a writer can convince you that you’re any good.

Aline: That’s interesting.

Craig: I had a very nice experience. I started writing a novel a couple of years ago. Honestly, I wrote two chapters and then stopped, mostly just out of fear that it wasn’t going to be any good and that I wasn’t any good and I’m no good and blah, blah, blah, rotten tomatoes.

John: Dennis Palumbo?

Craig: No, it’s not Dennis Palumbo. I gave it to Kelly Marcel because she asked to see it. She’s a really good writer. She loved it. I have to believe that. When we give screenplays, or we give our work to people that are employing us, they’re just as overly optimistic as we are. Everybody is rooting, rooting, rooting, but you always wonder. Or you give it to somebody, some producer or agents or coverage. Who’s doing coverage? I don’t know who they are. If a writer reads something of yours and says, “This is good,” then you need to believe it. We can’t get that from anybody else.

John: Yeah. You want that response of, “I’m so happy for you and also a little bit jealous.” That’s the best feeling you can get as a writer is when another writer says, “This is great and I wish I had written it.”

Craig: You know what’s so funny? That’s exactly what she said. She said, I actually think she used the words, “I’m a bit jealous.” Now, I have this other task master that’s making me write this book, which is terrific, terrific, because we also need that. We need somebody. We need a lab partner. We need a lab partner.

John: As we wrap up this segment on the importance of writers being friends, we also need to credit Aline, because during the strike – I agree that the 2008 strike was a big game-changer in terms of especially feature writers knowing who each other are – you organized these events that would happen during the strike, these drink events where we would all get together and mingle. It was my first chance of actually getting to know faces with names of some of these people.

During the strike you were assigned to different studios where you were supposed to be doing picketing. Because I am the palest person on earth, I would picket at Paramount Studios from 5:30 in the morning until 8:30 in the morning, so it would be dark and so I wouldn’t get sunburned. I loved that group of people I was hanging out with. Everyone else was at different studios.

The events that you organized, and there were three or four of them, were terrifically helpful,
because just suddenly all these names that I’d seen in the trades are suddenly in front of you
and you’re talking about the things you’re talking about. A lot of what we were talking about was the strike, but you’re also talking about the work, and you’re talking about how to make things better.

Aline: It came at a critical point. If you try to do those mixers sometimes, it’s hard to get people to go, but people were really wanting to be with other writers then and talk about what’s going on and what are we going to do, and nobody was working.

You were able to organize them over the internet really quickly, send out an e-vite to hundreds of people. There were a lot of people who I knew their names but had never met them. We all really got to know each other during that experience. People had really varying opinions was the other thing. A thing that always amazed me was people were really all over the map about what they believed about this, but by and large people were able to… The camaraderie of being screenwriters overcame people’s different point of views on the strike.

John: I would say there were different point of views on the strike and what we should be doing on the strike and how long it should go and what we should be fighting for. It made a common point of focus in terms of what our profession is and what it is our job is and what our craft is. By focusing on the feature writers who are usually completely in isolation, bringing thing together, it was a way for us to identify ourselves as a group, because usually we’re not a group the way that TV writers are often in rooms together and know each other. It was a way for us to actually know who these people were.

Craig: There’s a certain kind of way that screenwriters interact with each other that is unique. I love it. It is a very talky, chatty, low-tech, low-fancy environment, almost always. We don’t do it the way other people do it. There are few screenwriters I know that love to glam it up and throw parties at nightclubs and stuff like that, but for the most part it seems to me we’re at our happiest when we’re talking somewhere where we can hear each other. That’s fun. It’s a nice, real way to be in Los Angeles, a town where just around the corner there’s some place that has convinced you is important and you have to go inside, and if you can’t get inside, and who do you know inside, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There we are with our jeans and our sweaters and our cigars and our wine. We’re able to be real with each other.

Aline: I will tackle people. It’s funny, because I won’t do this with actors or directors really, but if I see a writer whose work I admire… I did a panel with Peter Morgan in 2006, and I was so excited he was going to be there. The video of me is like a running back approaching, of me literally taking guys and grabbing them by the nape of the neck and chucking them out of the way to get to Pete. I was so excited to meet him. I got to him and I was like, “Oh my god, I just came to this thing so I could meet you.” That moment someone said, “Let me take your picture.” There’s a picture like 30 seconds after Pete and I meet, and I look like I’m standing next to Santa Claus. I’m so excited to be meeting Peter.

Craig: John, who was my Peter Morgan in Austin?

John: Oh, it was Breaking Bad. It was Vince Gilligan.

Aline: Vince.

Craig: Vince Gilligan.

Aline: That thing, when you meet somebody whose work you so admire.

Craig: It’s everything. It’s everything.

Aline: It’s so amazing. I will tackle people. Kelly Marcel just moved to town.

Craig: Did you tackle Kelly Marcel?

Aline: I tackled her at the Mr. Banks thing. She’s new to town so she doesn’t know a lot of writers. I was like, oh, there’s people for you to meet.

John: There’s a mixer in your future.

Aline: She went to Austin, which is a really good way. One thing I would say is go to an event like Austin if you’re somebody who is starting out. Again, we just did not have stuff like this when we were starting out. I would have been there tackling people. Go to these events where there is going to be other aspiring people and you will find people that you connect to, that you can pitch your movies to, that you can talk about what they’re working on. You don’t have to be connecting to the fancy people. You can be connecting to people who are exactly in the same stage that you’re in.

John: Everyone grows up together, so there’s lateral things where you’re reading their script, and if you love their script, keep reading their scripts, and keep helping them out, and they will reciprocate. You will find your people, but you have to look for your people because it’s not you’re a professional football player where you’re just going to be around professional football players.

Aline: That’s right.

John: You are always going to be isolation unless you choose to make yourself not in isolation.

Craig: Don’t be judgey. Don’t be judgey. Don’t think that your friends have to be the fanciest writers in the world, or the most successful writers in the world. Don’t let that get in the way. When you fall in love with another writer, you’re falling in love with a kindred spirit and a fellow mind who understands you, who can help you and you can help them. There is no better feeling. The only better feeling than being helped is helping. How is that for Christmas?

John: This clip is from Episode 425: Tough Love versus Self-Care.

This is inspired by a Chuck Wendig blog post over this past week where he talks through the dueling notions of do you buckle down and sit in that chair and get all those words written when you’re hurting, or do you take a step back and practice some self-care. He’s really looking at the trap you can fall into where you’re just self-caring all the time and you’re not actually doing the hard work. As we head into NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which is where I started Arlo Finch, I thought it was a good time to look at the dueling instincts to you’ve got tough it out versus relax and be easy on yourself.

Craig: Yeah. I loved this. I thought it was really smart. The reason I really appreciated it is because there are two positive ways of thinking about things, and one positive way is I need to take care of myself and be gentle with myself and not beat myself up, because that’s going to be counterproductive. There’s another positive thing that says I need to apply myself and motivate myself and push through difficult things and be resilient in order to get things done.
The problem with both of those things is that bad sentiments can easily masquerade as those things.

That’s the part that I thought he really put his finger on brilliantly is that the two things I just said are correct and good, but here’s something that can masquerade as tough love: a kind of brutal self-loathing and self-denial. Here’s something that can masquerade as self-care: just fear and withdrawal and a sense that engaging isn’t worth it. I thought it was really important that especially now because we do concentrate so heavily on self-care ,that somebody said, just watch out, there are these two imposters that will wear the clothing of these two things and neither one is going to help you.

John: Yeah. Let’s go back to that tough love, because someone who is advocating tough love will say, “Yeah, so what? Writing is often hard. You’re not digging a ditch.” To some degree, writing is exercise and it’s just like working out. You get stronger sometimes by pushing through the pain. You’ve got to rip those muscles a little bit so that they can get stronger. I don’t know if physical science would hold that up to be true.

Craig: You did it.

John: I get that. Writing, for all of us, actually sitting down in the button chair and getting to that 1,000 words or those 3 pages can be really tough sometimes. It’s hard to string the words together. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show. What Craig describes as that imposter is a real thing where sometimes it’s your romantic notion that art must be suffering. That writing must be hard and so therefore if writing is hard then I’m doing the right thing because that’s what writing is supposed to be like, that it’s supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be torture every time you do it. That’s probably not true. That’s not a healthy way to be approaching the craft that you’ve chosen for yourself.

Craig: You can easily get into a trap where you think of yourself as stupid or lazy because it just didn’t happen that day. You can try and try and try. There are days where it’s not going to happen. The healthy thing is to say that that is normal. I am not perfect. Not every day is going to be optimum. That imposter dressed in the clothing of tough love will say, “You suck. You’re weak and lazy and dumb, and a real writer would have gotten it done. You just failed.” That’s not helpful at all.

John: Let’s look at self-care, because you and I are both dealing with shoulder pain. Part of the recommendation for that is, take it easy on your shoulder. Don’t do things that are going to hurt your shoulder. That really is a form of self-care. If you are encountering a lot of mental anguish and other things in your life that makes it hard for you to write, possibly pushing through and forcing yourself to write is going to make that mental anguish worse. Be mindful that there could be a good reason why you should step off the accelerator and give yourself a little bit of a break and not be pushing yourself so hard.

Chuck was writing from the perspective of he’s a guy in a shack who is writing books. I’m reading his book right now. His book is really good. He wrote a big giant tome called Wanderers. It’s sort of like The Stand. It’s as long as The Stand. It’s a big tome that drops down. Chuck is a guy writing by himself out in the woods. He is not in a writing room. I’m going to keep using that word as much as I can.

Craig: Good for you.

John: He’s not in a writing room in a social environment with other people, and so therefore he only has himself to turn to. Some of his advice can be a little bit different about self-care when you are surrounded by a group who can be pushing you or also be supporting you.

Craig: The self-care thing is interesting because we didn’t really have it until a few years ago. Of course, it existed and people would come up with different names, but the notion of self-care and the popularity of it is a relatively modern phenomenon. What happens is there’s this backlash where people say, “Problem is all these snowflakes with their self-care, ergo self-care is stupid.” By the way, the people that say that never use the term ergo, but whatever. That’s not correct. Self-care is actually crucial.

What is correct is that self-care can be used as a name for something that isn’t self-care at all, but a different kind of self-abuse, which is hiding. We can, when we are afraid, sometimes put on the clothing of somebody that is trying to take care of themselves, when really we’re just scared. People might think, how exactly is writing scary? When you don’t know what to say, it’s terrifying. It really is. It’s as scary as a dream where you have to go on stage and give a speech but you haven’t prepared one. That’s what it kind of feels like.

John: Yeah. There’s a natural anxiety that happens, like, am I going to be able to do it? If I can’t do it, then it’s going to suck and I’m going to be embarrassed. Even if I’m the only person who is going to see that I can’t do it, it’ll going to be embarrassing. Yes, there’s a whole cycle that can start about should I sit down and actually start writing today?

Craig: Correct. You can wear the clothing of modern parlance and say, no, today is a self-care day. It is worth taking a real clear moment when you say today is a self-care day to say, “Or is it?” It doesn’t mean you’re lying to yourself. It just means let’s really ask and evaluate first. Then if everything checks out, then yes, it’s a self-care day.

John: I put together a list of five questions that I thought would be a starting place for looking at is this a time for self-care or is this a time for some tough love with myself. et me read through here. Craig, I suspect you’ll have other things to add to this checklist.

First I would say is check the facts. Basically that’s a chance to sort of step outside yourself and just look at the situation you’re in. Is this a situation where you’re dealing with some big stuff that anyone in your situation would say like, okay, given what you’re going through, like the loss of a family member, a big breakup, you’re moving, there are some real reasons why you are not equipped at this moment to be doing this stuff. Just check the facts. Independent of your emotions, what are the actual facts about this situation?

I would ask, are you taking care of the basics? Are you actually eating properly? Are you sleeping enough? Is there some basic survival function that you’re not doing a good enough job at, and is that the thing you really need to fix rather than worrying about how much you’re writing on a day? I would ask, can you take smaller bites? By that I mean rather than committing to 3 hours of sitting writing, can you just write for 20 minutes, or an hour? Can you do a little sprint to get you through some stuff? Can you write 100 words rather than forcing yourself to write 1,000 words at a sitting?

Can you lower the stakes? And this is where I come back to Aline Brosh McKenna’s method of getting in the ocean. I don’t know if you remember her describing this at some point. This is how Aline describes starting to swim in the ocean, is that you sort of step on the sand and you get your toes wet, and then you get your ankles wet, then you splash a little water up on your shins, and then your knees. Eventually you’re in the ocean and you’re swimming and you don’t even realize that you started swimming. I always loved Aline’s visual for how she gets into the ocean, because it’s true. It’s scary to jump into the ocean, but if you just wander in there, you’re like, oh hey, I’m in the ocean and I’m swimming.

Craig: It’s literally how every Jewish woman I’ve ever seen gets into a pool. It’s like every Jewish woman slowly wets the arms, wets the legs. It’s so careful. Maybe it’s just my family. Maybe it’s just the women in my family. I don’t know. It’s such a weird stereotypical thing, and I guess as far as stereotypes go, fairly harmless, because it is a smart way of acclimating to a new environment. I think lowering the stakes is a brilliant point of view on this, because there are times where you may say, “Listen, I think today is a self-care day. You know what? Today is a self-care day. That said, what if I did some writing on a self-care day? It doesn’t even count. It’s like free calories. Because it’s a self-care day. If it happens it happens. If it doesn’t it doesn’t. I’ll just try it now with zero stakes attached because it’s a self-care day. I don’t have to sit there grinding my teeth because it’s not happening.” I think that’s really smart.

John: Katie Silberman when she was on the show recently, she talked about how when she starts a project she’ll write scenes and scenes and scenes that aren’t going to be in the movie that are just the characters talking. Perfect. Those are throwaway scenes. It doesn’t matter. You’re just getting a sense of the voices. There’s no demand that those actually have to be the real scenes in the movie. Try writing those. You’ll be surprised. Some of those will end up in the movie. It’s lowering the stakes. The world isn’t going to come crashing down if those scenes are not perfect.

Craig: There you go. Yeah.

John: Last I would say, can you define what you’ll need to be able to do in order to get back to work as normal? If you say, okay, this is a self-care day, I can’t do it, great. What are the criteria you need to meet for you to be able to get back to work? If you can be just a little bit more concrete about that, like, “Okay, I need to be able to sit for 10 minutes without bursting into tears,” great. That’s a thing, if you can do that, then you’re on your way to being able to do the next thing. “I need to be able to focus on one thing for 20 minutes.” Give yourself some real criteria, benchmarks that you need to hit, so that you can actually say, okay, I’m in this state or I’m not in this state. There’s a sense that there’s an end date to it, that it’s not going to be a permanent condition for you.

Craig: Those are five great questions to ask yourself. I really only have one other one to suggest. It is simply, is the biggest problem on this particular day your writing? Because if the biggest problem, the thing that is taking the most wind out of your sails, the thing that is making you the sickest in your gut is the work itself, it may not be a self-care day. It may be a day where you just have to kind of re-approach your writing and think about what’s not working, because otherwise you could hide forever from that.

John: Yeah. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, so the third book is in and done, so I’m essentially done with them, it was a lot more regular writing than I’d ever had to do. It’s been four years of really regular writing to get those books done. The word counts were just so much higher and the workload was so much higher than before. I did have to be little tougher on myself in terms of like, yeah, I don’t necessarily really want to do it today but I kind of need to do it today and I’m going to do it today. Even family vacations, I would say, okay, I need an hour this morning to write. I’m not being selfish. It’s what needs to happen. We would plan for I’m writing during this time. then once I got that writing done, I was just free in a way that was great. It wasn’t looming over me because I knew I’d gotten that work done.

I bring this up because sometimes writing actually is what you need to do. Sometimes writing is a really important way to get healthy again because it lets you step outside of yourself, outside of your own internal narrative into a different narrative and really focus on that for a time. It can get you out of your head with the right project.

Craig: That’s such a great point. I’ve got to tell you, that’s me. There are times where I needed a day off or even a week off because of extant circumstances, things that are going on in my family. My son has surgery. You got to deal with life as it comes and there are days where you just can’t do your work. In all honesty, 90% of the time when I am feeling miserable it’s because something is wrong with what I’m writing. The only way to fix that is to solve that problem. It doesn’t mean I have to write the solution. Sometimes I just have to take a long walk or a long shower. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer and I have to sit in that discomfort. That is still a work day to me. My fingers may not be moving on the keys, but I am thinking. I’m trying. I know exactly what you said is correct. When I do solve it and when I write that solution, the pain that I’m feeling will go away. Therefore I can’t self-care that. That can’t be self-cared away. That has to just be worked away. It’s a really smart distinction that you’ve made there.

John: Cool. We will link to Chuck Wendig’s original blog post which we thought was terrific. Chuck Wendig also writes a lot about writing and the writing process, so if you’ve not read any of his books on writing you should do that as well, because he’s a very smart, clever guy and talks really honestly about the frustration of writing but also what’s cool about writing, and has a very good voice. I would encourage you to check out his books as well.

This clip is from Episode 539: How to Grow Old as a Writer.

We have two big topics this week. This one you proposed, so I’m going to let you take leadership on this topic of growing old as a writer.

Craig: I was just thinking about because we’ve been doing this for a while, you and I, and when we started, there was actually quite a lot of concern about ageism in our business. The general idea was that somewhere after 50 the business started kicking people out. In fact, when you look at what the Writers Guild considers a protected class, writers over the age of 40 are considered a protected class. The world has changed drastically since the mid-’90s. I was talking to some people the other day who were pointing out that the writers who are being employed as showrunners, and we’ll call them sort of major feature film writers, generally are older than they’ve ever been before.

I thought, this is interesting. There must be some sort of lessons that we can learn, since you and I are among the people that are still here, about how to keep yourself fresh and motivated and relevant as the years go on, because we are not kids no more.

John: No. Craig, do we want to talk about how to have a long career, or how to be comfortable with aging in your career? Are we talking both? What are the edges of this conversation?

Craig: I feel like they’re intertwined. So, rather than talk in a very practical way about something that is applicable to about 80 people, I want to talk about something that’s applicable to everybody. Everybody who pursues any kind of creative concern, whether you are a visual artist or an actor or a writer or a producer-director, whatever it is that you do, as you get older your relationship to your own art and your own creative process does need to change, or you’re going to suffer. A reflection of that may be in terms of the industry around you and people’s interest in you, or an audience’s response to you. Rather than view it through the lens of industry, I just want to talk about how to keep ourselves in a kind of good place with our own creative minds.

John: Great. The artistic side of growing older and how that relates to the craft and the thing that you’re trying to make on a daily basis.

Craig: Ideally that would be reflected back at you with some sort of industrial success, if that’s what you’re looking for as the years go on. First let’s just consider it all in terms of strategies, because I do think like anything else there’s just practical things that you can apply to yourself as time goes on. These are good thoughts and questions to just, even every birthday, take a 10-minute walk and think about it.

First, you have to think about what your task actually is. Because it changes over time. You may start as someone who for instance in the mid-’90s, you are, “I want to write sitcoms. I’m going to be a sitcom guy that works on network sitcoms.” There are hundreds of them. Over time, that changes. The tasks that are available that match what you think you do can change. Also, formats can change. We think of television as a certain thing now. It’s all over the place. When we started, it was something else. Chernobyl, for instance, couldn’t have been really done until a certain format change occurred. That meant paying attention to what was going on with formats.

There are two kinds of challenges that you can make to yourself. The first is, is the thing that I’m doing the only thing I can be doing, or could I be writing a different kind of thing, like a short story, or like you did, a novel, or like we’ve both done, some songs, or nonfiction work? Also, are we working within a format that is maybe dying out or just getting boring to us? What other formats might expand our own personal expression? If we don’t rotate the crops, as it were, then we will end up with a field that isn’t doing too well.

John: Let’s talk about rotating the crops, because I think that ties into a thing that happens with age, which is this burnout, which is that you’ve done one thing for so long that it’s boring to you. It’s just not interesting to you. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm to do it again.

I was talking with a writer recently. She was just starting on a new script. She’s like, oh wow, wait, I’m back doing this again. I’m having to start a whole new script again. She was ready to. She knew how to write a script. It was also she didn’t have the same enthusiasm for it that she would have had 5 years, 10 years earlier in her career.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to writing the Arlo Finch books or to writing the Big Fish musical is it gave me a chance to be a beginner again, to be someone who is brand new to things and be curious and eager to explore and willing to make mistakes as I’m figuring out this new art form. When you have mastery over something, it’s nice, it’s helpful, things are easier for you, but they’re also less exciting. Picking a new thing to try to do… Just challenge yourself on a regular basis to try something that you haven’t done before as a writer, so that you get that experience of being new at things.

Craig: Yeah. Getting yourself in that rut is the function of a good thing, I think. We know that you need to focus and you need to practice and perfect. That’s part of how you get good at any creative pursuit. There is a point where, and a little bit like when you get in a video game you’ve maxed out your level, you’re now just walking around all the areas of Skyrim and beating everyone’s brains in with ease.

John: Yeah. You’re just doing a little side quest.

Craig: There’s no challenge because you are perfection, and it gets boring. You’re absolutely right. Being a beginner again is a wonderful thing. It’s a little scary, so it’s also a function of fear. Trying new things is scary. The thing that I’m scared of the most is actually, at this point now in my life, being bored. Challenge yourself to reconsider the nature of the formats you do work in, that you’re willing to work in, that you’re willing to try. Take a look at some formats that you didn’t maybe know even existed before, because there are new ones all the time. Challenge yourself to even break out of a genre and into another genre.

John: You’re really saying just stay curious and really look at the world around you and see, what is out there, what is a thing I could make out there that is interesting to me? It doesn’t mean you have to pursue everything. You don’t have to become a social media influencer. You don’t have to master TikTok. It’s okay to leave some stuff by the side, but also recognize that if these things are coming online, they’re serving some need. What is it you can bring to this need, and what can you do that could fit into this bigger universe of new content that’s being made?

Craig: You’ve mentioned the key to all of this, which is stay curious and be connected with the world. The biggest complaint people will make about, we’ll call them aging artists, is that they’re out of touch. How do we get out of touch? We get out of touch by essentially ignoring the world around us because we feel like we figured it out in a moment, and then we stay there. The world will move past that moment. If you don’t, you will be out of touch.

Sometimes people engage with the world simply in opposition. “Kids these days.” Let me just boil it down to that. “I don’t understand the world today. Everyone is on their phones.” Anybody who ever says, “You know what the problem is with the world today? Look around you man. Everyone is staring at their phones. They’re not looking at each other,” you go ahead and tell that person they’re an idiot, because the world changes. They are interacting in fact with more people faster than you could have ever done in your life. Is it true that sometimes uninterrupted eye-to-eye contact is wonderful? Absolutely. Is it a cliché, out-of-touch thing to say, “They’re all looking at their phones?” Absolutely out of touch.

Rather than instinctively saying, “In my day everything was perfect and now it stinks,” listen. Just listen to the world. Even if you disagree with it, listen to it, because perhaps in your experience of the world around you and your differences of opinions with it, you may find grist for the creative mill. Defensiveness isn’t going to get you anywhere.

John: Yeah. Being defensive is never a good look. When you say no to something, people stop engaging with you. I would say over this last 20 years, one of the most helpful ways I’ve been able to stay caught up with how things are for screenwriters and just for general people making creative things, I’ve always had an assistant. My assistants have always been younger than me. They’ve always been at the start of their careers and doing stuff that people at the start of their careers do. It’s been fascinating to see how the starts of careers have changed over the last 20 years because just the industry has changed around them.

Also, just engaging with the people who originally were writing into the website who are now Scriptnotes listeners. You see what they’re doing and what the challenges they’re facing, but also what is exciting to them. I may not be excited about the same things, but what they’re into is valid. Listening to what it is that they are going after is great. I always try to remember that the people I’m interacting with are the people who are going to be running this town in 10, 20, 30 years. It’s worth hearing what’s sparking for them because those are the kinds of movies and TV shows that we will be making the next couple decades.

Craig: Inherently, you are not jealous of the young, nor am I. I think a lot of older people get quietly, subconsciously jealous of young people. My feeling is that when we judge them, remember what it was like when we were judged by older people, because in my memory my feelings were not hurt at all. I just kind of rolled my eyes and made fun of them, because soon they were going to be dead and I was not. They were old and out of it and not vital. My feeling is, judging people who are younger and thinking that all they do, they’re obsessed with their influencers and their TikTok and blah blah blah, you’re not having any impact on them. They’re laughing at you. Maybe just listen to them and observe them. What’s wrong with that?

John: You can also ask advice, which I think a lot of times older people have a hard time asking advice of younger people because it reveals something that they don’t know. The fact is you just don’t know some things, so again, be curious. Ask the questions. Don’t ask the questions in a way that feels judgmental like, “Why are you doing it this crazy, stupid way?” What is it that’s interesting to you about this thing, or why did you decide to make that choice? Again, when you get to move into new fields, that’s very natural because you just actually just don’t know. You’re in a much better position to ask naïve questions because you don’t know what that thing is, versus us as screenwriters we have a good sense of how all the stuff fits together.

That said, when I talked with a writer, Liz Hannah, who just did a movie for Netflix, I am genuinely curious about what the experience is like making a movie for Netflix. What are the deliverables like on that movie? Are they expecting the same things that we’d expect in a theatrical feature delivery system where they want… Are they cutting negative? Are they doing all the stuff that we used to do for normal, traditional features, or is it more like a TV delivery system? Ask those questions and realize that the different kinds of things people are making these days are more likely the future than what we knew.

Craig: The things around us that happen that we can lose touch with in a dangerous way are not just I guess the different experiences that younger people are having, but also the general viewpoint of the world. Attitudes change. It’s very hard for us to keep up with it. It really is. I understand that.

I remember a friend once told me, he was like, “I’m going to keep listening to whatever the pop music station is, the current hits station, because I never want to be one of the old people that doesn’t know current music.” Inevitably, you will be. It’s not possible. There are some things that are going to leave you behind.

General attitudes and vibes and feelings are things you need to be in touch with, because what was once funny may not be anymore. Things like funny and dramatic and scary and shocking are not absolute values. They are relative to the time in which you live. If you’re not paying attention to the kinds of things that are shocking people or making them laugh, you’re going to flop, because you’re out of touch and out of time.

John: Let’s talk about authenticity, because one of the things I see which can be kind of embarrassing is when an older person is trying to seem younger than they are and is not acknowledging the fact that they are in a different generation than people they’re talking to.

Craig: Hello, fellow kids.

John: Language is one where they’re trying to use slang and they’re using it improperly. That’s sort of a tell. It’s not just that it’s embarrassing that they’re using it wrong. It’s that it’s clear that they’re not being authentic to who they are. I think one of the reasons why young people spark so clearly to Bernie Sanders is he feels very much himself. That is true of any generation. When we were in our 20s, we didn’t want the old person who was trying to be like us. We wanted the old person who felt like themselves. Don’t reach too far in terms of your own voice trying to sound young.

In terms of your writing voice, though, you are going to be writing characters of all different ages, all different backgrounds. You have to be listening for how those things sound so that your character’s voices don’t drift away.

Our example in last week’s episode, where we were listening to how people speak, that’s I think even more important as you age into your career, because your assumptions, your memory of what 20-somethings sounded like is not going to match how 20-somethings sound right now.

Craig: Yeah. Then we come to our last point, which is just language, just the realities of language, because you’re right. There is something terribly inauthentic about someone that is chasing language. They will always be five steps behind anyway. They will always be your dad walking in saying, “Oh, chill out. Oh wow, this is fresh.” Shut up, dad. That’s so old and lame. It’s faster now. Whatever is cool five seconds will not be cool five seconds from now, because that’s what youth is. It’s a churn.

Don’t chase it, but do let yourself be carried along by it. Be aware of it. Let yourself be old authentically without either chasing something, which is inauthentic, or denying the reality of it, which is just as terrible. Just be aware of the way that the world is changing and be aware of the way you’re changing. If you are those things and you are willing and open to evolving, then it doesn’t really matter how old you get. You’ll just be cool. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is 4,000 years old.

John: Good lord, yes.

Craig: She’s cool.

John: Yeah, she’s a lich, but she’s really cool.

Craig: She is a lich.

John: There’s a [unclear 01:17:21] hidden away someplace.

Craig: Yeah, she’s a lawful good lich. Very rare. Very rare.

John: Special when you find them.

Craig: She’s a lich.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan McDonnell. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Chris John Mince [ph]. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin and I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. You should get them. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record with Jake, who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Thanks, and we’ll see you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, I’m here with Jake Kelley, who is the listener who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Jake, welcome to Scriptnotes.

Jake Kelley: Hello. Thank you for having me.

John: Tell me about the inspiration for this episode. What got you thinking about, “Oh, I should put together a compendium episode.”

Jake: It started because I think as listeners what we appreciate about you and Craig is your expertise on the craft of screenwriting. If you listen to enough episodes, it becomes evident that you’re both very wise and experienced guys in other manners. I wanted to put this episode together to showcase some of that wisdom that’s not necessarily craft-specific, but that can still help screenwriters.

John: Stuff that’s not about the words on the page, but the actual experience of being a screenwriter. Are you a screenwriter? Do you write yourself?

Jake: I do write. I am not a professional screenwriter.

John: I see by the little bit of Googling that you’re actually a visual artist. That’s your background?

Jake: That is correct.

John: How do you find the relationship between the creative process, writing, trying to write a script, versus the work you’re doing, painting or doing other visual arts?

Jake: I find the process to be pretty similar. I would say the biggest difference, and it’s a very surface-level difference, but I can only write for about two or three hours a day max, and usually not even that, whereas if I’m doing visual art, it’s pretty easy for me to do five, six, or seven hours straight.

John: They’re similar disciplines, but different in the way that doing physical art, you’re physically doing stuff, you’re in a space, you’re moving around, versus writing, you’re at a desk and you’re making a thousand decisions about this word or that word, this moment or that moment. Even Craig and I, we’re writing two or three hours maximum a day also. It’s not realistic to assume that you’re going to be able to crank out that number of hours.

Jake: There still is a lot of those decisions in creative art. Every time I mix a color, it’s like, is this the right color or the wrong color? Every line, I’m questioning it. It really is a process of thousands of micro decisions you’re making through the course of that working session.

John: Craig, of course, if he were on this podcast, he would say [unclear 01:20:48] drop out of film school. Did you go to art school? Did you learn how to do this in an academic setting?

Jake: Yes. I did go to the University of Wisconsin, where I studied fine art.

John: What are those classes like? I know a writing class, because I went through a journalism program. Those metrics were like, are you able to do the job or not do the job, versus it would seem to be harder to figure out, is this student in my visual arts class actually progressing? Are they doing the work that deserves an A or a B or a pass or a fail?

Jake: I think that was the trouble for some of my educators, some of them being grad students. I would say overall it is measured by progress. These classes were open to non-artists a lot of times. We did try to foster a healthy atmosphere if somebody wanted to come in from a science field and just try to do a life drawing. It was based on progress and effort and attempt. You’d just blow it off, but that was the starting place.

John: Now, coming from a visual background, were you always also writing? Did you write even back in those days or was it a later thing that you got into?

Jake: We can say I was doing some writing, but where they really came together was I was doing comics and comic strips, which is really both writing and drawing at the same time.

John: Talk to me about the comic strips, because that’s absolutely true that you were both having to figure out what the stories, what the words are, what the actual point is, yet you have to have a strong visual representation of how that works. As you were doing comics, were you scripting them out first and then figuring out the panels? What was your process?

Jake: For that, if it was a simple four-panel comic, generally I would just have a vague idea of one I wanted to do. I would fill in the visual information, and then do the text last. Other people did it the other way. If it’s longer form, then I would probably start with some sort of words on a page to help guide me, break up the storytelling information that way.

John: I’m writing a graphic novel right now. I’m loving it. It’s a great process, but I’m finding it is actually exhausting to really have to visualize the page and think, okay, how is this going to be presented on the page, what’s actually happening panel by panel to get me through it, what is the top-of-page to bottom-of-page experience? I love it, but it’s just, even after 20 years doing this as a job, it is still different than the normal screenwriting I’m doing.

Jake: When you’re screenwriting and you’re using only words, what is the engagement of the visual process there for you?

John: Screenwriting with just words, I am envisioning the space, envisioning who the people are and where they are in the space and basically what they’re doing. I just create the loop of this is the moment, this is the scene, this is happening. I don’t think shot by shot. I don’t think what the coverage is going to be. I don’t think necessarily who’s big in frame, who’s small in frame, usually. I just have to put the people there and get them in motion, as opposed to doing this writing now for this graphic novel, I really have to think about who’s in that frame and who am I focused on in that moment. It feels a lot more like the directing from the page has always been okay, but it feels like calling out those closeups, calling out what it is moment by moment I’m going to be seeing. That is a little exhausting for me.

Jake: Of course.

John: I want to talk to you about, you pulled for this episode way back to Episode 6. When did you start listening to this show? When did you find all these little moments? Were you always listening from the beginning or did you go back through the archives? How did you find all these moments?

Jake: I believe I discovered your podcast, I want to say around Episode 390 or so. I’m not actually sure what date that lines up with, maybe three years ago or so. At first I was just listening to the new episode every week it came out. Then I did start to become more interested in the past episodes, because there is a wealth of information there. What I did was I would go reverse chronological by… You break it up into 50-episode chunks. I would go backwards a chunk, but then within that chunk, go forward. I’d jump to Episode 250, then go 251, 252. Then when I reached 300, I would jump backwards to 200 and then 201.

John: I’ve never listened to the back-catalogs. I have a memory of recording them, but I can’t remember who I was at that time or what the show was like.

Jake: Of course.

John: How much has the show changed when you listen back to those early episodes versus what’s happening now on the show?

Jake: I don’t think it actually changed all that much. I know that some people say that the earlier episodes are a little bit rough around the edges. I think that’s only true maybe in terms of microphone quality. Very, very early on, I think you and Craig maybe don’t have quite the same rapport. Honestly, it’s not that noticeable. It really is you could jump to those back-episodes that far back and really truly have the same experience. You guys are as wise and smart as always.

John: Aw. Jake, thank you so much for this. Thank you very much again for writing with this suggestion, because it really was a great pitch for putting together the kind of episodes that we’ve been doing more of as Megana’s come online, to really pick stuff up from this big catalog and make episodes that make sense. We some rerun old episodes, and that can be great, but so much of that information gets weirdly out of date, and our wonderful things don’t match up to anything. A suggestion like this for a special compendium episode is great. Jake, thank you so much again for this.

Jake: Of course. Thanks for having me.

John: Absolutely.

Links:

• Episode 6: How Kids Become Screenwriters
• Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing
• Episode 425: Tough Love vs. Self Care
• Episode 439: How to Grow Old as a Writer
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium to listen to all the episodes in our back catalogue, including the ones sampled here.
• Thanks to Jake Kelley for the episode suggestion!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Christiaan Mentz (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (with segments by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan Mcdonnell!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.