Scriptnotes Transcript

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 592 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are action heroes named John and not Craig? We’ll think into the mystery of the J names and why you see so many Jacksons, Jakes, and Joes, and so few Craigs. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Can you think of even one action hero Craig?

**Craig:** Literally, not only are there no Craigs, but do you remember when we were kids and you would go to a theme park or something and there would be the big rack of personalized miniature license plates?

**John:** License plates, yeah. You’d find Bort but no Craig?

**Craig:** Right. You could find Bort, yeah, exactly, but Craig was rare. Even back when Craig was a name that some people had, it was rare, whereas you never had a problem.

**John:** Never had that any issue. Was there an H? Was there not an H? Both options were always available.

**Craig:** Exactly. You literally had variations on your name. I had nothing!

**John:** After that discussion, we’ll get into another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering listener questions on research, options, and work for hire. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, let’s talk anesthesia.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** I recently went under the knife, and wow, Craig, those drugs are good.

**Craig:** Yes, they are. Happily, we don’t have access to them.

**John:** No, and the people who do have access to them, like the Michael Jackson people who have access to them when they shouldn’t be using those, that’s bad.

**Craig:** That’s bad. We’ll get into that. We’ll get into that. I don’t want to give this away to the people that don’t spend the $5 a month. You know what? You don’t get it.

**John:** You don’t get it, but you know what you get? A quality show full of many other things, which we’ll dive into right now, starting with some follow-up. A previous episode about villains, we talked about the tied to the railroad tracks trope, that mustache-twirling villain who ties a damsel in distress to a railroad track.

Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, sent through this great article that actually went through the history of the tied to the railroad tracks trope. It’s fascinating, because it’s not what you would expect. I thought it started with silent movies, but when we see them in silent movies, that was already a parody of an existing trope that came from stage plays.

**Craig:** Oh, really? That’s interesting. People were tying damsels to train tracks on stage?

**John:** Yes, and it became such a cliché. It became an early copyright lawsuit, because there’s a famous play that did it. Then other plays started having the villain tie the damsel in distress to a railroad track. Then it became actual copyright lawsuit things happening about that, whether you could copyright that action in a play, which seems crazy.

**Craig:** That’s crazy.

**John:** This article we’ll link to says that at some point there were six plays in London that all had that trope in it at the same time.

**Craig:** What I like is that the folks who did it first, so looks like Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight by American, apparently that was first, contained a scene “where a character named Snorkey is tied to the rails by a man named Byke.” What I like is that Augustin Daly wrote this play, probably thought, “This can be cool. That’s a fun idea,” and then everyone went insane. Everyone was like, “Dude, that’s the greatest thing we’ve ever seen.” Everybody went, “People are clamoring for other people being tied to railroad tracks.” Why?

**John:** It’s wild. It happened on stage before it happened in real life. Then after it happened on stage and in movies, there are a couple examples of it happening in real life. I think the other example that this article gives talks about how the idea of cement over shoes, like the mafia casing your feet in concrete, then throwing you into the lake. That was in fiction first, and then there were a couple cases where it happened in real life.

**Craig:** Where they thought, “Oh, that’s a cool idea.” It did always strike me as just very involved, really involved. Concrete is difficult, because the moment you pour it, it starts to set. That’s why concrete mixers are always turning. You gotta get some Quikrete. Then it’s messy. It’s all over the place. They’re thrashing around probably, so that’s annoying. Why didn’t you just shoot him? Just shoot him.

**John:** Just shoot him.

**Craig:** Shoot him. What’s hard about that?

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Karl Smallwood, which talks through this. I just really enjoyed reading the backstory of how we got to this trope. I was just fascinated to know that it was already a jokey trope by the time we see it in silent films.

**Craig:** No one’s ever taken it seriously.

**John:** No, it’s never been taken seriously. Two other bits of follow-up. Actually, related follow-up. In that same villains episode, we were talking about Annie Wilkes from Misery. I said, “Oh, would Annie Wilkes have even been a villain if this guy had not crossed her doorstep?” Two readers wrote in to remind me that it’s set up in the movie that he discovers that she was actually involved in a series of baby murders when she was a nurse. She was a bad person before James Caan’s character shows up at the house.

**Craig:** What if those babies were jerks?

**John:** What if she knew they were gonna grow up to become future Hitlers?

**Craig:** Exactly. You don’t know what she’s capable of. I totally forgot about that. It did strike me that, look, if you are the sort of person who upon reading a novel that kills off a character you love, goes so crazy as to hit the author’s shins with a hammer, there’s no way that’s your first crazy thing. Nobody just starts there at the age of 53. Something happened.

**John:** It’s a ramp up to that.

**Craig:** Have you seen the movie Pearl?

**John:** I haven’t seen Pearl yet. I’m eager to see Pearl. I haven’t watched it yet though.

**Craig:** It looks to be a fascinating portrayal of just good old-fashioned nuts. I want to see it. It looks intense. Looks terrifying.

**John:** It’s hard for me to see a terrifying, intense movie. I just don’t have a space in my life or a time in my day where like, “Oh, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna watch a terrifying, intense movie.” There’s just not a lot of opportunity for me, the way my life is set up right now.

**Craig:** How’s your life set up? You know what? Don’t go into it.

**John:** We watched The Last of Us in an afternoon at 1 p.m., because Mike does not want to watch a scary thing before bed, which I get.

**Craig:** I get that.

**John:** Mike has watched most of your show with his back turned to the TV so he can’t see what’s actually happening on screen.

**Craig:** That’s how we intended it. Boy, we could’ve saved a lot of money if we knew that everyone was watching facing away. Just a really nice, tight radio play.

**John:** Nice radio play.

**Craig:** That’s what we were going… You know what? The show sounds really good, so hopefully he enjoyed the sound.

**John:** It’s good sound mix quality here. We have a last bit of follow-up here. We talked before about European script consultants. Hillevi [ph] wrote in with a really good overview of the Swedish system. Hey Drew, can you talk us through what Hillevi wrote for his involvement with the Swedish system?

**Drew Marquardt:** Hillevi writes, “My day job is as a screen industry strategist for a regional talent development fund in southern Sweden. This is an organization that gets its money from the state and acts under the broad decisions made by the regional and local governments in terms of what their priorities are. A filmmaker will apply to us for money to hire a dramaturge to help them develop their script. We don’t really have development execs here. If we grant them the funds, we are not involved any further in that process.

“The idea is that the public funds will ensure that less commercially viable films will be able to be made and also so that people who have money are not the only people able to make films. In Sweden there is a democratic mission in the way public film funds are distributed. At the same time, any government influence is kept at, quote, ‘arm’s length.’ However, this paradigm is being tested more and more at the moment.

“The Swedish Film Institute was criticized by an independent oversight report for being too politically angled for launching initiatives to increase diversity and green filmmaking in the films being funded by the Institute. While those ideals are good, there is a danger in violating that principle of arm’s length. Since our last election, when the far right party got more power, there’s been a lot of talk about, quote unquote, ‘reviving Swedish culture,’ in a very specific way.

“If the arm’s length distance is no longer the norm, then there is a risk that the public funds for film development and production do become more of a propaganda tool for the state. If European filmmakers are being squeezed by global streamers on one hand and regressive far right governments on the other, color me concerned about what that will mean for the future of independent cinema in Europe.”

**John:** Thank you, Hillevi, for this good overview. I think it brings to light both what we’ve talked about in previous episodes, about how there is meant to be an arm’s length distance between the government funding and the actual filmmaking. They can use the money to hire [inaudible 00:08:56] not deliberately telling the people what they need to write, what their films can be about. That’s all meant to be there. That’s all part of the structure. The minute you try to introduce any kind of ands or qualifications or other things, it could also fall under political influence. That is a genuine worry.

**Craig:** That’s basically I think what we were concerned about. Any time a government is funding the arts, there is always the concern that they will bring some sort of governmental interest to bear, even if it’s done subtly. Hillevi points out something that we probably don’t think about much, and that is that governments change. If you set up a system that is run well or honestly by one administration, that is no guarantee that it will continue that way. Another administration may want to do something else with it.

We do have some public funding of the arts here in the United States, but precious little, not enough compared to how wealthy our country is. It’s limited enough where it never struck me that the government was influencing the content.

This is definitely something to keep our eyes on, because as he says, the paradigm is being tested more and more. Even when they are doing things that progressives might consider to be a positive, other people won’t, and then those people will come along and do things that conservatives think is positive and other people won’t. Suddenly, the arts have become a football, which no one wants.

**John:** The arts are traditionally associated with the left, and that’s why you always see when Republican governments take over, this talk about defunding the National Endowment for the Arts or defunding PBS, which of course mostly hurts educational outreach kinds of things of those institutions.

Just always be mindful that these things can happen, especially when you have any shifts in how government is structured. We tend to see these in the US and in Europe as shifts to the right, but you could also theoretically imagine shifts to the left, where suddenly, what was considered standard is now not considered acceptable for a new leftist government.

**Craig:** It’s odd bedfellows, as they say, government and the arts, especially considering what the mission of the arts is. I continue to be concerned about this method. I think even though our method isn’t perfect, it’s not terrible. That’s my full-throated defense of America.

**John:** We’re talking from the bias of a wealthy country that can spend a lot on the arts because we are a wealthy country, not as a nation, but just because we have the market to be able to drive a lot of things.

I think the goal behind these film funds was to make sure that you had a local arts scene or it is possible to make movies in your country. That’s the concern is that without the governmental funding, it may not be possible to really make a local film industry.

**Craig:** We wish everybody the best with that. Hopefully, it goes better than it goes poorly. What else can we say?

**John:** This is not really follow-up. It’s news, 20 years of follow-up. Andy Baio, who writes a great blog at waxy.org, for the last 20 years has been following the leaks of Oscar screeners. Basically, when movies come out for an award season, we get sent screeners. WGA gets sent screeners. The Academy gets sent screeners. These used to be DVDs. Then they went to Blu-rays for a little while. Now they’re all online.

He was tracking how quickly it’d go from this DVD was sent out to potential voters to it’s now leaked online [inaudible 00:12:32] that actual screener leaked online. It was incredibly quick. A large part of the high-quality movies you could find online were from these linked screeners. He was charting how many of those leaked each season.

This last season, not a single screener linked before Oscar night, for the first time in the 20 years that he’s been tracking it. He looks at why that has changed. It really comes down to the end of physical media, so moving more things to online services, and just the fact that by the time screeners have shipped out, there were already good online versions people could download that didn’t have to use the screeners as their source material.

**Craig:** I have a suspicion that that is one of the larger reasons why. That doesn’t bode well, because I think that the theatrical experience continues to come back, maybe not as quickly as some people want, but it’s coming back. That means that once again, as we head into the next year, that a lot of those movies will not be available on Netflix or any of the streaming services, they will be in theaters only, which means that there will be more of an interest in pirating them. Is Hollywood even trying? Nobody even tries, right?

**John:** Here’s what Hollywood tries to do. I think they are concerned about in-theater rips of things. Literally, the weekend that it debuts in theaters, if it’s available online, they hate that. They will try to do things to stop that. They can watermark the bejesus out of things. I’m sure they actually can do a pretty good job of figuring out what copy of what is the thing that is now on some sharing site, so maybe they can get some of those knocked down.

The huge worry over Academy screeners leaking and that being the way that piracy started I think can be put to bed, because that’s not the source of online leaks these days. The Academy app is great. I think that did a lot to help there. Even if we were still shipping DVDs around, I don’t think it would be the main source of piracy.

**Craig:** Here’s hoping, because while there are a decent amount of Oscar-nominated films that are from big studios and big movies, a lot of them are small. A lot of them are the kinds of movies that actually get damaged and the artists get damaged by this stuff.

I don’t know, it’s just a rough one. There’s so much copy-fightism inherent in what I’ll call the youthful left and not a lot of thought through on it. I think it’s easy to want everything to be free until you make something. Then you realize that you need to make a living. It’s not about defending the rich. It’s honestly about defending the people that are scraping by as artists more than anything else.

**John:** The films they are debuting at South by Southwest this week, some of those will be giant hits. Some of them will become Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was a South by Southwest debut. A lot of those films will have limited theatrical runs or will have to debut on streaming someplace or an exclusive debut on some platform. If you’re not watching it there, but instead you’re watching it through a pirated copy, those filmmakers who you say you want to support are not going to be supported. It’s making it harder for them to make their next film and everything else. All the previous speeches about the horrors of piracy are still true.

Craig, you are destined to be many things in life. You’ve achieved a lot, but you will probably not be defending the White House from attack. You’re not going to be stopping the runaway train. It’s not your fault, Craig. It’s your parents’ fault. They named you Craig. Mazin is a perfectly valid action hero name, but Craig is just not it.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. It’s mild.

**John:** It’s mild. You need to start with a J. You need to be a John, a James, a Jack, a Jake, Joe. This data supports this. We’re going to link to an article by Demetria Glace writing for Slate. She’s taking a look at, it feels like Johns and Jacks and Joes are over-represented. They are actually hugely over-represented among the characters when you have a single action hero in a movie or movie franchise. They’re way over-represented. As soon as you take out the James Bonds and the characters where they have 15 films in their history, the Js just run away with it. Is that surprising to you?

**Craig:** No. I think we’ve all seen this. There’s something that feels punchy and tough about the single-syllable name. These names, John, James, Jack, Jake, Frank, Joe, these are incredibly generic American tough-guy names. They’re also names that are not current. They’re names that have been around forever. They’re names that go back to the Old West. Because America doesn’t really have what the Europeans would call history, we have just have this whatever, short 400 or 500 years, these are the names that we have mythologized, and so it’s not surprising to see them come up over and over and over again.

When you look at the villain names, you notice that even though there are a couple of repeats, like James and Jack, most of the villain names are multiple syllables. Victor, Michael, Robert, Ivan, Simon, Eddie, Gabriel. Then there’s Ernst, which is just a straight up Nazi thing. Eddie in particular has a skeezy vibe to it. Eddie, he just seems like he might be a scumbag. Obviously, Ivan is your generic Russian terrorist.

Victor is one that always gets me. That always makes me laugh. I don’t know what it is about Victor. As a name, it’s a perfectly good name. It signifies victory. I think maybe Victor Frankenstein was it. I think it’s doomed.

Also note that villain names tend to feel a little bit more erudite. Simon feels like he’s a bit learned, and we don’t like bookworms.

**John:** No, none of those. None of those eggheads in our movies. Those eggheads are always plotting things.

**Craig:** They’re scheming, whereas a simple man, John, he’s just John. He’s a man of the earth. John. You know what you never see? You never see any of the what I call new American names, Jaden, Braden, Hayden, Maiden, Saden, Daden, all those. No, they’re not there.

**John:** My theory is they’re probably too new. They’re also, in many cases, ambiguously gendered. They can be used for male or female, so they don’t feel as strongly identifiably this is your male action hero star, so you’re not gonna give them that name.

**Craig:** You may be right. It really just strikes me how old-fashioned these names are. No one’s naming their kid Frank anymore, right? Are there still people naming their babies Frank? I’ve never met a baby that was Frank. That’s hysterical. Actually, now I want to have another baby and name it Frank, because that’s kind of cool. It’s a great name. Bruce.

**John:** Bruce, love it. Now, we’ve talked a lot about naming characters on the show and how I will stop and not continue writing until I can find the right name for a character, because it’s so crucial to just defining how I feel about the character and therefore how the audience hopefully will feel about the character too.

Arlo Finch, I spent a lot of time figuring out Arlo Finch’s name. I knew the rhythm of the name. I knew what it needed to do. Until I found that name, I couldn’t continue to write the story.

It does feel like something about the short, the John, the James, the Jacks, they are short, they’re punchy, for a character who literally will probably be punching some. In many cases, maybe a Joe or a Jack, they are a shortened, more familiar version of a longer name. That’s why you see a Joe. You don’t see a Joseph as a hero. There’s something familiar and next door about them.

These are also largely very white names. I think it’s important to keep in mind, this is looking back over the last 40, 50 years. We had a lot of white male action stars, so they were gonna have these names. If you look at the trends in the last 20 years, the J names have fallen a lot, and I think you’re gonna see a lot more names that are not these classically white names in those action male roles, because you’re not gonna write a character who could only be played by a white male.

**Craig:** Also, some of these names are names that I know Black people have these names. I know Black people who are named John or James or Jake or Jack or Joe. I think honestly, when you see a movie and the trailer says, “Jake Bronson was,” you’re like, “This movie’s gonna probably be bad,” because they didn’t even get past that. It’s pretty cliché. The best argument I think we can give people out there as they’re doing this is probably just avoid these now. They feel weak.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article. What I liked about it is she really did go through and pull the Occam’s razor. Is it just because those are the most common names? Is it because screenwriters are named with J names and then are picking those things? Is it because of Keanu’s hypothesis that when you say a J name, your mouth forms a certain hopeful place? It’s not really that. Probably a little bit all of the above. Each might be nudging a little bit closer there. I think there’s also an inertia in that we had a lot of J names and this became default for what we thought of as that one solo hero in an action movie.

**Craig:** I think also while you’re doing your villains, maybe give your villain one of these names. That’s kind of interesting.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Why not? Flip the script.

**John:** Flip the script. Let’s flip the script on some Three Page Challenges. It’s been a minute since we’ve done this. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, Craig and I will do a Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at the first three pages from somebody’s script. It could be a feature. It could be a pilot. They sent those in. We give our honest feedback.

If you would like to read these three pages, you can look at the show notes. You can click there, see the pdfs, and read along with us. Drew will read us a quick summary of things, so in case you’re listening in your car, you have some sense of what the heck we’re talking about.

Reminder that everybody volunteered for this. They signed a little form. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, filled out a little form, and attached their thing. We are not picking on people randomly. These are people who asked for our feedback, and we are happy to give them our feedback. Drew, this is your first time doing this. Are you excited?

**Drew:** I’m really excited. I’ve read these before with Megana, and I haven’t gotten to do this yet.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Let’s start with your first pick. What is it?

**Drew:** Let’s start with Flotsam by Sam Darcy. A montage of news clips informs us of the death of the neo-Nazi terrorist named Clifton Calwell. He was given a burial at sea to deny his supporters a place to mourn him. The sound of waves brings us to a Maori child, Jai, nine, looking at Clifton’s bloated corpse washed up on a beach. Jai puts the corpse in the basket of his bike and takes it to his backyard, where his two friends investigate and decide it’s the body of a pirate.

**John:** Flotsam. Flotsam starts with an image on the cover of a bottle and a thing on top of it. Cute cover page. Looks great. Just an email address on the front for our writer, Sam.

Then getting on to Page 1, I really liked how we did this montage of getting us up to speed on who this Clifton Calwell was, how we’re finding out about this. They are very short little news hits. We are bolding and uppercasing these little moments, but we’re not going to [inaudible 00:24:18] all this stuff, just a blast of images and video going past, dialog where we need it. Establishing this thing which we’re very clearly meant to be thinking it’s like bin Laden, how they buried bin Laden at sea so there couldn’t be a place to mourn. I get it. You’ve created this alternate universe where there was a neo-Nazi person like this who was a big enough threat that you would’ve done this at sea.

Then we are arrived at Australia on the beach, and here’s where it did not work as well for me. Craig, I want to get your initial opinions on how this first page worked for you.

**Craig:** Pretty well. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s the montage of lots of different people describing a news event, so multiple anchors. We have a character, Australian Anchor, American Anchor, and Another Anchor. I liked Another Anchor. Aw, what country are they from? There’s a Government Official, and there’s also a Late-Night Host. The Late-Night Host was doing a monologue, so that helped initially to give you a sense of, okay, this is some sort of bin Laden type thing.

Where I got a little nervous was… This is just a hard thing to do. I would say to Sam, when you are writing monologue jokes for fictional late-night hosts, they have to be good. They can’t be bad. Sometimes late-night hosts do have clunky jokes or super generic jokes, but you’re writing it, so people are already like, “You wrote that. It’s not real.” Therefore, it has to be legitimately weird or funny.

This one was very clammy. “Yikes, that’s a face only a Fuhrer could love.” I don’t really think that’s getting a laugh out of an audience. If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it, for sure. Otherwise, you’re gonna put yourself a little bit in a hole right at the very top.

**John:** Agreed. That did feel like an unearned laugh there. I got nervous coming out of this. Don’t think we really stuck the landing.

“Camera flash. Sound of waves further encroaching.” The Government Official says, “The stench of neo-Fascism has been tempered today,” dash, dash. “Now the crashing of water, propelling us to: Clifton Calwell (30s). Bloated. Discoloured skin. Very much dead.”

The Government Official’s line was not especially helpful, didn’t tell us that we were coming to the end of this montage. Most importantly, I wanted to see the behind-the-scenes footage, the army footage of them dumping the body over, just that video footage. I didn’t want to see just… I needed a stronger image for this guy is dead and now he’s being pushed into sea. I wasn’t getting that in these delivered lines, so it didn’t feel like the end of this montage to me.

**Craig:** I agree with you, although I have a suggestion, because typically when they do this sort of thing, they don’t have footage of it, because they don’t want anyone memorializing it, basically.

What you could do is, one person could say, “There are reports that the body is being taken to so-and-so.” Then you could have another person on a panel saying, “I guarantee you they’re just dumping it at sea. That’s what they do in these cases. That’s what I’m hearing they’re doing. We’ll never know. No, we will never know, but I’m pretty sure.” Then somebody can disagree. “You’re an idiot,” blah blah blah. It’s a talk show. Then boom, the body washes up on shore. Clearly, the one guy was right. There’s a way to do it. It’s unlikely that they would film it and show it.

**John:** This is a probably entirely false memory, but I thought I remembered seeing something of bin Laden’s body being dumped into the water. Maybe that was a re-creation footage I saw. I feel like I saw something there. I definitely saw the equivalent of body cam footage of storming the compound.

**Craig:** Definitely, yeah. I remember that. I’m looking it up, dumping body ocean. Let’s see. There is a video, but it is a video that I don’t believe has been released.

**John:** There is a question of are we breaking the seal by showing this thing that would not be a part of the international news coverage to show that one thing. I don’t know. It’s a choice to make. I think you could go either way. What Craig pitched also works. I think we needed some stronger… Stick the landing here before we’re getting into more normal movie, because we’re changing our time and our tempo a lot.

**Craig:** You sure you want to say normal movie here?

**John:** The choices that are being made here are really fascinating. I don’t think they all work. I’m so happy we have this as an example, because we can talk about what’s working and where we got off the train.

“Exterior beach – early morning – continuous.” It’s not continuous. This is a whole new thing, so not continuous. Scratch that out. “Calwell’s legless corpse slumps in a cracked plastic capsule upon the sand. The tide froths then recedes around him.” You could do this where you could start with his body. I think that’s not gonna be your strongest choice.

I think your stronger choice is to start with Jai, our boy, who’s at the beach for some reason, because he doesn’t know that he’s looking for a body. He comes across this thing. Then we could gradually reveal, oh, it is actually this body and this corpse. I think this could be weirder and funnier, but by starting on the body, it makes it seem like the body is more important than this kid, who is going to be our hero for this story. Give us some moment of Jai before we find the body. That’s my pitch. Craig?

**Craig:** I kind of like this way, if we had stuck the landing on coming out of that montage. I think there’s something shocking about seeing that body. It is a startling cut, which I like, which then makes the reveal that a child is calmly looking at it also shocking and somewhat funny. Like I say, it has to feel like the cut to it is earned. If the cut to it is earned, I think it could be really interesting to see this kid.

Right off the bat, I will say, tonally there’s some nice things here. The fact that Jai [jae] or Jai [jai]… I’m not sure how to pronounce that name. I’ll go with Jai [jae]. Jai is wearing a Wrestlemania beach towel. I like it. There’s something already that feels very darkly comic about all of this.

Especially with what’s about to come, it reminded me of Peter Jackson’s early stuff. I suspect that our author, Sam, is either Australian or from New Zealand because of some of the spelling and the specificity of the location. Peter Jackson, obviously from New Zealand, some of his early stuff was just funny and disgusting. There’s a specific tone.

**John:** The body horror is a big part of this. What we’re seeing in these next two pages, just this disintegrating corpse that these kids are trying to examine, is fun. The way it falls out of his basket and just gets smeared on the road, love it.

**Craig:** People are gonna shriek. I’ve never seen this before in my life. “Calwell,” that’s the body, “draped in Jai’s beach towel, squeezed into the front bike basket like Norman Bates’s homage to ET.” That’s really funny, this nine-year-old kid biking along with a human torso corpse shoved in his bike basket. I’ve just never seen anything like it. It’s really fucked up and funny to me.

Similarly, “Calwell’s insides fall out of his torso.” That’s so gross. Look, I don’t know if I would watch this, but I appreciate that it doesn’t care whether or not I’m gonna watch it. It’s doing its own thing. It’s, woof, yuck.

**John:** Oof. Bottom of Page 2, we have two paragraphs here. I would flip the paragraphs. Right now we’re talking about Calwell’s insides falling out of his torso before we actually get to setting up where we are at. I think it’s gonna be funnier if we’re establishing this place and then coming back to the body keeps falling apart, which is great.

“Weatherboard beach shacks, scattered Norfolk Pines, and scorched lawns permeate our ride through Aussie suburbs.” Great. It’s a really good description. Give us a start there, and then let us get back to the body and the melting of it all, because after it’s falling out of the basket, “Jai’s created a Hansel and Gretel trail of neo-Fascist entrails. We linger low on some organ as he pedals off.” It’s gruesome. The movie knows what it is, which is fine and fun.

On Page 2, there’s also a link out to a song, Rocky Raccoon covered by Charlie Parr. I wouldn’t know what that was. We had a link here. We can play it if we want to play it. I support that as a choice.

**Craig:** No problem whatsoever. Where I was most pleased was with the third page of this, because now we’re getting into this interesting Australian/New Zealand, probably New Zealand is my guess, Stand By Me. It’s like a weird alternate universe version of that. You’ve got these kids, Jai and two of his friends, Toni, who’s 10, and Daley, who’s 8. Toni is Samoan, and she’s reached puberty already, and she’s tall and she’s broad. I love the words, “She’s a broad girl.” I think that’s terrific.

Then Daley is white, and he “is the Donny Kerabatsos of this Lebowski trio. Bug-eyed, feeble, and malnourished.” Malnourished is such a great… I appreciate that the script so far has maintained its tone in such a way that I see that a kid is malnourished and I am laughing. This was really funny.

Now he’s got 3 kids, 10, 9, and 8, are staring at this horrible vision of a dead neo-Nazi’s torso and head. Then Daley says, “I’m telling!” He runs. “Jai and Toni give chase. The camera remains. Rather, we hear the ensuring struggle. The three return, Daley caught in a Toni-induced headlock. Daley: ‘Okay!'” This is a pretty great juxtaposition of childish hijinks with absolute disgustingness.

Then there’s this last little bit here at the end of Page 3 where Toni asks, “Who is he?” which is this nice little bit of innocence. She doesn’t know, even though it’s been all over the news. He says, “A pirate,” which he doesn’t know either. I only can imagine where this is going. Do they think he has buried treasure? Who knows? It made me laugh. It was sick, and sick on its own terms. I thought these were quite successful.

**John:** I thought it worked really well too. The part you mentioned on Page 3 where the camera stays behind as they run off and struggle and then it gets dragged back into the shot, it felt a little… I never want to say directing on the page, but it felt like it was a little much for me, and yet the whole script is a little much, so I’m totally fine to go with it. Also, it establishes that this is going to have a very certain style to it. There were lines that would’ve bumped for me in other examples and didn’t bump for me here.

**Craig:** I didn’t mind it. I saw the moment. It helped me see the moment. I laughed. I laughed.

**John:** Obviously, what I’m looking for on Pages 4 and beyond is really establishing specificity of the characters and their voices and what they’re actually about, rather than just their basic descriptions. I feel like I didn’t know Jai as well as I knew the other two, even in this little brief moment. I’d love a little bit more sense of that.

I’d be curious to read where this goes next. Luckily, now with this innovation we have where people send us the log line, Drew can tell us what actually happens next in the script. Drew, what happens?

**Drew:** “When the body of an international terrorist washes ashore following a botched burial at sea by US forces, an enterprising child fabricates tales of pirate mutineers and buried treasure to his peers in an attempt to monetize his corporeal find. A short film.”

**John:** It’s a short film. Then I’m probably even more intrigued, because I was really wondering how this was gonna stretch into a full feature and where this was going to go. As a short film, I can see the closure it a little bit more easily. Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** Look, short films are tough, but they are at least easy to make, although this one won’t be easy to make. You’ll need a body. A fake body. Please, Sam. God. Stand By Me, even though it was a full feature film, it started life as a novella or a short story, one of four short stories. This one was called The Body by Stephen King. I could absolutely see a short-ish version of that sort of thing, for sure.

**John:** Cool. Drew, help us out with our next one.

**Drew:** Next is Sockfoot by Jesse Allard. Autumn, late 20s, finishes having a one-night stand with a mid-20s punk boy on a mattress on the floor. He criticizes her for wearing socks during sex, so Autumn quickly decides to leave. The two have a drawn-out, awkward goodbye. Autumn drives to her nice, spacious apartment, where her burn-scarred cat greets her. Slumping on the bed, Autumn takes off her socks, only to reveal another sock fused to her foot.

**John:** Great. Craig, what’s your first impression of Sockfoot?

**Craig:** Putting the sock-foot aside, which we don’t really understand quite yet, it just felt very broad and under-baked in terms of characterization, dialog, relationship, action on the page. Multiple issues. A bit clunky. The sentences themselves were a bit clunky.

Let’s just start with the very first couple of paragraphs. “A vinyl spins on a turntable.” No. A vinyl record spins on a turntable. “The sounds of a hard hitting punk song blast through the speakers.” Hard-hitting should get a dash. “The sounds of a” we don’t even need. Just a punk song blasts through speakers.

“Another sound seeps through the music growing ever louder as we follow a path of clothes that litter the floor of the apartment leading to the bedroom.” We’ve got prepositional overload.

Really, there’s just a better way to say all this. We’ve got a punk song blasting through the speakers. What punk song? First of all, what punk song? You can’t just say punk song. Second, there’s moaning. Just say over it or through it, we hear moaning.

Then the clothing continues. We’ve seen the whole thing of the hastily discarded clothing leading up to two people having sex a million times, but to keep it going… It was, “A band shirt, a modest bra, a pair of black jeans. Men’s underwear, a pair of women’s underwear to match,” one pair of socks. “Only one pair of socks — black, holes in the heels and toes.” First of all, we’re not gonna notice that there’s one pair of socks. It’s just gonna be laundry to us.

They were having sex, and then we arrive there and we meet Autumn, and she’s done. She rolls off. Somehow, the camera arrived, but we didn’t even know she finished. It wasn’t like I was hearing people having an orgasm or finishing or anything. It was just moaning and then suddenly rolling off. She “cuddles up to Logan. They play footsie as they catch their breath,” which is not really how it works for me, but that’s fine. Maybe other people do that.

Then this was where I just felt like I was being hurdled off the planet. “After a moment, Logan looks a bit concerned. He looks downs,” so looks and looks. “He looks down at their feet,” and there’s a comma there which shouldn’t be there. “He looks down at their feet pulling back,” there should be a comma there, “pulling back the blanket to reveal their toes. Autumn is wearing socks, he is not.” His line is, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” Her response is, parentheses, “(confused,” semicolon, “a frightful air in her breath) uh… yeah… ” “Logan (playful but serious): Don’t ever do that again.” What?

**John:** I don’t understand those lines. I think, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a great line. I think it’s the outline of that moment. I think that moment I would pitch differently.

I get while the following their trail of clothes to a bed is a tropey, tropey, tropey trope, in this case I would allow it because it is about the fact that she cannot remove this sock which is permanently fused to her foot. I’m going to allow it, but I think we need to get to the bed more quickly.

They may have already been finished and were pulling up the covers or something, and he sees her socks. “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a funny out. I don’t need the reaction from her or from him. Just let that be the thing. Then we get to the awkward going away, getting out of that house moment. There was just too much there. It’s like the moment had passed and we were still talking.

**Craig:** Also, they just met. They’ve just had sex for the first time. Who cares? Honestly, who cares that she fucked him with her socks on? Oh yeah, sorry if I was in the heat of the… We were rushing to have sex, because that’s clearly what happened. It wasn’t like we carefully took our clothes off. We threw our clothes everywhere and started fucking, and so whatever. Fuck, who cares? I don’t even understand. He says “playful but serious.” Excuse me? What does that mean?

**John:** Hard to do.

**Craig:** Hot but cold? Close but far. Then he says, “Don’t ever do that again.” What? That’s what he chooses to say?

**John:** I would love to see a great actor deliver that line in a way that’s playful but serious. Someone could do it, and it would actually completely work, but I’m having a hard time visualizing it, because even internally I’m not the great actor who can make that line work.

**Craig:** I just don’t know what the motivation would be. Again, just who gives a shit? It’s your first time together. It’s almost like she’s anticipating this question. It’s as if he looks down and goes, “Wait, do you not have feet?” Then she’s like, “Sorry, no.” He goes, “Oh, okay.” Then she goes, “Oh, no, he noticed.” Or, “Do you have hooves for feet?” Socks? Is it a crime? I don’t know. It just seems like such a weird thing.

Because it is the way that Jesse is introducing the problem for our main character, it’s just not… Everything that comes after it feels pretty off, because I don’t understand what the problem is. It’s like the script is saying, “Right? This is bad?” I’m going, “No, it’s not. It’s not that bad, not yet.”

**John:** We have a larger problem. After three pages, I don’t know what the tone of this is actually supposed to be. I think it’s supposed to feel bad for her because she has this injury, this sock fused to her foot because of a fire, apparently, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel and what the tone of all this that I’m watching is, because was this kind of sexy and then kind of funny and then she’s getting herself out of there? I just don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling about this situation.

We’re not hearing the name of the punk song at the start, but then bottom of Page 2, “Everybody Hurts by REM begins playing over the Bluetooth.” Wait, is it playing ironically or is it playing seriously? I just don’t know how to take that song, because that song is so loaded that I am lost.

**Craig:** At the bottom of Page 1, “Autumn breaks a bit inside. This isn’t going to work out.” I don’t know why. I don’t believe that moment. I believe neither what Logan asked, nor do I believe her response.

Then the next scene says, “Living room – moments later. Logan and Autumn stand at the door.” This is what I call a dead start.

**John:** So hard to do.

**Craig:** They’re just standing at the door. It’s not one of them is getting the clothes on while the other one’s waiting. It’s not one of them looking for her keys. It’s not him helping her find her underwear. It’s nothing. It’s just two people just, boom, standing, bah. It’s a dead start.

Then what I also don’t understand is, the scene before, he says, “Okay, I don’t like that you had sex with me with your socks on,” and she’s like, “Uh-oh, this isn’t gonna work out, because he’s noticed the sock thing,” and then the next scene is him really being like, “Hey, I would like to actually keep hanging out with you.” She’s like, “Nope. Nope, gotta go.” I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m so confused. The emotional math is not adding up at all. Then Everybody Hurts happened, and I got very, very concerned.

Then we go to Autumn’s apartment. This, if you were counting along, is the third consecutive interior. Interior, interior, interior. Where are we? I don’t even know if we’re in a city, a town, big city, America. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where we are. There’s a lot of description of what this building is like, and yet I don’t know what city it’s in.

**John:** There’s too much description of her place. The “apartment is very nice, a one bedroom with an open kitchen/living room area, fairly spacious and trendy with it’s exposed brick wall.” It’s is the wrong its.

**Craig:** Correct. Then another it’s happens.

**John:** “Recently been converted into an apartment, the kind of place most people in their 20s would struggle to afford on their own.” I don’t know ho to take that. Does it mean she has independent money? Maybe. Maybe she got money out of the fire, I guess, but that’s just a lot to be dumping at me in scene description that doesn’t help me understand this character.

**Craig:** I particular because I don’t know where we are. Is this a one-bedroom, nice, spacious, trendy, exposed brick walls apartment in Kansas City or Manhattan? That’s a huge difference.

“Autumn’s greeted by her cat, Luna,” and then quite a bit of description about the cat, and then a little bit of a burn scar there, so okay, we’re getting that there’s been some fire issues. Autumn says, “Sweet baby,” doesn’t say her name, doesn’t say Luna’s name, so we don’t know that it’s Luna, but fine. “Sweet baby. She pets Luna and heads to her room.”

I want to imagine this. She enters her apartment. Everybody Hurts is playing. A cat walks up to her. She says, “Sweet baby,” pets the cat, and then walks out. This is not a scene.

Then even weirder, after she says, “Sweet baby,” she gets to her bedroom and “slumps on the bed in defeat.” What was “sweet baby” about? Is she happy? Does Luna make her feel good? All of these questions are just piling up.

Screenplays are like the Titanic. They have lots of watertight compartments. They’re designed so if you puncture one of them, the rest of the boat can stay afloat, but if you puncture a whole bunch of them, it’s over. You’re sinking. Every single one of these moments of disconnect are creating a flooding of watertight compartments. The script is sinking here. This final line is not strong.

**John:** I can read it. “At least you love me even though I’m a monster.” This is after we’ve seen her fused together foot and the sock-foot, the titular sock-foot.

**Craig:** I don’t know what’s happened here. Drew will tell us. Initially, we’re like, okay, there was a fire. The sock was melted into her foot. They can’t remove the sock. It’s part of her foot now. I think it would be fair for her to say, “I was in a fire, and so I have to cover my foot.” That’s fine. She’s not hiding 666 or a Kuato. Do you know what a Kuato is, John?

**John:** Kuato from… It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall.

**Craig:** Total Recall, yeah. She’s not hiding a Kuato. She doesn’t have a foot Kuato. If the sock-foot fused thing is a Kuato, then that’s different. Even then, I think we need a different vibe. We just need a different opening. I just didn’t understand what was happening here. Help.

**John:** I do think the takeaway is that if you have a character whose central, initial dilemma is the fact that she has this sock-foot, this may be the wrong way to establish it, or you just picked the wrong character, this guy is not the right guy to be exposing that thing, because the scene as we saw, it feels like, why wouldn’t she tell him? We don’t have any understanding of why this is such a big deal to her at this moment. We just don’t believe it.

I do want to go back to one moment. I thought it was the right idea. On Page 2, this familiar moment where, “Logan goes to hug her. (It’s one of those awkward post one-night-stand hugs where there’s this question of do we kiss goodbye? Is that too intimate? Too personal?) His face lingers towards her for a split second while he contemplates what to do. Autumn saves him the trouble, quickly whipping her chin over his shoulder.” Overwritten, yet I got that moment. I was familiar with that moment. It felt like a nice thing to show, if it would’ve been a different scene getting into it.

**Craig:** Right, if I had understood why any of it was happening, because it seemed like in the scene before, she wants to be with him, and he doesn’t want to be with her, and then we cut to she doesn’t want to be with him, and he does want to be with her. I just don’t know why, but yeah, absolutely, it was an evocative moment. I didn’t even mind the overwriting because I understood it.

**John:** Yeah, understand it all. Drew, help us out. What is this about?

**Drew:** The log line is, “Autumn Cassidy is a woman with a secret, a woman with a sock-foot. Autumn is working as a preschool teacher with her best friend Sam, as they and their group of friends navigate the transition into true adulthood. However, Autumn’s secret, if exposed, threatens to destroy her relationships and her life, that is if she doesn’t do it first herself.”

**John:** I don’t believe that premise. I’m sorry. I don’t. I think it’s weirdly regressive. I don’t know. If I were a person who had one foot or something and I’m seeing this story about, oh no, her foot doesn’t look normal, I don’t get that. I’m frustrated by that premise.

**Craig:** I don’t understand it either. It is a challenge for people to have a situation like this, but it’s not something where it threatens to destroy every… I’m with John. I don’t believe it. Even if it’s causing a problem, it doesn’t cause a problem instantly like that. It’s just not that thing.

Look, if this turned supernatural and it did become a Kuato, then I would understand. I just don’t believe it’s a Kuato. I don’t. No, no, no, no, no, no. No. I think there’s something wrong. There’s something just fundamentally flawed here in this bit.

**John:** I want to thank Jesse for sending through these pages, because sometimes the pages that aren’t working give us a lot more to talk about and things people can recognize in their own scripts, like, oh, that thing you’re trying to do can’t work for these reasons. I do want to thank Jesse for sending these through, because I don’t want it to just be this slam on, “Hey, it just didn’t work for us.” Instead, let’s look at what we actually were able to take from this and discuss.

**Craig:** I would also say that it may be that after reflection and listening to this, even though it might hurt, Jesse, that you may find that there is a different story to tell with a similar premise. There was something that drew you to this in the first place. I think you need to dig into what it was and why and then ask how would this actually really, really go and what is it about this that you think could work in a more realistic way.

It may also be that you listen to this and say, “These two guys are out to lunch. This thing does work. They only read three pages. Screw them.” You might be right. You might be right. Either you will take constructive thoughts from this, and meaning you will create your own constructive thoughts, because I’m a big believer in destructive criticism when giving notes, it’s better than us telling you what to do, or you may be more convinced than ever that you’re on the right path. Either way, go forward, young man or woman or nonbinary.

**John:** Young man. We now know the preferred pronouns for all the people.

**Craig:** We do?

**John:** Yeah, because it says on the form now, so people tell us how to refer to them.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** An innovation which it only took us 10 years to figure out, oh, we should probably ask what people are, so we don’t have to guess based on their names.

**Craig:** Great point. Sir, take this and move forward. I believe in you.

**John:** Drew, give us one more Three Page Challenge, please.

**Drew:** Sure. Last we have Spark by Rachel Thomas. Winnie, 12, wakes up her sister, Lucy, 10, in the middle of the night, excited because it’s October 1st. The two girls jump out of bed and rush downstairs to find their mother, Clara, 40s, reading a book and using magic to bring a plate of cookies to them. Clara makes the girls wait until the neighbors are asleep before using her magic to decorate the house for Halloween. Giant spiders really move. Life-size skeletons dance with them. The girls are thrilled. When Clara takes them back to bed, Winnie makes it clear how badly she wants her witch powers, but her mother warns her that her powers may never come.

**John:** Great. I’m glad we’re talking about this sample, because we haven’t done anything quite like this before. This feels to me like a Disney Channel movie. It feels like a bright, poppy, made for TV kind of thing. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. I just mean it felt very innocent. I want to approach that with I think the spirit in which it’s written. It’s very wide-eyed through the whole thing. It feels kind of innocent.

That said, my problem started at the very beginning, where I didn’t believe that these two girls were asleep and then waking up and then one is showing them a watch. That all felt really clunky. Either they know what day it’s gonna be or they don’t know what day it’s gonna be, what hour it’s gonna be, what hour it’s not going to be.

If one girl is asleep and her sister wakes her up, the older sister wakes her up, then I believe. Like, “It’s after midnight. We can go down.” It’s like, “Oh my gosh, yes.” Then we’re excited to get started in what is the equivalent of this family’s Christmas. It is finally October 1st and we can do all the Halloween things.

**Craig:** You’re getting at a problem that I think permeates these pages, and that is a lack of familiarity among people that are supposed to be the most familiar with each other. They’re family. This is not the first time this has happened. This happens all the time.

First of all, Winnie has a remarkable ability to wake up at exactly midnight. That’s pretty strange. It would make more sense, I think, to begin with a little girl just staring at this pocket watch, watching the second hand going until it finally turns midnight. Then she turns and she “taps Lucy gently on the nose,” and Lucy opens her eyes and says, “Is it midnight?” “It’s midnight.” Then they’re like, “Yay!” They know what’s going on. When they go outside to join Clara, who’s sitting on the front steps, where are they? Where are people?

**John:** Where are people?

**Craig:** Where are people?

**John:** I think it has to be Salem, Massachusetts, because all things with witches have to take place in Salem, Massachusetts.

**Craig:** That’s fine, but what part of the neighborhood of Salem, Massachusetts? Help us see things. Then Winnie says to her mother, “It’s my favorite day of the year besides Halloween.” Her mother says, “You’re definitely my kid.” Have they met before?

**John:** I think they’ve met before, yeah. I think they should have.

**Craig:** What’s happening? That’s not what happens. It just doesn’t feel like they are all really connected as family. There is a tonal thing here where it’s getting very juvenile, particularly when endlessly patient parents giggle at their children bothering them at midnight. These characters all feel like they’re saying exactly what they’re thinking. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** They do. I’m willing to let them have it a bit, because I placed it in this simpler, made for basic cable kind of universe. I think there’s a place for that kind of thing. There’s an innocence there that works. Yet this is a very pushed version of this. I think we could step back and sophisticate this a little bit and still retain the joy, still retain the innocence.

**Craig:** It doesn’t even require sophistication. “I can’t wait anymore. Let’s get started.” “You know the rules. We need to wait until all the neighbors are asleep.” Nobody feels real. They just feel like information bots at this point. It immediately goes into a lesson. “Can’t you make him go to bed?” “Winnie, using magic on other people has consequences.” It just feels so corny.

**John:** It does feel corny. Again, I’m willing to give it some of the corny because of just genre assumptions, the same way that in a body horror thing I’m willing to go there a little bit more. I definitely hear you, Craig. Let me validate you there. I did feel that too. I was just being more forgiving of it. Let’s talk about some things on the page that are just basic screenwriting things that need to be worked on.

**Craig:** Let’s.

**John:** Parentheticals go on their own line. In US screenplays, British screenplays for that matter too, your parenthetical goes on its own line. In this case, they’re just touching the dialog. That’s not how we do it here.

As we got into the montage on Page 3, where the house is being decorated, there are some fun elements in there. I would encourage you to break some things up a little bit more there and let these moments land separately, because the risk you have with these four paragraphs is people may just start skimming or just start skipping over some things. I would say break those moments out a little bit more. You might even want to do some bolding in there. Just do some things where you get a sense of what it is that we’re establishing and what has changed.

Going back to Craig’s earlier note, I don’t have a sense of what this house is normally, other than it’s a Victorian. I don’t know what neighborhood we’re in. I don’t know what I’m seeing and what I’m looking at. I have no sense of how close the neighbor’s house is. I just need it to be placed and anchored in a space more clearly from the start.

**Craig:** I agree with everything you just said. Rachel, when you have a montage like this, where you’re showing them decorating the yard with Halloween stuff and mom using a little bit of magic to help it go along and make it go faster and fun, and then you follow it up with Lucy asleep and Winnie saying to her mother, without prompting, without any prompting whatsoever, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween,” I think you’ve missed an opportunity to show that she does not have her powers.

Does Lucy have her powers? If Lucy has powers and Lucy’s using magic and mom’s using magic, then I could see Winnie getting frustrated. If Lucy doesn’t have her powers, but she doesn’t care, but Winnie keeps trying to do it and does care and doesn’t like that her mom has to do it. I want to motivate her character problems.

She literally says, “Winnie looks out over her neighborhood, having the time of her life.” Then the next thing she says is, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween.” “Win, some witches never get their powers.” You can just see where this is going.

**John:** It is called Spark.

**Craig:** Look, here’s the thing. It’s fine to do a straight up formula movie. Children in particular really enjoy them. They can be done beautifully. Pixar at this point has mastered a kind of formula. It is gorgeous.

This scene right here feels so blatantly setup-ish that it is bordering on somebody reading out loud, “Interior attic bedroom – later. Winnie doesn’t have her powers yet, and she really wants them, and her mother is saying, ‘You might never get your powers and you might need to accept that you are special as you are.'” It is literally that setup-ish here. We gotta do better, just for pure entertainment sake. Otherwise, it will feel perfunctory.

**John:** I would say you would find scripts of this genre that do similar, really clunky things and [inaudible 01:00:31] “I should write a script that is like that.” I think the challenge we’re both arguing for is how do you write the better version of that that gets you the job to write the thing that does get made? I think this as a writing sample needs to be above the minimum level that you see in that kind of genre.

**Craig:** Completely agree.

**John:** Cool. Those are our Three Page Challenges. We want to thank everybody who sent in their Three Page Challenges, especially these writers, for letting us talk about them on the air. If you have three pages you want us to take a look at, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a form there. You will say that it’s okay for us to talk about them. You will attach your pdf. It’ll go into Drew’s queue for next time. Drew, thank you for reading through all these with us.

**Drew:** Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for sending it in.

**Craig:** Drew’s Queue is a great name for a Blue’s Clues type of show.

**John:** Drew’s Queue.

**Craig:** Drew’s Queue.

**John:** Until this very moment, I hadn’t realized how much Drew Marquardt feels like he could’ve been one of the Blue’s Clues guys, 100%. If he put that sweater on, he absolutely could be a Blue’s Clues… You could have Blue as your cartoon dog.

We have listener questions that we won’t have time to get to this episode, so we’ll save them for next episode. Craig, I do think we have time for some One Cool Things. You got a One Cool Thing for us?

**Craig:** I do. This One Cool Thing actually comes from my assistant Allie, who like my assistant Bo before her, is quite the foodie. She was talking about a place that sounds amazing. I gotta go. She had a very specific recommendation. If you do like Indian food and you happen to find yourself, I believe it’s in the Los Feliz or Silver Lake area, it’s called Pijja Palace. Pijja Palace?

**John:** Pijja Palace.

**Craig:** Have you been?

**John:** I’ve been. Pijja Palace is built into a strip mall that’s connected to a mid-budget hotel. It’s very unpromising from the outside. You go inside, it looks like a sports bar, and yet the cuisine is actually Indian-inspired, non-Indian dishes. You have listed here the Malai Rigatoni. There are just pizzas and other things, but they all have Indian flavors and not Indian traditionally foods.

**Craig:** She got me the description of the Malai Rigatoni, which instead of a typical Bolognese, it’s in more of a masala sauce. It sounds delicious. I’m gonna have to check that place out. I just like the name of it. Pijja Palace.

**John:** Pijja Palace, it’s great. Definitely check that out. My One Cool Thing. We’ve talked before on the show about GeoGuessr, which is this great game where you are plopped somewhere in a Google Maps situation, street view of Google Maps. You have to figure out where the hell you are. You only have a certain number of guesses. Basically, once you make your guess where you are, it’s how close you were to the actual place. My daughter loves to play it.

I want to link to this YouTuber named Rainbolt, who is just really, really good at GeoGuessr. The video we’ll link to shows this meme, this Vine from many, many years ago, where this guy, he’s stepping off this curb, he says, “So no head?” It’s a five-second clip. The clip went viral. In this video, he tries to figure out what curb this guy was stepping off of. The way he can figure this all out is just masterful. It’s very Sherlock Holmes in terms of using the cues of just what the fire hydrants looked like, how many bars are on the telephone poles next to him, what other metadata he can find for this user who has these videos. Really, really smart. It’s no surprise he gets it down to the exact street, within one foot of where this video comes from.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. I love that.

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

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Unknown.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Richie Molyneux. If you have an outro this week, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on anesthesia. Craig and Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, when was the last time you were under anesthesia?

**Craig:** I would say it was probably eight months ago. It was the last time I had a spinal epidural injection.

**John:** That doesn’t sound good at all. I was under anesthesia just last week. I had these weird bones growing underneath my tongue, it’s called mandibular tori, that was making it hard for me to speak. The oral surgeon cut them out. To do that, they had to knock me fully out. There was an anesthesiologist. It wasn’t just a little drug. It was fully knocked out.

I remember talking to this guy about skiing, and then suddenly, much time had passed, two hours in fact, and I was waking up and being moved to this recovery room, and no idea what had happened, didn’t feel a thing. Later in that day, I realized, wait, how did I get home? Mike told me that I had fallen asleep while we were walking to the car. I asked, “Why is there a trashcan here?” Apparently, I had asked for a trashcan to be brought into the room.

At the time, I had felt like I was actually completely fine, but I realized I was not forming memories of that time. It was fun. It was such a different experience than I’ve had in quite a long time.

**Craig:** Yes, amnesia is cool. It is a very strange thing. The history of anesthesia is a remarkable thing and is inextricably linked, as far as I’m concerned, to the kinds of surgical advances we’ve been capable of. Without anesthesia, there just simply is a vast category of surgery that is impossible. It’s just not possible.

**John:** We used to do amputations without anesthesia. They could hold somebody down, but there’s no way someone could’ve sawed these out of my mouth without anesthesia.

**Craig:** There is. It would’ve been very difficult, and you would’ve been in horrible, horrible pain. What we can’t do, for instance, are things like a heart transplant or kidney transplant or anything involving lungs or kidneys, internal organs. Those things are really hard to do because people just keep writhing around. It’s just hard to do. Amputations is just a straight sawing. The trauma of that kind of injury is insane.

The crudest anesthesia was ether, chloroform. Those things were pretty brutal. Prior to that, back in the old, old days, it was just basically alcohol. I don’t think there was much else going on there. Then just holding you down in misery. Anesthesia is magical.

**John:** It is magical. A question for when you see in vintage things or post-apocalyptic things, it’s like, oh, some alcohol as I pull this bullet out or whatever. I don’t fully get that, because I can drink a couple shots of something. It’s not gonna make things hurt less. I guess I could be less combative, I guess, or are you drinking to the point where you’re actually blacking out, and that’s the goal? I’ve never blacked out from alcohol. In the old days of alcohol, how much alcohol were they using?

**Craig:** Quite a bit. Obviously, they would’ve used alcohol as a topical antiseptic as well. Drinking-wise, we do know that alcohol affects the GABA pathway, gamma-aminobutyric acid, I believe, which is connected to our pain pathways. When you are very, very drunk, you don’t experience pain at the same level that you do when you’re not. You’re more confused. It’s harder to tell what the hell’s going on. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which means that it can in fact knock you out, and if you’re knocked out, you’re knocked out.

Now, knocking you out without killing you is a trick. Alcohol is a toxic substance that we know can kill people in excess, and so is every single anesthetic that we use for surgery, which is why we need anesthesiologists, medical doctors, who very specifically administer this and monitor you and your breathing. Now, for a procedure like yours, my guess is you had an IV and they used propofol.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** Propofol is wonderful. They used to use Versed.

**Drew:** It’s magic.

**Craig:** Propofol’s magic. They used to use Versed a lot. Propofol is better because it wears off much faster. Propofol actually gets metabolized by your body really quickly, so it’s perfect for these shorter procedures, because you don’t spend an hour or two hours groggily coming to. I believe Versed is more of a benzodiazepine, I believe. That’s the whole Valium family. That stuff is great.

When you’re dealing with serious surgery, where you have to be out for a long time, they can’t just keep hitting you with Propofol. Propofol is actually quite irritating to the veins. That’s when they give you the old mask on the face. Often, you’re intubated, which means that they have to breathe for you or need to be able to breathe for you if it comes to that, because so much of what they do to you is also paralytic.

**John:** Drew, you were saying propofol is great. You’ve had experience with it?

**Drew:** Yeah. I had a procedure last fall. I had a colonoscopy last fall. They injected it into my hand. It was interesting, you saying, Craig, that it’s hard on the veins, because one of the things I remember before I went under-

**Craig:** It burns.

**Drew:** … was that there was a weird pain. It burns.

**Craig:** It burns.

**Drew:** Saying to the anesthesiologist, “Hey, is that normal?” I think he got out the Y-E of yes before I was out.

**Craig:** It does tend to burn. Sometimes they will put a little bit of lidocaine in there with it to reduce the burning sensation, I believe. Yep, colonoscopy is a perfect example of a propofol nap. When I get those injections, propofol nap. Depending on the position you’re in, it’ll go right in the back of your hand. That’s where they have their IV.

Because I’ve had the procedure done a lot, on average once a year now for about, I don’t know, four years, five years, different anesthesiologists do it differently, I’ve noticed. Some of them push it in slowly, and those are my heroes, because you get to feel awesome for about five seconds.

It seems lately the new ones are like, “You know what? We actually don’t want you feeling awesome. We don’t want you coming back to enjoy your five-second propofol holiday. We’re gonna push it in much faster, so you’re gonna be fine, fine, fine. Bye-bye.” There’s not that euphoria. I have experienced the euphoria. It’s almost like your brain is inflating like a balloon with happiness and then you’re gone.

**John:** I’ve had a bunch of colonoscopies in my life, because my whole family gets colon cancer. In those cases, I don’t know what they’re using. Maybe it’s propofol. I’m just in a twilight state, so I actually am aware and conscious during it. It’s not been a problem. They’re giving me enough of something that I just don’t care at all, but I am actually awake for it in ways that were so different than my experience here.

This is much more like… I had to have my nose fixed, have my deviated septum fixed. In that case, you’re just completely out. You wake up completely like, “What just happened?” In this case, I was talking about skiing, and suddenly just a whole bunch of time had passed.

**Craig:** The fact is, when we say we go bye-bye, we don’t actually know what’s going on, because I think with propofol, a lot of times, like you say, you’re in this weird in and out state. They call propofol milk of amnesia, because it looks milky. You just don’t remember. You may have been talking throughout the whole thing. You don’t remember, because you’re just-

**Drew:** Oh, that’s horrifying.

**Craig:** … totally doped up. Yeah, but it’s not like you’re in pain. You’re not shrieking and going, “Oh my god, take this camera out of my ass.” You’re like, “Hey, what’s going on? My nose is weird.” You may be talking, but you don’t remember later.

**John:** When my daughter had the same surgeon take out her wisdom teeth, she was goofy on the drive home in the way that you love. We have video of her asking goofy questions. That wasn’t me at all, at least not to my recollection of it. I seemed perfectly normal. I wasn’t actually forming memories, in ways that were surprising to me and also made me think of, oh, you hear stories of date rape drugs. It feels like, oh, I can see why that is so problematic, because I didn’t have agency over my own memories, which was strange.

**Craig:** I’ve had that experience too, where I even realize, I know I was in the car with Melissa, we drove home. I know we talked about stuff. I don’t remember any of it. Any of it. I was awake, perfectly awake. Propofol definitely messes with the whole memory system.

**John:** It’s not sleep. Every night we have the experience of what it’s like to fall asleep and what it’s like to wake up. It was the suddenness of the change that was so striking to me. Not that I remember falling asleep every night, but I get the sense that you go down the ramp and then you come back up out of the ramp. This was just like lights off, lights on. It was just a very different experience for me.

**Craig:** It’s very fast. One thing that strikes me as really interesting about the propofol nap is I do dream vividly during it every time it happens. When I’m coming out of it, I’m coming out of dreams. Then there’s just that confusion for a moment of like, “Where… Oh, right. Oh, yeah, that. All that happened.”

Here’s an interesting thing. Talk about the amnesia. When you get this epidural injection, I’m on my stomach, and they put a needle all the way into the epidural space in my spine, and they inject stuff into it. Then they take it out. It occurred to me once, I was like, “How do you get me out of there?” because it’s not like I wake up in there. I wake up on my back in another bed in a recovery room. They were like, “Oh, you just wake up, and we help you down, and we get you over onto this other thing and wheel you out, and then we get you onto this thing and you do it.” I’m like, “Okay, so I’m awake. I have zero memory of that.” I have never once formed one memory of any of that.

**John:** That’s wild. Hey, speaking of knocking out, something I’ve been meaning to ask you is, in the last episode of The Last of Us, one of the characters is hit with a back of a rifle and knocked out. Talk to me about your decision to do that and how you feel about that as a thing that is done in movies and TV, because in real life, people shouldn’t do that.

**Craig:** No, you should not do that.

**John:** In movies and TV, it happens a lot. What is the reality of hitting somebody over the head like that? What does it really do? What is your decision making process of showing that or not showing that?

**Craig:** There was a lot of head hitting in the game. People get hit in the head a lot and get knocked out a lot that way. We avoided most of it. That was an area where just story-wise we just needed someone to get knocked out. We had done it earlier, actually, as well, when Joel knocks a guy out, and then he comes to, and Joel’s torturing his friend. I’m not a big fan of it.

I’m gonna try and avoid it if I can next time, because you can absolutely knock people out. You’re giving them a concussion. You can knock them out. You can also just kill them by giving them a subdural hematoma that just swells in their brain and then kills them. You can do all sorts of stuff. You can fracture their skull. It’s a terrible way of knocking somebody out. You shouldn’t do it. Nobody should be knocking anybody out.

If you hit somebody hard in the back of the head, first of all, you may not knock them out at all. You may cause brain damage, and especially if you’re hitting somebody in the back of the head. You could blind them. There’s all sorts of terrible things that can happen. It is not something you should do. I’m gonna try as best I can to avoid people hitting people on the back of the head with the stocks of guns for Season 2, but Season 3 will be nothing but that, just one after another.

**John:** All head injuries. They’ll suffer the consequences of those head injuries. That’s gonna be the real change. That’s gonna be the shocking revelation there. Craig, thank you for your answer there, because I suspect that there was a debate there, because you’re so concerned about portrayals of things in the real world.

As I was looking at the scene, I was thinking, okay, because a thing happens before that, there’s other ways you could’ve gotten that one character knocked out, and yet this made sense for the characters in that world and in that moment. [Crosstalk 01:17:39].

**Craig:** It made sense, but it’s not great. When we play DnD, as you know, if you are attacking someone and you don’t want to kill them, you want to leave them just alive enough to interrogate them, all you have to do is say to the DM, “I want to deliver a non-lethal blow here.” If it takes them to 0 HP, they don’t die, they’re alive, you can interrogate them. In this case, this was not that. The guys that came up, they didn’t know who Joel was. They were like, “We’re gonna knock you out, and if you die, you die. If you don’t, we’ll be able to ask you questions. Either way, it’s fine.”

**John:** Exactly. There was a movie I’ve really liked recently where the central character I think is knocked over the head three times, knocked out over the head three times. I was like, “She’s paralyzed now. I don’t think she’s coming back and fighting for victory here.” I loved the movie, but that was a thing that [crosstalk 01:18:27].

**Craig:** You gotta stop hitting people on the head. I agree. To the extent that we have contributed to the head hitting, I apologize to all of culture.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I’ve got a colonoscopy coming up. I’m gonna try and take notes. I don’t remember. I’m just gone.

**John:** You can ask them. You can ask them. You can tell them, “I’m an absolute pro at this. You can give me less.” Maybe not, because they don’t want you talking.

**Craig:** Oh, no no no, I’m not gonna ever say that. Ever. Ever. I’m a baby. You want to run a garden hose up my butt? Do it. I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to be awake. I don’t want to know about it. Just do the garden hose. It’s not a garden hose, by the way. It’s incredibly slender.

**John:** It’s slender. It’s fine. People may way, way, way too big a deal of colonoscopies. They’re fine.

**Craig:** All they do is save your life. That’s all they do.

**John:** That’s all they do. Easiest thing you could do to save your life.

**Craig:** Get a colonoscopy, people. Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Has Anyone Ever Actually Tied a Damsel in Distress to a Railway Track?](https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/01/has-anyone-ever-actually-tied-a-damsel-in-distress-to-a-railway-track/) by Karl Smallwood
* [Pirating the Oscars 2023: The Final Curtain Call](https://waxy.org/2023/03/pirating-the-oscars-2023-the-final-curtain-call/) by Andy Baio
* [Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John?](https://slate.com/culture/2023/03/john-wick-james-bond-action-heroes-j-names.html) by Demetria Glace for Slate
* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [Flotsam](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2023%2F01%2FSam-Darcy_FLOTSAM_Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=0ef4e278ecbe1687ad1a36c0a96f0e3b01a8d282ed17845879114ca368c0cfcd) by Sam Darcy, [Sockfoot](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F12%2FSockfoot.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=bb72643a11a5d302f96bbc96947d57ffcd0f01f96147767cb10acca002f51e59) by Jesse Allard, and [Spark](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F12%2FSpark_ScriptNotes_ThreePageChallenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=2781befc01a890bfd2e53921356d178f96a1486a558300228375a8808edcf804) by Rachel Thomas
* [Pijja Palace](https://www.pijjapalace.com/)
* [how I found the ‘so no head’ vine road in 15 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfdwjleF7nY) by RAINBOLT
* [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 Richie Molyneux ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) 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/592standard.mp3).

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).