Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here!](https://johnaugust.com/2022/live-at-the-austin-film-festival-2022)

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode was recorded late at night in front of a live studio audience, so unsurprisingly, it has some salty language. Listener be warned. Also, for Premium members, stick around after the end, because we have an audience Q and A that’s actually really good and makes Craig a little uncomfortable. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about what?

**Audience:** Screenwriting.

**John:** And?

**Audience:** Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** Wow, so good. So impressive. 581 episodes. They’re so well trained.

**Craig:** I’m so hurt by what just happened.

**John:** I want to thank Heidi Lauren Duke for singing our intro. Thank you, Heidi.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** We are here at the Austin Film Festival, which we’ve been to many, many times. It’s been a minute since we’ve been at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** It’s been three, four, five years.

**John:** Something happened, but now we’re back.

**Craig:** There was a little bit of trouble.

**John:** It’s exciting to be back here. Craig, this afternoon we were planning the show. One of the plans was we would get together for dinner. I did not join the dinner. I want to know, how was your dinner?

**Craig:** There was drinking. I have a vague sense of what will happen tonight, as I often do. It was a lovely dinner, actually. I’m not saying that it was lovely because you weren’t there. I’m simply saying it was lovely despite the fact that you were not there.

**John:** Also, live shows tend to be a bit loose and a little bit messy. The live show we did in Los Angeles, it was on a schedule there.

**Craig:** I know. I don’t like that. I like a nice, drunken, stupid, disorganized mess.

**John:** Originally, I had planned to be at this dinner, but then I had to do a pitch on a Friday evening for 90 minutes on Zoom.

**Craig:** That’s ridiculous.

**John:** Not the ideal time to pitch a movie, so I don’t know how it went. Either it’s going to be announced and deadline at some point or it will never happen. We’ll see what happens there.

**Craig:** Hollywood.

**John:** Hollywood.

**Craig:** Hollywood.

**John:** We’re not in Hollywood. We’re in Austin, Texas.

**Craig:** I’m so glad to be back, honestly. Thank you guys for showing up, honestly. It does mean a lot. Thank you. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a live show in this room.

**John:** I don’t think so. We’re usually at the other-

**Craig:** At the other place (mumbles under breath).

**John:** For some reason, we’re not at the other place this time.

**Craig:** I don’t know what happened there.

**John:** There’s lots of speculation about things that happened.

**Craig:** There was speculation.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Perhaps the ghosts.

**John:** The ghosts finally got-

**Craig:** The ghosts got the upper hand.

**John:** We’re here in a big venue full of people, which is really exciting.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night, which feels like the ideal time to talk about really serious issues that are facing screenwriters, television writers, the industry. Over the next three hours, we’re going to dig really deep into some of the fundamental issues afflicting the film and television industry. I think we’re all ready for this. Did we all stretch? We’re good for this.

**Craig:** I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I know you said earlier we were preparing, but really he prepared, and I was there near him.

**John:** Classically, we are on the floor of the hotel, which is the best place to plan for these.

**Craig:** He was telling me what I’m going to do.

**John:** Thank God we’re in a venue where we can just grab people and say, “Oh hey, do you want to be on this show?” We’ve got amazing guests for you.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** Why don’t we just start with our guests?

**Craig:** Should we start bringing some guests on?

**John:** I think we should bring two guests on.

**Craig:** I don’t know if there’s any reason to delay other than to say… I will say that as the night goes on, at some point, and hopefully not too late in, we will have lots of Q and A. I love Q and A, and I’ll tell you why, guys. It’s not because I care about your questions. I don’t. It’s because I don’t have to prepare anything for it at all. I can just react. If I had my way, that shit would start right now, but because I don’t, I will do what he tells me to do. We have four guests tonight.

**John:** Four guests.

**Craig:** We’re going to start with two, Chuck Hayward and Brenda Hsueh. Chuck Hayward writes on or has written on Ted Lasso and WandaVision. Brenda Hsueh has written on a whole bunch of stuff, but the thing that I’m most excited about is the Ghostbuster movie, because I’m super excited about the animated Ghostbusters movie. Come on up, guys.

**John:** Obviously, we can talk about features, but I really want to talk about television with the two of you. I would love to get to know how you got started getting staffed for your first television show. Chuck, can you talk us through what were the scripts you wrote that got you staffed?

**Chuck Hayward:** I was an assistant for about nine years in Hollywood. I was doing a lot of coffee acquisitions and excrement consumption. After doing a whole lot of that for nine years, I was like, “All right.” I started sending my scripts around to people, agents’ assistants, managers’ assistants, and, “Hey, if you like this, kick it up to your boss.” Somebody did eventually. Then I got repped. Then the reps started sending me on meetings. I had no fucking clue what I was doing.

**John:** Chuck, before we get to that, talk to us about the scripts that you actually first approached people saying, “Hey, would you be willing to read this?” because that’s where I think a lot of people in this room are at is like, is this script right for people to actually read and think about you?

**Chuck:** I’ll tell you where I screwed up. I started writing scripts that were like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if X happened or Y happened or whatever?” My manager told me, “You should write something that’s very personal, write something that shows people, ‘Hey, here’s my view on the world. Here’s what my experiences have been, my perspective is, my humor is,'” because people originally, they were like, “Hey, we like you, but we don’t really know you from the script.” They say write what you know, but just really make sure you put a lot of yourself on the page. After I did that, that’s when I started actually getting hired for jobs.

**John:** Brenda, any similarities in your experience? What were the first things that you wrote that got attention?

**Brenda Hsueh:** I think for me, I was an Asian immigrant, and I was like, “Oh, that’s not a real job. Writing is not a real job.”

**Craig:** You’re right. It’s not.

**Brenda:** Like, “That’s not a thing.” I was sensible, and I was an English major. I wrote about Jane Austen and stuff. Then I was like, “I’ll be in television news producing or something like that.” My mom got sick, and then I had to take care of her. She was in LA. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to move out to LA to take care of my mom.” I was like, “Oh, I’m super derailed. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why I would come out here. All my friends are in New York City. My job’s in New York City.”

Then in LA, when I was taking care of my mom, she’s a frugal Asian, and she was like, “Oh, you can’t just take care of me. You have to work and make money.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” I was tutoring overachieving Asian kids in SAT tutoring and anything I could bluff my way through. It was a lot of me going ahead in the book and being like, “What’s dew point?”

I met somebody at the alumni function that was a Seinfeld writer. Then I was like, “Oh, okay.” I was like, “Oh, this is a job. People can make money on this? This is interesting.” Then he was like, “Why don’t you try writing a spec?” Then honestly, I was so lazy, I was like, “Okay, writing. What’s the shortest one?” I was like, “Oh, half hour.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll do a half hour.” Because I was lazy, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s the one to do.” Then I was like, “Oh wait, actually that’s the hardest one to do,” because you have stakes and story and character but be funny and do it all efficiently in 22 minutes.

I got tricked into doing half hour. Then I was doing that in my bubble, taking care of my mom. Then I was like, “I don’t know how to get a PA job. I don’t know how to get a writer’s assistant job. I don’t know how to do any of that. I don’t know anybody.”

**Craig:** I am so amazed to see how this works out. It seems like you’re doomed for failure.

**Brenda:** For sure. I was like, “Don’t know anybody.” I was a sensible Asian, and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to give myself two to three years to break in.”

**Craig:** Tip: be a sensible Asian. Go on.

**Brenda:** I was like, “I’m giving myself two to three years like grad school.” I was like, “I don’t have to pay tuition.” I was like, “Okay, I just have to support myself, try to get better at this.” I basically just read every example of good writing of what I wanted to do, on the internet, guys. Then I was like, “Okay, I’m going to enter a contest,” because that’s what you did.

**John:** Oh, Craig, you love contests.

**Craig:** We’re about to hear about the contest that matters. Go on.

**Brenda:** I was like, “Okay, so since I have no connections, I’m going to enter a meritocracy,” which is a contest.

**John:** Oh, you think contests are meritocracies?

**Brenda:** Kind of, because they don’t know anything about-

**John:** Wow, let’s have a good, long-

**Brenda:** They don’t know anything about you!

**John:** Sorry. Tell us.

**Brenda:** I also am an Asian. I wanted to get paid. There was many contests, but there was only one that paid.

**Craig:** You know the rest of us want to get paid too? You know that, right?

**John:** [inaudible 00:09:56] that is. Tell us, tell us, tell us.

**Craig:** All the people want to get paid.

**Brenda:** There was an ABC Disney writing fellowship that was the only one that paid. I was like, “I’m going to apply to that one.” I was like, “Okay, if I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t. I’ll do something else.” I was like, “All right, we’ll see.” I literally was like, “We’ll see.” Then I got it. Then I got a job on that. Then I got an agent off of that. I circumvented the whole-

**Chuck:** How dare you?

**Brenda:** I know.

**Craig:** Both of you, regardless of your arc-

**Brenda:** Very different.

**Craig:** Everybody has a different path in, but both of you arrive on your first day. I want to hear what that was like, when you’re no longer doing excrement consumption, you’re no longer just taking care of your mom. You’re not taking care of your mom and doing a job, because your mom is apparently a tyrant.

**Brenda:** She’s just an Asian mom.

**Craig:** I have a Jewish mom. It’s-

**Brenda:** Similar.

**Craig:** It’s bad, so I know. What was that first day like, when you’re like, “Okay, I made it.” Did you feel like you made it? How did that go?

**Brenda:** It’s hilarious. When I got the fellowship, there was one show that was like, “We will take a writer.” There was three of us that were interviewing for this show. I didn’t realize in comedy when you go on an interview, you are basically going on a high-stakes date. You just be charming and lovely and funny and a raconteur but not seem nervous. I was such a nerd that I was like, “Oh, how do I prepare for this?” I literally wrote up potential questions and answers for this interview, which would’ve been fine.

**Craig:** Sounds awesome.

**Brenda:** I did that. I typed them out, and I printed them out. I had it on a piece of paper. I was in the office, waiting to be called in. I was just reviewing it like a nerd. I was like, “Okay.” This would’ve been fine. Then I get called in. We go for the meeting. I forget to put the piece of paper away. I fold it up. I’m holding it in my hand.

It’s going great. The interview’s going great. For 10 minutes, I’m charming their socks off. Then the showrunner’s like, “What’s in your hand?” I could’ve lied and just been like, “My shopping list.” I’m so honest, and I can’t lie, so I was like, “Oh, it’s the potential questions I thought you would ask and the answers that I would give you.”

**John:** If I’m the showrunner, I’m delighted by that, by the way.

**Brenda:** He’s like, “What are they?”

**Craig:** Did you share?

**Brenda:** Yes, I had no choice. Literally, they said the question. They were like, “Why do you think you got into writing?” One of the answers is because I had no friends growing up and because I’m a nerd.

**Craig:** Oh my god. “I’m repellent.”

**Chuck:** Be a friendless, frugal, nerdy Asian, and that is how you get-

**Brenda:** You’re getting the picture.

**Craig:** It’s easy.

**Brenda:** My older sister and I were best friends, because we had no other friends. We had a world called Dolly Land, where we had stuffed animals, and we would just create a whole world with our stuffed animals.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**Brenda:** It’s not terrifying. It’s delightful.

**Craig:** It’s terrifying.

**John:** It is a Pixar movie.

**Brenda:** It’s Toy Story. It’s Toy Story.

**Craig:** Or a Blumhouse movie.

**Brenda:** My sister and I would make up stories and narratives and characters with our stuffed animals. I remember she would be the mayor. She was older. She was like, “I’m the mayor.” She’s like, “You are the vice mayor.”

**Craig:** The vice mayor.

**Brenda:** Even at seven, I was like, “That’s a fucking made-up-”

**Craig:** You knew that was bullshit.

**Brenda:** I was like, “That is not a real office.” I was like, “That’s made up.”

**Craig:** That’s fucked up. Your sister’s awful.

**Brenda:** It was a lot of us playing stories and making up stories all the time with our stuffed animals. I was like, “Oh, that’s where I got this.” I was like, “Oh, we were just acting out stories with our stuff all the time.” I had to tell the story.

**Craig:** It worked.

**John:** It worked.

**Brenda:** It worked.

**Craig:** It worked.

**John:** You got the job.

**Brenda:** I got the job.

**John:** Chuck, what was your interview for your job that got you staffed?

**Craig:** Tell me please that it was the exact same thing.

**John:** Were there stuffed animals?

**Chuck:** My sister and I, we had dolls, but they were Transformers. It’s boring. My agent set me up with a bunch of showrunner meetings. The first seven or eight of them were like, “Go fuck yourself.” I was sending out this script that was basically about a non-stereotypical gay man who was a chronic masturbator who couldn’t get his life together, so semi-autobiographical. I’m like, “I’ll just go in there and I’ll be myself and we’ll toss it back and forth. We’ll go at it.”

Then I meet with Tad Quill, who I adore, who is one of the WASPiest men in the history of WASPing. Whatever I was saying, he would like, “That’s good. That’s funny. That’s funny.” About 30 minutes later, I was like, “Okay, I am not getting this job, so I’m going to get out of here.” Then I got the job.

**John:** Yay!

**Chuck:** Turns out, just be yourself and don’t worry about your audience. You might get a cold room, but they end up liking you sometimes.

**Craig:** I love both of these stories, because as you’re going through this, one no after another, it’s very tempting to just look at it as a part of a pattern that will continue on forever. Then one day you get the yes. You didn’t change. You didn’t change. They did.

**Chuck:** The nos are great, because then you build your revenge list. I know that at some point down the road, I will take all those people down, and it’ll be fun.

**Craig:** That’s the only thing that gets me up in the morning is anger, honestly, just anger.

**Chuck:** Listen, revenge, it’s a dish best served cold.

**John:** My question for the two of you is… You had studied this job a little bit. You wanted to be writing in TV rooms. What were the biggest things that you guessed wrong about what the job would be like? What were your misconceptions going into that room about what you should do or how it would be? What were the things that surprised you about it?

**Brenda:** I don’t know if it was a surprise, but I think it was hard for me as a writer, because when I was writing alone, I was like, “Oh, I hear the joke, and I can just write it on a piece of paper.” The thing that you have to do well in a room is pitch. I’m like, “Oh, you have to sell it.” It’s not the same skillset. It’s one thing to pitch an idea and not get a reaction. It’s another thing to pitch a joke and it not-

**John:** Give us an example.

**Craig:** Give us an example of your failure.

**John:** Your first show is How I Met Your Mother?

**Brenda:** Yes, that was my first show.

**John:** Great. What is a joke in that? Is it already within the scene, what the next punchline is going to be, or what are you trying to sell?

**Brenda:** It’s all very character-driven and premise-driven. What I would do is, I would sit near the showrunner and just pitch quietly, but they could hear it. It was the way that I would slowly gain confidence in my pitching. What did you do? Did you have any issues with that?

**Chuck:** No, I just pitched terrible jokes. I called myself the cricket-maker, because I’d say the-

**Brenda:** Just embrace it.

**Chuck:** … funniest fucking thing I could think of it. Then it was like, “All right, I’ll stop doing that.”

**Craig:** The cricket-maker. That’s funny.

**Brenda:** You’re like, “That’s a good name.”

**Chuck:** Unfortunately, that’s where my comedy lay was in my own failure.

**Craig:** Your lack of ability is hysterical.

**Chuck:** Exactly. I chose the wrong career. The biggest surprise was I thought you just go in there, and you come up with stuff off the top of your head. You come up with stuff that you feel like is topical or that works in your showrunner’s voice or whatever. A lot of it is sharing yourself. A lot of the times, the likelihood of your pitch getting taken is increased if you say, “Hey, this happened to me. Here’s a story that I went through.” By the way, it can be the darkest, most fucked up, most terrible story ever, and then you can be like, “I felt like our character might be able to do something like this.” I’ll give you an example if you don’t mind.

**Craig:** Please.

**Chuck:** On that show Bent, which was my first show, there was Amanda Peet and David Walton. They were dating. We needed a reason why Amanda Peet really wanted to have sex right away. Nobody could come up with a reason. I was like, “Hey, I don’t know if this helps, but I had sex a couple of months ago because if I had waited another month, it would’ve been a two-year dry spell since I had had sex the last time. Maybe that’s her thing. She needs to not hit that awful deadline.” My showrunner goes, “I like it. I like it.” Tad goes, “Let’s make it one year though so it doesn’t sound so pathetic.”

**John:** He plus-oned it, yeah.

**Chuck:** That’s what I always say the best part about being a writer is, is the worst thing that happens in your day, in your life, in your world, you get to make money off of it.

**John:** What I hear both of you saying, which is a truism that we’ve heard throughout 581 episodes of doing Scriptnotes, is that by being your authentic selves, you were cast in that role of the writer of that show, but also you could pitch things that you were the only person in that room who could pitch. You could be very specific that you’re not trying to write for somebody else or some mythical audience or some mythical showrunner. You were writing what you could do.

**Brenda:** It’s funny, because I’ve been in this business long enough where I think being Asian was a liability in the beginning, but it’s awesome now, which is great. I’m glad we’re on the other side. In the beginning, I wanted to write about my dad and how he’s a real stoic Asian dad that’s repressed and taught me to be a repressed Asian man. Basically, I was like, “That’s hilarious.” I was like, “I can’t really write about an Asian dad. That’s crazy.” I’m like, “What’s a white comp for that?” I was like, “Oh, a CIA dad, a crazy CIA repressed white guy.” I had to make a show about that. I was like, “That’s palatable. That I can cast. That is what a thing is.” That was early on. Now I’m like, “Oh, he could just be an Asian dad. That’s great. I can do that,” which is progress, which has been amazing.

**Craig:** It is progress.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Now you can humiliate your father on television or in movies.

**Brenda:** Now I can just be blatantly about it.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Brenda:** I don’t have to hide it.

**John:** Cool. Chuck and Brenda, stick around, because we’re going to keep you up on stage. You’re not going anywhere. We’re going to play an audience game, because we have a big audience. We want to play an audience game. I asked earlier today who would be willing to be a contestant on this game. I texted with Kelly McAllister. Kelly McAllister, are you here? Kelly McAllister!

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Can you go to that microphone? Craig, you remember our last time here in Austin.

**Craig:** Yes, I do.

**John:** It was really fun.

**Craig:** It was.

**John:** Then we got a call afterwards.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** We had a little bit of a moment.

**Craig:** We got in a little bit of trouble, because the last time we were here, we did a live show.

**John:** In the other place where we can’t talk about anymore.

**Craig:** I happened to be somewhat friendly with Mr. Beto O’Rourke, and he appeared on screen and encouraged everybody to vote, because around this time, obviously, elections are coming up. He encouraged everybody to vote. It was a message about voting. I guess that was maybe too political, and their rules-

**John:** Their rules. Basically, the Austin Film Festival is a-

**Craig:** No politics.

**John:** … nonprofit organization. It shouldn’t have a political agenda. We get that.

**Craig:** We get it.

**John:** I had a long, uncomfortable phone call.

**Craig:** We don’t. I’m going to be honest.

**John:** I had a long, uncomfortable phone call, because I did this.

**Craig:** We don’t get it.

**John:** Tonight, no political content at all. We’re just going to have fun.

**Craig:** We’re only going to deal with facts.

**John:** Facts and fun. Facts and fun.

**Craig:** Facts.

**John:** That’s the Scriptnotes way.

**Craig:** Facts and fun.

**John:** We want to do some movie trivia. In the spirit of spooky season, we’re going to give you, Kelly, some log lines to some scary movies, and you need to tell us the film.

**Craig:** That’s easy.

**John:** That’s simple, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Easy, right?

**Craig:** Easy. Since horror films, as you know, are often commentaries on modern issues, we’re also going to ask you a second question. Please do not answer the first question until you hear the second question, because it’s important. The first question, we’ll give you a log line. You have to name the movie. The second question will be a related question about current events.

**John:** Current events.

**Craig:** Current events.

**John:** Facts. No political content, just facts.

**Craig:** Nothing political, just facts.

**John:** Kelly, it is possible for you to score two points-

**Craig:** Two points.

**John:** … if you get both of them right.

**Craig:** Two.

**John:** Again, it’s just a game.

**Craig:** Just a game.

Kelly McAllister: I answer both after you say both things?

**Craig:** Yes, wait until you have heard both questions. Then you may buzz in. We don’t have a buzzer.

**John:** No, there’s no buzzer. Kelly, are you ready to play Nothing is Scary When Everything is Terrifying?

**Craig:** Is Kelly playing through all these questions?

**John:** Yeah, it’s just you and Kelly.

**Craig:** He’s just doing all of them?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just Kelly?

**John:** Yeah. Originally, we were going to have two contestants, but now it’s just Kelly. It’s all Kelly.

**Craig:** It’s just you.

**John:** Question number one. In this 1974 classic, five friends head to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On the way, they stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover a psychopath armed with a chainsaw.

**Craig:** Wait. Second question. However, Texans are much more likely to be killed by assault weapons. Yet according to this Texas governor, raising the age to purchase these weapons would be considered unconstitutional. For two points, can you name the movie and the governor?

**Kelly:** Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Greg Leatherface Abbott.

**Craig:** That’s two points. Two points.

**John:** Two points. Two points.

**Craig:** Hold on. Come on.

**John:** We got [crosstalk 00:23:58] questions here.

**Craig:** We got a long way to go. You don’t want to-

**John:** Matthew can’t cut it down this much.

**Craig:** Kelly at this point is just like… It was the best moment of his life. We have so much to do. Let’s build it for him, okay? Are you ready for question number two?

**Kelly:** I am.

**Craig:** In this 1994 sequel, an evil leprechaun selects the descendant of one of his slaves to become his bride, leaving it up to the girl’s boyfriend to save her.

**John:** However, if they lived in this state, that boyfriend could be sued under state law by any citizen he assisted in getting her health care, such as terminating the resulting pregnancy. Leprechauns are not real, but women’s health is. For two points, can you name the movie and the state we’re talking about?

**Craig:** Trickier.

**Kelly:** That is, because I don’t want to instate the fine state of Texas.

**Craig:** The state, that’s right.

**Kelly:** Leprechaun 2.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Leprechaun 2.

**Craig:** You get another two points.

**John:** Kelly, perfect score. Let’s keep going. Hush, everyone. Shh.

**Craig:** Easy, guys.

**John:** In this 2019 hit, a family’s serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgangers appear and begin to terrorize them.

**Craig:** Meanwhile, in 2022, Texas families with trans and nonconforming kids have their lives upended when this governor, so it’s going to be the same answer, instructed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate medical treatments of transgender adolescents, such as puberty blockers and hormone injections, as quote unquote, “child abuse.” The policy is currently blocked, by the way. For two points, can you name the movie and the same governor from before?

**Kelly:** That would be Us and Greg Abbott.

**Craig:** There we go. He’s on fire, guys. Right about now, the people that did mention to us that we should be less political are having serious regrets.

**John:** Craig, we’re only saying facts.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** We’re not telling anyone to do anything.

**Craig:** He’s right. It’s facts.

**John:** There’s no endorsement of any-

**Craig:** We may agree with what he’s done.

**John:** A hundred percent. Ask another question.

**Craig:** In this 2007 sequel, three American college students studying abroad are lured to a Slovakian hostel and discover the grim reality behind it.

**John:** In September of this year, Venezuelan asylum seekers in Texas were lured by a mysterious woman named Perla and flown to Martha’s Vineyard, part of a plan hatched by this governor. For two points, can you name the movie and the governor?

**Kelly:** Hostel 2, Ron DeSantis.

**John:** That’s great. I thought we might get him. I thought that was a trick question.

**Craig:** I gotta be honest. Kelly’s freaking me out with how good he is with the sequels.

**John:** These are good. I wouldn’t get some of these things.

**Craig:** Hostel 2?

**John:** Megana researched these. I didn’t do any of this.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know there was a Hostel 2.

**John:** Let’s try question number five. This 2001 film finds a brother and sister driving home through an isolated countryside for spring break, where they encounter a flesh-eating creature in the midst of a ritualistic eating spree.

**Craig:** Wait. We all agree that consuming teenagers is bad, but that’s not the only questionable diet out there. This TV doctor turned candidate was grilled by the House subcommittee on consumer protection for hyping green coffee beans as a weight loss secret. He also suggested that maybe he drank pee in medical school. For two points, can you name the movie and the candidate?

**Kelly:** Jeepers Creepers, Mehmet Oz.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** That’s exactly correct.

**John:** I would not know.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** I would not know either of those things.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** This is all news to me.

**Craig:** I love the fact that, if you notice, Kelly, who is on an all-time high-

**Chuck:** He’s the Ken Jennings of this game.

**Craig:** Kelly is the Ken Jennings of the only game instance this has ever happened.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** I like that he said Mehmet Oz. He didn’t even give him the honorary doctor.

**John:** No, took away.

**Craig:** In this 2014 film, a single mother and her child when an eerie children’s book manifests in their home.

**John:** Just last night, this enigmatic billionaire manifested his dream of buying Twitter, a move we both thing is great-

**Craig:** Officially.

**John:** … and not problematic at all. He definitely knows what he’s doing.

**Craig:** He knows what he’s doing.

**John:** For two points, can you name the movie and the billionaire?

**Kelly:** Strangely enough, Babadook is actually Elon Musk’s middle name.

**Craig:** What I like is that Kelly’s now just going for flair.

**John:** He’s riffing. He’s taking over this thing.

**Craig:** Do you guys see what you’ve done? This was a perfectly decent man, and he’s on his way to being a monster.

**John:** Final question. You could win it all here.

**Craig:** All. Or lose it all.

**John:** Or lose it all. In this 2021 film, a vacationing family discovers that the secluded beach they’re relaxing on for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly, reducing their entire lives into a single day.

**Craig:** If you think time is moving quickly on that beach, what day this week did CAA drop Kanye as a client over his antisemitic remarks?

**Kelly:** The film was Old, and I think it was Tuesday.

**Craig:** Don’t listen to the audience.

**Kelly:** I think it’s Thursday. I thought Thursday.

**John:** Come on, give us the answer.

**Kelly:** Today. Today. Wednesday. Monday.

**Craig:** Yes!

**Kelly:** Monday.

**Craig:** Yes, you got it right!

**John:** Monday is the answer.

**Craig:** You got it right!

**John:** Kelly.

**Craig:** A perfect score!

**John:** Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Perfect score!

Audience: Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!

**John:** Kelly, thank you!

Audience: Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** As a prize, you get all those applause. That’s your prize. Thank you for playing Nothing is Scary When Everything is Terrifying.

**Craig:** Well done, Kelly. Good job.

**John:** Craig, we need some more guests.

**Craig:** The next two idiots, big friends of ours. Both have been on the show before.

**John:** Repeats.

**Craig:** Both are both feature writers and television writers, which I think is particularly interesting, because we have lots to talk about tonight with television, etc. Do I do credits? No. Alec Berg and Phil Hay.

Alec Berg: I found myself carried away during that game. I almost shouted from the front row, “The one about the Babadook! It’s The Babadook! It’s a good one!”

**Craig:** Kelly didn’t need no help.

**Alec:** No, he didn’t.

Phil Hay: It is really going to be impossible to follow that man.

**Alec:** A good improviser would try to take the incredible energy-

**Craig:** That Kelly provided.

**Alec:** … and humor and power that has happened thus far and build it.

**Brenda:** “Yes, and” it.

**Alec:** A great improviser would turn it into quiet tears and introspection. We’re great improvisers.

**Craig:** Let’s go for that.

**Phil:** Or just boring.

**Craig:** Let’s go for that.

**John:** We’ll go for that. I’m curious. The two of you are working on shows that are in subsequent seasons. I would love to talk to you guys about-

**Craig:** Mysterious Benedict Society.

**John:** … Mysterious Benedict Society, Barry, Silicon Valley.

**Craig:** Barry.

**John:** I’m curious about the conversations that go into your thinking but also into your writers’ rooms as you approach the second season of a show, because it’s one thing to figure out everything from the start, like, “What the hell is this show?” Then you have a show, and you have to go back and figure out, “Okay, what do we do next?” Phil, you’re new to television. I’m curious, going into Mysterious Benedict Society Season 2, what are the first conversations that you’ve come into that room with?

**Phil:** I will answer that question, but first I have a question for you.

**John:** Oh God, he’s taking control of the show.

**Craig:** Just violating our format, but fine.

**Phil:** How am I supposed to be funny talking about that?

**John:** You have no requirement to be funny.

**Craig:** You can’t be Kelly.

**Phil:** Fine.

**Craig:** No one else can be Kelly.

**Phil:** I’m going to provide content.

**Craig:** Content.

**Alec:** Make them cry, Phil. Make them cry.

**Craig:** Make them cry, Phil. Here we go.

**Phil:** The second season I would say when you’re making a show… This is the first show we’ve done, so this is new to us. I guess what we thought about right away was how to honor the growth that happened in the first season and to not try to redo what seemed to work and not try to undo anything, but to just grow. We had the advantage of having a second book in the series that we’re adapting that was in kind very different than the first. The first book and the first season of the series is a spy, undercover mission. The second one is sort of like a Mad, Mad, Mad World kind of peripatetic journey. There was a lot of just physical stuff that was different.

I guess one thing to be specific about that we thought about was how to put… There’s a lot of characters in our show. There’s many main characters. I think the one thing we specifically talked about is how can we take characters who haven’t been together a lot and put them together and find ways to see what happens when you take people who don’t naturally tend to each other among the characters and put them together and see what happens.

**John:** Mysterious Benedict Society has a really huge cast. On Barry, you have a much smaller core group of people. As you’re going into the second season-

**Craig:** Or third.

**John:** … or third, subsequent things, how are you figuring out like, “Okay, these the things we want to follow through.” Are you figuring out Barry’s line first and then who tips into it, or are there themes? What are the discussions for figuring out a shape for a season?

**Alec:** Every discussion we ever have is just about what is the honest, true emotion of what would happen next, what would this character do, and what’s real, not what would be cool, not what would be fun or funny, just what’s the honest emotion of this moment and what would happen. We started from the pilot that way, and we’ve just followed that forward ever since. It’s the fourth season now.

**John:** That’s right, fourth season.

**Craig:** Dammit, John.

**John:** Embarrassing us at our own show. Matthew, cut that out.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on. Do the question. “As we all know, Barry’s entering its fourth season.”

**John:** Fourth season.

**Craig:** As you progress into a subsequent season or a fourth season, showoff, even if you say, “Look, I want to insulate myself from Twitter and the world and all the rest of it,” the world exists. There is a feedback loop. You put the show out there. People have reactions, whether it’s reviewers or people online or anything. It is obviously dangerous to think, “Okay, we’re going to consider all that as we’re preparing to tell this story again.” At the same time, you can’t possibly be completely blind or deaf to it. How do you manage that aspect of it? I ask as a guy that may have to have that problem.

**Alec:** Honestly, so much of it was so funny to me. I don’t know who has watched Barry. I’m not pandering, I swear.

**Craig:** No. No. No.

**John:** No. No. No.

**Alec:** A seasoned professional.

**Craig:** That was fishing.

**Alec:** Seasoned professional. Just because we’re in our fourth season-

**Craig:** Fishing.

**Phil:** Just a little show called Barry.

**Alec:** There’s no reason.

**Craig:** Shame on all of you for falling for that.

**Alec:** No, guys.

**Craig:** Goddammit. You didn’t see these two doing that.

**Alec:** Why does Kelly get to have all the fun? Some of us are really needy.

**Craig:** He fought for that.

**Alec:** He did, and he earned every bit of it, dammit.

**Craig:** Goddamn you, all of you.

**Alec:** That man is a legend.

**John:** He replied to a tweet, so he gets all of it.

**Craig:** What did you do? Nothing.

**Alec:** One of the funniest things about Barry is… Sarah Goldberg’s character, Sally, is a lot. There’s a lot of debate online about is she the right person for Barry. People say, “She’s very needy and she’s narcissistic and she’s petty. I don’t know if I want Barry to end up with a person like that.” We’re sitting in the room going, “Barry kills people. He is a murderer.”

**Craig:** Murderer.

**Alec:** There are people he kills just because he has to, so he doesn’t get arrested. It’s so funny to me that people are concerned about him ending up with a nice girl. Stuff like that, I just go, “They’re following it in a different way than we are.” It’s nice to have the feedback and the affirmation, whatever. Honestly, for us it’s just about what makes sense to us in the room. If people don’t like it, honestly…

When we started the show, Bill’s movie… Bill did this movie called Trainwreck that was huge. Every day we were working on Barry, I felt bad because he was turning down immense movie offers to keep working on this show. I assured him. I said, “Look, we’re going to write this thing as aggressively and as hard as we can, because if this show fails, it’s honestly going to be the best thing that ever happened to you, because you’re going to get to do all of those movies.” We just said, “Look, we’re not going to try and hold anything back. We’re not going to try and please people for the sake of pleasing people. We’re going to write what is true and real and honest.”

**Craig:** You like pleasing people.

**Phil:** I love it, Craig. It’s how I get what I need. I was going to say that we’ve had an incredible experience with the fans of the book, who are very passionate. It’s really a wonderful feeling around these books. Everything that we’ve changed and modified seems to have been received really well, except for one thing. It’s weird, because it’s come up a couple times, where people are like… A lot of invention has to happen when you’re doing a show of some books. These books are beautiful. They’re truly inspiring.

There’s a small contingent that is really hung up on one thing. I discovered this because someone sent it to me like, “Isn’t this funny?” Then it kept happening, which is, “I’m out, because Kate Wetherall has blond hair and a ponytail, and in the show, it’s pretty clear… She’s often wearing a hat, which I don’t like as well, no hat. Beneath the hat, there’s no blond hair, and there’s no ponytail. We’re done.” I was like, “We’re not going to get the blond hair, ponytail people, but hopefully everyone else.”

**Craig:** As a guy adapting a popular video game, I can assure you I never have to deal with that problem.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** No one’s ever like, “Pedro Pascal’s beard isn’t full enough. That’s it.”

**Phil:** No, he uses a seven-millimeter clip or a nine-millimeter clip.

**Craig:** “I’m out.” I love it when people are like, “I’m out.” No one cares.

**John:** Great. We’re fine.

**Craig:** It’s fine.

**John:** We’re fine. We’re good.

**Phil:** Of course I care. I want to please everyone.

**Craig:** Then you’re like, “There’s a guy that’s out.”

**John:** Alec, you came up working on Seinfeld, which is running 22 episodes a year.

**Craig:** Guys, no.

**Alec:** Oh, yes.

**John:** On a regular comedy-

**Craig:** Dammit.

**John:** … there’s just churn. You’re burning through stuff. You’re writing. You’re producing. You’re filming. It’s all happening. There’s a schedule to it, versus something like Barry I suspect is written all in advance of when you’re shooting those episodes. Mysterious Benedict Society is also, I presume, completely written before you get started shooting, so that feedback mechanism is also very different. If you want to make a change, you realize, oh, that thing isn’t working very well, there’s a lot more gears to shift. Can you talk about the planning process when you know you have to get the whole thing done before you start filming versus adjust on the fly? What’s that been like for you?

**Alec:** Obviously, what’s nice about it is you can plan the whole thing out. The shooting schedule gets more efficient that way. That buys you a little bit more time, which means you can spend a little more time and energy getting that stuff right. Honestly, the big thing is you feel this immense pressure that we had all this time to do all of this, and if it doesn’t work, then we’re that much bigger idiots than we would’ve been if we had the excuse of we just didn’t have time.

**John:** For Barry, were all the scripts written before you started shooting?

**Alec:** I don’t know if a script is ever… We were two weeks away from shooting Season 3 of 4 when COVID hit. We finished writing Season 3, and then we were sitting on our hands. We asked HBO if we could put a writers’ room together. We wrote Season 4 also during COVID. Then based on what we had written in Season 4, we went back and rewrote Season 3. Based on what we had rewritten in Season 3, we then rewrote Season 4 again.

**John:** Oh, God.

**Alec:** If COVID had lasted three more years, we would’ve just gone back and forth between Seasons 3 and 4. Thank God we finally got to a protocol that was safe enough that we could start shooting. It’s weird. You get to the set sometimes, and you’ve had months and months and months to write something, and as soon as you’re there on set in that moment with cameras and lights up, you run it with the actors and you go, “This shit doesn’t work.” There’s no way you could’ve foreseen it. You have two choices.

**Phil:** Huh. That’s interesting.

**Craig:** Not familiar?

**Phil:** I didn’t really consider that. Interesting.

**John:** Tell us about the Mysterious Benedict way.

**Craig:** I don’t know what that’s like either.

**Alec:** You have two choices, Phil.

**Phil:** I feel for you, man.

**Alec:** You can either ignore those feelings and simply shoot what you have, or you can make everyone very uncomfortable and you can risk looking like an idiot. Bill and I have done this, when we’re sitting there about to roll. We’re both sitting there scratching on the back of our scripts, writing a new scene. We have actors who are very nimble and happy to roll with that. We also have actors that have a real system. They really work the dialog, and they want to own it and really have it in their bones by the day you show up. When they see you writing on the back of pages 30 seconds before they’ve gotta shoot something, they do not like it.

You have the conversation of, “Look, we could shoot what we had, and it might be a B-minus, or we can strive for something better, and we can all be very uncomfortable, and you can feel very exposed and betrayed and like we put you in a bad spot. We’re only doing it because I’m not happy with a B-minus, and I would rather take a shot at having an A-plus if it means that it brings a C-minus into play.”

**John:** Alec, I want to ask you a truthful question in front of all these people here. Are there any of those situations where you went through and rewrote the B-minus scene and it didn’t make it better or you actually broke something that needed to work a certain way? That’s always my fear in those situations, in trying to fix this thing you don’t realize everything else it’s going to break.

**Alec:** Again, the virtue of having Bill and I there is that we have been through every inch of it. We are shooting it. We direct. Now we direct all of them. He’s directing the entire fourth season himself.

**Craig:** Fourth season you say?

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of Barry?

**Alec:** Yeah, and not the movie about Barack Obama either. The series Barry.

**Craig:** I thought you were talking about Barack Obama this entire time.

**Alec:** No.

**Craig:** You have a show called Barry?

**Alec:** Not for much longer.

**Craig:** You’re on Season 4?

**Alec:** Yeah, believe it or not.

**Craig:** Did you guys know this?

**Phil:** Could I add something?

**Craig:** Yeah, please.

**Phil:** I do think there’s something interesting about what we’re talking about, because I think there’s a danger sometimes that happens when everybody gets bored with the A-joke, because they’ve heard it so many times. It happens in pitching, for sure. I think it really happens less in a show than it does when you’re selling something or you’re writing.

**John:** It happens in features too. We’ve all had the experience where, oh shit, they got to the set, and they just didn’t shoot the scene you actually needed them to shoot.

**Phil:** Everyone’s doing the joke on the joke on the joke because they’ve all heard it, but nobody in the audience has heard it. The A-joke is the best joke. I think there’s something interesting about that. I also think there is a cultural bias toward making it up on the day that I don’t think is good for everybody. It’s good for some. It’s really interesting. It’s different, the process you’re talking about, where you have the thing, you refine the thing, you refine the thing, you refine the thing. I think many of you probably feel the same way.

It’s crazy how desperately people want to believe that the actor just made it up on the day. You go to a film festival, and they’re like, “I have a question. How much was improv?” They’re really bummed when the actor’s like, “None of it. It’s written, and then I do it.” I wonder about that. There is a bias toward what just happened, the last thing you thought of. That can be dangerous actually, because it’s not always the best thing.

**Craig:** For sure.

**Phil:** It’s the last thing you thought of.

**Craig:** Sometimes you have to do a little bit of a rescue mission at times, because the plans aren’t working. I definitely had an experience with Pedro Pascal in particular, where sometimes I would think, “I wonder if we could maybe just do this or this,” because sometimes it’s not even that it’s not working. It’s that you’re running out of time on the day. “Maybe we can make this a little shorter,” or, “You know what? We needed it to be like this. It’s not like this. We needed a car to be there. The car never showed up. Let’s figure something else out.” Sometimes I would say, “Okay, why don’t we just do this instead?” He would say, “Okay.” Then he would come back to me about 10 minutes later and go, “Listen, I’m going to defend your writing,” which he wasn’t really doing. It’s not that nice. What he was doing is like, “I actually like the way it was, and here’s why.”

Then he would remind me about things that I had forgotten about, even though I was writing it, because when it’s narrowed down to just writing, you can actually think about all the specific things that are going to happen throughout the show. You’re laying these little breadcrumbs down and setting things up. Sometimes you just forget on the day. It’s why directors should not be in charge of feature films, because they didn’t write it. They just don’t know.

**Audience Member:** Yes.

**Craig:** Exactly, person, yes. Sorry, feature directors.

**Alec:** It is interesting sometimes when you’re shooting something. I’ve had this happen a few times where you do a take of something, and one of the actors is doing something, and you’re just like, “What the hell is that person… Why are they playing it that way?” You cut, and you go over, and you go, “Hey, just a reminder. Remember, the scene before this, you just found out that your dad died. Remember?” They go, “You mean you want me to play it correctly? Okay. Can you roll again, please?” They just forgot where they were in the-

**Craig:** Because you’re shooting everything wildly out of order.

**Alec:** Honestly, when I direct, one of the things I always do is I just talk to the cast and I go, “Remember, this happened, then this happened, and now we’re here, and tomorrow this is going to happen.” A lot of times, people go, “Oh my god, I was about to make a huge mistake about how I was doing it.”

**Craig:** It’s very human.

**Alec:** It’s just the simplicity of knowing where you are in the story.

**John:** Brenda and Chuck, I want to talk to you guys about this, because oftentimes as shows are being written, as many rooms are rooms way before production happens, writers are not getting the opportunity to go to set and learn how things are working or just to visit and see how the scripts are being shot. Chuck, did you have the opportunity on something like Wandavision or other shows you’ve worked on to visit an episode that you wrote six months ago?

**Chuck:** Yes. That was actually the first mini room I was on. All the rooms I was in before then, we were doing writing corresponding with the production, so we could just run across to the set and do whatever. I think that’s invaluable. I think with this mini room thing where there’s 10 weeks or 20 weeks or whatever of a writers’ room and then production happens, these writers are not getting the on-set experience that they need to become really good showrunners later in life. They’re not learning how to talk to actors. They’re not learning how to talk to directors. They’re not learning what everyone does on a set. I think it’s a problem that’s going to bite us in the ass in a couple of years. To your point, it is cool to have all the scripts ready by the time production starts. Then we can go back and adjust them.

Anybody under the rank of executive producer has no fucking clue how to make a television show. They know how to write one, but they don’t know how to make one. I think that’s something that really needs to… I know with talks within the Guild, people have been really voicing that concern, being like, “There’s gotta be a way that we can address this,” because mostly streamers, but I think cable companies are starting to follow suit, is doing this cost-plus model where they don’t want to have to pay all the writers through production, so they’re like, “Get the nerds to write the shit, and then tell them to go home so we can make the thing, and it can be fine.” I think it’s penny-wise and pound-foolish, and I hope that they find a better way.

**Alec:** I was just going to add that I think another thing that makes a huge difference is shorter orders. When I was working 22, 24 episodes a season, the showrunner could only be in so many places at once. As a very junior writer, the showrunner would say, “Hey, can you go into casting and read the people for waiter?” or whatever. Even if it was a smaller level of importance, just being in a casting session and getting to see what that was… Or they’d go, “I don’t have time to look at the new cut of your episode. Can you go down to the edit, watch it, and if anything is glaring, let me know.” I started directing movies at some point after Seinfeld, and there was not a single part of the entire process that I hadn’t been exposed to by working as a writer on Seinfeld, because I just had to cover…

Now that we do 6, 8, 10 episodes, the showrunner can… It’s still tight, but they can pretty much be in every room. You don’t need people to cover all that stuff. They’re not getting that experience.

**Chuck:** They’re not getting the experience. Also, if you’re showrunning and you’re directing a bunch of episodes, it would be nice to be able to have somebody to delegate to, so that you’re not putting an undue pressure on yourself or the two or three other co-EP-level people are bearing the brunt of work that used to be covered by 5 to 10 other people. I feel like everybody has to work a lot harder because they want to spend less money on fewer people.

Again, the long-term issue is that we’re not training our next generation of showrunners. Honestly, selfishly, it’s great for all of us, because they’re going to have to pair us up with younger people who don’t have that experience. I think that that’s an experience that they should have, because it strengthens your confidence as a writer. It makes you feel like showrunning is not this crazy thing that I maybe one day can sort of, kind of do. No, it’s the thing I’ve been doing for the last several weeks whenever the showrunner taps me in. That to me has made me feel way more involved, way more invested, and just way more like this is something I can actually do, and do well.

**John:** Brenda, I want to get back to one more point with you. Your first thing was a television writing workshop.

**Brenda:** A fellowship.

**John:** Fellowship. Talk to us about that, because Warner Bros is potentially closing down their television program or they’re changing their television program.

**Craig:** They opened it back up.

**John:** They brought it back.

**Craig:** They hit Command-Z on that shit.

**Chuck:** Command Zaslav.

**John:** Talk to us about those workshops-

**Craig:** Command Zaslav.

**John:** … because I think a lot of people in this audience look to those things and say, “Oh, is this an opportunity for me to actually learn my craft?” Was it constructive for you?

**Brenda:** I think it’s amazing. I was like, “This is my way in.” I didn’t have any way in. I didn’t know how to get connections and stuff. I thought it was a great opportunity. The one thing that was hard for me as a lady in comedy early on was just that I was always the one lady in the room. It was difficult. Then I realized I was doing this thing where I… I got this thing called vocal nodes. I had this hoarse throat for many, many months and no other symptoms. I’m like, “What is this?” I went to the doctor, and he’s like, “Oh, you should go to an ENT.” Then an ENT put a scope down my throat. He’s like, “Oh, you have vocal nodes.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s what Adele has. That’s what she does [inaudible 00:53:18] singing.” I’m like, “Am I talking too much?” They were like, “No, you’re not talking too much. You’re talking at the wrong pitch, at the wrong volume.”

**Phil:** Are you singing too beautifully?

**Brenda:** I was like, “What? What?” Then I was talking to my female writer friend. She’s like, “I think this is a female writer problem.” She’s like, “I had vocal nodes.” I’m like, “Really?” She’s like, “Oh, and Kristin Newman has vocal nodes too, and she’s also a female comedy writer.” She’s like, “I think this is a female comedy writer problem.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “Oh, we’re all talking at a pitch that is not our natural pitch, that is too loud.” I realized, I’m like, “Oh my god, I think I’m trying to sound like a guy.” I’m Elizabeth Holmes-ing.

**Craig:** Elizabeth Holmes-ing.

**Brenda:** I was like, “I’m fucking Elizabeth-”

**Craig:** You’re Holmes-ing.

**Brenda:** Subconsciously. I was like, “I’m inadvertently Elizabeth Holmes-ing. I’m trying to sound like a guy.”

**Craig:** I’m doing it right now.

**Brenda:** I also want to be heard, so I’m talking at a low voice that’s not my pitch, that’s too loud. Then I’m getting vocal nodes. I was like, “This is crazy.” The irony was, so then I go to a doctor, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, so take some steroids, just anti-inflammatory.” I’m like, “Okay.” I take these steroids, and they actually give me shingles, because they suppressed your immune system. Then I get shingles on my boob. I was like, “What?” I can’t wear a bra, because it hurts. I’m like, “Oh my god, now I can’t wear a bra to work!” I’m like, “Oh my god!” I’m like, “The whole point is to not be a lady! It’s hot!” I’m like, “I can’t wear a sweater! It’s 90 degrees outside!” I’m like, “What?”

**Craig:** You got boob shingles?

**Brenda:** I literally was like, “Oh my god! Oh my god! How do I hide these?” I was like, “This is crazy!” I’m always aggressively trying to be unattractive. I was like, “I have to wear glasses, never wear makeup, always have my hair up, and never show my body.” I was like, “I have to sound like a man.” Then I was like, “Oh my god.” This is the irony. Whatever, I couldn’t wear a bra. Finally, I went to a speech therapist. She was like, “You’re talking at the wrong pitch. I’m going to teach you how to speak correctly.”

**Craig:** And put a bra on.

**Brenda:** “You can wear a bra again.” Isn’t that fucking crazy?

**Craig:** That’s insane.

**Brenda:** I’m like, “Oh my god!”

**Craig:** Because I’m obsessed with the Elizabeth Holmes thing, can you give us just a sample, without giving yourself nodes?

**Chuck:** Don’t set her back on her journey. What are you doing?

**Craig:** Don’t give yourself nodes. I just want to hear it.

**Chuck:** Don’t do it, Brenda!

**Craig:** I want to hear what it sounded like.

**Brenda:** It was low. It was low. It sounded like a guy. Sounded like a guy, and then it was loud. It was not good for me.

**Craig:** It was not healthy.

**Brenda:** It was not good for me, guys.

**Craig:** No, clearly.

**John:** Don’t do that.

**Craig:** Clearly.

**Brenda:** Can you believe I did that for years, and I didn’t realize I was doing that?

**Craig:** Don’t do that.

**John:** Bring this all back.

**Brenda:** It’s fucked up.

**John:** You were hired for this writers’ room because of who you uniquely were. Then you felt you had to completely change yourself in order to be heard in this room.

**Brenda:** Yes. That’s not cool. I think that’s changed. Obviously, that’s different now.

**John:** Everything’s better now. We solved Hollywood.

**Brenda:** Better now.

**John:** We have to thank our producer, Megana Rao, who’s right here.

**Craig:** Megana.

**John:** Megana!

**Craig:** Still no Megana. Megana. She is beloved.

**John:** Scriptnotes is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who will cut out all the stuff we tell him to cut out.

**Craig:** Hooray!

**John:** Yay. We need to thank Colin Hyer and all Austin Film Festival for having us back.

**Craig:** Colin over there.

**John:** Colin, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you. All the volunteers who have been working so hard this weekend.

**John:** I need to thank our incredible panelists.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Oh my god, Phil, Alec, Brenda, Chuck.

**Craig:** Chuck.

**Chuck:** Thanks for having us.

**Craig:** Brenda, Alex, Phil.

**Phil:** Thank all of you.

**John:** Thank you all so much!

**Craig:** Thank you guys for coming out.

**John:** Thank you! Have a good night!

**Craig:** We release you into the wild!

**John:** Austin!

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We gotta do questions.

**Craig:** I know. I’m so excited for questions, finally.

**John:** Craig’s been looking forward to it for weeks. Questions!

**Craig:** I made it through the rain.

**John:** Hello and welcome. Tell us your name, and what is your question?

Jerry Jerome: Hi, my name’s Jerry Jerome.

**John:** Hi, Jerry Jerome.

**Craig:** Hi.

Jerry: I’ve been listening to Scriptnotes for a long, long time.

**John:** Thank you.

Jerry: I know you said it’s no statements. I’m going to have to break a rule.

**Craig:** We just said. We literally just said.

Jerry: I was writing. I was going to film school to make Craig happy. I got hurt at work, and I had to take care of my own health. It took a while for me to get back to writing. Listening to you guys really helped me out.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** We accept that. That is allowable. I should’ve added non-questions that make me feel good about myself are completely allowable.

**John:** Also, praise makes Craig really uncomfortable, and I kind of like that too.

**Craig:** That is true.

Jerry: It made John feel better. Before I got hurt, I turned in to Austin. I didn’t make second round, anything. This time I made the semifinals.

**John:** Hooray. Congratulations.

Jerry: Now for my question.

**Craig:** Thank god.

Jerry: When I was listening to Scriptnotes all the time, my girls loved it. Sometimes I would try to go through different episodes. What they would always love and laugh at was every single time Craig would say his name differently. There’s one outro where I believe you guys had a mix where it was just Craig saying his name differently each and every time set to music.

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

Jerry: I cannot find it.

**Craig:** Let’s get you that.

**John:** We gotta find it.

**Craig:** Did he dream it, or was it real?

**John:** I think it’s real. Megana, we can find that.

**Craig:** Megana’s like, “Is it real?”

Jerry: That’s my only question, to make my girls happy.

**Craig:** I have to say I remember this. I also remember it.

**John:** We’ll find it.

**Craig:** It’s real.

**John:** Also, we’ll put it in the episode. Someone will do the research for us and find it.

**Craig:** We will get you this.

Jerry: Thank you very much.

**Craig:** We will get it for your girls. Absolutely. Gotta look out for the dads. Dads look out for dads. It’s what we do.

Audience: Aw.

**Craig:** Don’t you dare.

**John:** Hello. What’s your question?

**Craig:** Hi!

Teresa: Hello.

**Craig:** Hi!

Teresa: My name is Teresa. Thank you all. I love Mysterious Benedict Society. I’ve never read the books. It’s the sweetest nugget of television ever.

**Phil:** Right on. Thank you.

Teresa: My question is… It’s related to something that Chuck said regarding the future of television. Something that I’m hearing when I’ve been sent out on meetings and stuff is, “We love you. You’re great, but we’re only looking for upper-level writers,” or a lot of writers sometimes might even write all the episodes of their show and not even have a staff. I’m not thinking of anyone in particular. I’m just thinking out loud. My question is, why does this happen, and are there any efforts being made to try to re-incorporate staff writers and get those lower levels going?

**John:** Great. Do you guys want to talk about this?

**Phil:** Sure.

**John:** Talk about your plans on Mysterious Benedict Society, how you guys did it.

**Phil:** We do have lower-level writers on our show. That’s definitely one of the points, and who have frankly performed as well as anybody else on the show. Sometimes you have a certain amount of budget slots, basically how it works. Every show is different. There are shows where one person writes every episode. Writers’ rooms seem to be smaller now because the orders are shorter, but also because you want everyone to have a script. We only have eight scripts, and we are going to write two of them, and our partners are going to write two of them. We want to make sure that everybody has a script. We try to very carefully offer those opportunities.

I think in the case of our show, we’ve always had people at every level. It’s not a staff of 12 people or 15 people or more that might be in a traditional half hour or something like that. I guess what I’d say, it’s different for every show, but for our part, it’s not just because it seems right to us. That’s true, but also, I will say those writers have performed tremendously. You’re trying to find the right person regardless of level. Sometimes you have to have a certain number of every level. I think not every show is served by a writers’ room. If you have a writers’ room, I think you’re served by having all of those different, not just different perspectives, but actually people at different points in their career.

**John:** Teresa, this last year while Craig was gone, I had some showrunners who came on for just one episode and we talked through how they did things. One of the things that came up off mic pretty frequently, I would ask, “What was your process for putting together a room?” The thing I heard probably most consistently is like, “Man, I really need a mix of experienced people who knew how to do stuff and some brand new folks,” because some rooms were so top-heavy with just like, these are the power hitters, but then they disappear and they can’t do anything, or just brand new people who didn’t know how to do stuff.

Really, I think just communication in terms of making sure people are thinking about the whole range of experiences in rooms is going to be important. I don’t see the studios making a big change. I don’t see them pushing for that. The Guild’s not going to push for that. That’s not a thing. It’s going to be just changing the culture, hopefully. Chuck, thoughts?

**Chuck:** I think it’s also important because, I don’t want to speak for the rest of you guys, but I stopped being cool about 15 years ago. I think it is important to hire staff writers that are younger so that they actually talk the way that people talk for the last decade or so. I think you, A, have that, and then B, to your point a second ago, John, upper-level writers are all allowed to develop. Their attention is a little splintered in a way that a staff writer’s would not be. If you have these people that are there, that haven’t learned a bunch of bad habits from other showrunners that aren’t running the show the way you are, I think it’s very important to get them in there to add authenticity, to add a youthful vibe.

I find that younger writers inspire me. They make me want to work harder, because I’m like, “I had that excitement in me before they beat the shit out of me in this town for all those years.” I think it lifts all boats. It’s a [inaudible 01:04:24].

**John:** We were talking beforehand about Megan McDonald, who was a previous Scriptnotes producer, who went on to Wandavision, is now a superstar and is doing a bunch of stuff. She was hired on as just a staff writer.

**Chuck:** The Wandavision room was full of staff writers. I think I was the most senior at… I think I was 38 at the time or something like that. The younger people were really the ones… It was funny, because you could tell the demarcation, because they were like, “Oh, it’s like in Harry Potter when blah blah blah.” Me and Gretchen were like, “I’ve never seen any of those movies.”

**Craig:** What?

**Chuck:** They grew up with all this-

**Craig:** Really?

**Chuck:** Yeah, not a single one.

**Craig:** I’m older than you are. I saw all those movies.

**Chuck:** You have kids though, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, but I still like them alone.

**Chuck:** They came into it with such enthusiasm and with such lore from fantasy projects that we hadn’t had exposure to, Fantastic Beasts. I’m going to stop naming things, because I don’t know. That’s the whole point. They made that show as inventive as it was.

**Craig:** I will also say, if they say, “Hey, you know what? We’re looking for more seasoned or senior writers,” they still met with you. There will be a day when they want staff writers who are newer. You just give a great meeting. Give a great meeting. Trust me, no one else is.

**Brenda:** As a 43-year-old woman who watches Mysterious Benedict Society, new writers, because not all new writers are young.

**John:** Very good point. Hundred percent.

**Craig:** I like that. Good for you.

**Chuck:** Totally.

**Craig:** You showed him.

**Phil:** Can I just underline something quickly before we go to the next question, really quickly?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phil:** Something Chuck said earlier which relates to this is, there is a cultural thing that is not good, which is the idea that we’re strip mining the culture right now and the idea of just development, developing people, developing talent, developing writers. Again, whenever you start in that journey and wherever you’re at, that is devastatingly shortsighted. We started in features with the idea of development just getting crushed. That’s the R and D of the business. Writing staffs are the training ground of people who are going to… Again, it’s not just like it’s great to give people jobs. That is. It’s people who are going to make the culture. I think it’s really dangerous that we’ve created a thing where somehow we don’t care about developing people, just right now, what can you do right now.

**Chuck:** It’s also shortsighted financially, because as an established executive producer, if you have a young show writer or an unseasoned show writer that you’ve given an opportunity to, you can utilize them. They’re part of your camp from now on. Whatever idea they have, you put your name on it as executive producer. You make money off of it for the lifetime of that show. You have a farm team that you’re creating that you can continue to make money on in perpetuity. I think it’s shortsighted, both for the career and for your wallet.

**John:** Our next question, sir.

**Craig:** Here comes a Dodger fan.

Marc Blitzstein: Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Sorry, man.

Marc: I think it was six to five Phillies last I checked. I don’t know what the score is now.

**Craig:** Oh wait, Phillies came back?

Marc: Phillies came back.

**Craig:** Good, because honestly, I’m sorry-

Marc: Oh hell yeah.

**Craig:** Fuck you, Astros.

Marc: Fuck you, Houston.

**Craig:** I don’t give a shit.

Marc: Fuck you, Houston.

**Craig:** Fuck you, Houston.

**John:** Everybody go to the bar.

Marc: Cheating pricks.

**John:** Go to the bar right now. Let’s go.

**Craig:** Fucking Houston. We’re in Austin. It’s cool. Go ahead.

Marc: Hey, guys.

**Craig:** You don’t know what we’re talking about. It’s baseball.

Marc: John, it’s okay if you don’t know what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** It’s baseball.

Marc: Honestly, I’m huge fans of every single one of you on this stage. I’m honored even to be in the room. My question is on packaging right now. My writing partner and I, we go out with projects all the time. Ever since we all collectively fired our agents, there seemingly has been a power-

**Craig:** You’re going to hire them back now. You know that, right?

Marc: I know, but since that happened, since that inciting incident, the power seems to have shifted away from the writers, and it’s gone to the directors and to the actors. My question is, at this stage when we go out with a project to pitch, we’re seemingly introduced to more and more obstacles that are too high or moving, that you have to come with a showrunner, you have to come with a director, you have to come with a piece of talent. That burden is now on the writer to package that or for our management to assist in that. I know you’re at a different level where that’s not necessarily as important. For guys like us, how do you navigate something like that?

**John:** Great. I didn’t get your name. What’s your name?

Marc: Sorry, my name’s Marc Blitzstein.

**John:** You’re mostly working in television or [crosstalk 01:09:20]?

Marc: I am. I’m a television writer. I’m a Guild writer.

**John:** Great. He’s being asked to put more of the show together before he’s going into a studio or to a streamer or anywhere?

Marc: Anywhere.

**Craig:** Anywhere. I guess my question is, do you feel like based on what you’re hearing, what they are saying is you’re not going to really be the showrunner.

Marc: Of course.

**Craig:** That’s what they’re saying. Take that to heart and do what you need to do to be the showrunner, because if you’re not, there’s nothing anybody can help you with. What they’re saying is, “Hey, we don’t think people are going to put you in charge of this show. They’re not going to put you in charge of the show possibly for the reasons that Chuck was talking about, that you maybe don’t have the experience.”

Running a show, as everybody here that does it can tell you, is you still have to be a writer, you still have to be an artist, you still have to be creative. You also have to be the CEO and CFO and COO of a company. You are dealing with a business. It’s a whole other shitload of shit to do. What they’re saying is, you don’t have that yet. All the other stuff, what they’re really doing is backfilling in what they think they need based on what is lacking from your repertoire. Then the question is, how can we get that experience? My then asking back to you is, have you worked on shows? Have you and your partner worked on any shows together?

Marc: Yeah, we’ve been staffed.

**Craig:** Great. Then I’m going to turn to you guys, turn to all of you and say, okay, there is this military hierarchy within a television room. Here’s the executive producer. Here is whatever the staff writer is hired at. How do you start to make your way up the rungs of that ladder in an effective way, so that when you do have an idea, you are not being told you are not enough. We don’t have to add on a bunch of crap to sell this. You guys are now considered whatever you need to be to be a showrunner.

**Phil:** I figure that out, I will gladly let you know, because I’m stuck in [inaudible 01:11:29].

**Alec:** One thing I would say is that I actually think that you don’t graduate from that. Right now, we have a television company. Fortunately, our television company comes with a great director with it. Sometimes that’s the package. Sometimes we have to go get an actor too. I think that’s definitely been a much increased expectation recently. That is just yet another difficult obstacle to get to, depending on how much access you have or what the thing is. I guess it’s the same thing that you’d say anyway, which is it puts even more pressure on writing a spectacular character. Beyond the story, the idea, the concept, the other stuff that could sell your show, it seems like it’s putting more of an intensity on a lead character who is spectacular, because I think it’s true.

I’m interested to hear what you guys think. All of the stuff that we’ve gone out recently, we have attached an actor to. Sometimes that takes a really long time. That’s an expectation right now I think generally. Do you guys think the same?

**Phil:** Yeah, I think it varies project to project. I think one really interesting thing is that when I started as a TV writer, the specs that I wrote were scripts of existing shows. The idea of writing a pilot was so foreign to me. I didn’t write an original pilot probably for the first five or six or seven years I worked professionally. I think now that people write specs from the jump, I think it changes the way people think about when they’re ready to put a show on the air.

**Brenda:** Run a show, yeah.

**Craig:** Right, because original material is not the same thing as running a show based on original material.

**Phil:** It’s interesting. Literally, there was not a showrunner on earth when I started who hadn’t been on a staff for at least six or seven years before a network would even consider hearing a pitch from them.

**John:** One of the things that you’re pointing out is that it used to be very hard to even get in that room to pitch your thing if you didn’t have all these credits, but now because people don’t have those credits, because we haven’t built the farm team system, people can’t progress up the seasons. Now you suddenly have the ability to get into those rooms sometimes to pitch this idea, but they’re saying, “Who are you? What are you bringing?” You’re not bringing your experience, so they’re expecting you to bring in all these other people. That’s really fucking tough. It was always tough. It was always tough to get that actor to read that thing, to get that director to do that stuff, because they’re getting a lot of other requests for those things. What these people are saying is having that thing that feels like, “Oh shit, that person is going to really want to play that role,” that may be the way through. That’s something that’s really specific to them.

The other thing I’ll say is younger writers, newer writers who are having some success right now, that I see in my life, it’s not necessarily they’re getting a big director or a big star on, but they’re getting a producer who has some juice at that place to read it. That’s always been the class leading the way. They have some deals someplace. They have relationships someplace.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** They’re getting you in. Maybe don’t focus all your energy on that director or that actor. Think of who has the deal in that place, who might want to be able to make [crosstalk 01:14:49].

**Craig:** That’s great advice. That’s true, because when I went to HBO to pitch Chernobyl, I did not have an actor and I did not have a director. I just had myself. I didn’t even have a script. What I did have was Carolyn Strauss, who was one of the executive producers of Game of Thrones. That made it a lot easier, I imagine. I still had to do my job. It certainly was enough to put that meaning in context. That’s great advice, because I do think that when we get into this mode of, “What do we have to throw on this to get them to say yes?” the problem is, oh shit, they said yes, and now I’m stuck with this fucking idiot and this fucking idiot-

**John:** That are never available.

**Craig:** … that I don’t want and I never wanted. That’s a huge problem. I guess at a minimum, if you need to go in with somebody, go in with somebody you actually like, because you’re going to get stuck with them.

**Chuck:** A hundred percent.

Marc: Thank you guys, all of you.

**Craig:** Thank you for that one.

**John:** We have time for one more question.

**Craig:** Aw, one more question.

**John:** One last question. You’ve got a great one. I can tell. I can see it.

**Craig:** This is it.

**John:** This is going to be the one.

Catherine: The pressure is crazy now.

**John:** It should be good. What is your name?

Catherine: My name is Catherine, and I represent all of the final questions.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

Catherine: That’s what everyone said.

**John:** You are the final question.

**Craig:** You’re doing great so far.

**John:** Amazing.

Catherine: Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

Catherine: My question is for whichever ones of you, which I think is actually the majority… When you’re reading scripts, looking for your staff writers, obviously you’re reading hundreds potentially, what is happening in the moment before you stop reading?

**John:** What a great question, Catherine.

**Craig:** You mean what’s the thing that make you stop is what you’re asking?

Catherine: Yeah.

**John:** My god, Catherine maybe asked the best question, because-

**Craig:** That is a great question.

**John:** It’s answerable.

**Craig:** Yes, answerable.

**John:** I want to start with Phil Hay, because Phil, this is your first time reading for staffing probably.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**John:** As you’re reading through scripts, you probably had to read a lot of scripts, what were things that were just like, “Okay, I’m done. That’s enough. I get it. This is not my jam.”

**Phil:** I’m not really like that, John.

**John:** You read every script to the end, didn’t you?

**Phil:** No, I did not, but I relied on other people to curate the scripts before I read them. Generally, they would all be of a certain level of accomplishment. It’s hard for me to say what would make me stop if I felt something, if I felt anything, because a script can be amazing, it can be really technically good, it can be very accomplished, but I might not feel anything. A script can be a little rougher or a little more off or a little wandering. That doesn’t bother me if I’m feeling something.

I guess what I’d say is I love to be surprised somewhere in the first 10 pages of the script. Maybe that’s the way you say it, like that. That can be any kind of surprise. It can be like, “Oh shit, that was really funny,” or, “I’ve never really seen a character like this before.” That’s gold. It’s just something surprising, and not relentless surprise, just a nugget of little inspiration and weirdness to me. The weirder, the better I guess I would say.

**Craig:** Alec, what stops you in your tracks?

**Alec:** This is my own personal pet peeve, but typos drive me fucking nuts. It’s not because I don’t like typos, because I’m one of the worst typists on earth. It’s because if you’re sending a script out to get a job and you can’t be bothered to read your own script over two or three times, why would anybody else feel like they should read it too? It’s one of the easiest things to fix.

**Craig:** There’s a machine that does it for you.

**Alec:** They just drive me… That said, to Phil’s point, if I start reading, and I’m like, “Where is this going?” or, “Where is this coming from?” or, “That was hilarious,” I can see past typos. That’s just one of the things that personally drives me nuts. Again, it’s just because I start to get into this conspiracy theory of like, how much does this person not care that they didn’t bother?

**Craig:** Brenda, what stops you in your tracks when you’re reading a script?

**Brenda:** I think I am trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, but you’re right, I think it’s really hard to be surprising, especially given we all know the structure of things. Anything that’s going to throw me, I’m like, “Oh, let’s keep going.” If it’s humorless, I’m kind of over it, something that’s too self-serious, even drama. Life is never humorless. I think there’s something about if you’re trying to say something, you can’t be funny at all. I’m just like, “No, you need a foil.” That can stop me in my tracks.

**Craig:** Chuck, what stops you?

**Chuck:** I think I understand the question.

**Craig:** You left without even asking.

**Chuck:** Listen.

**Craig:** You just left. We have a whole system where you ask to leave.

**Phil:** Don’t make us call the hospitals, Chuck! Don’t make us call!

**Chuck:** What stops me in my tracks is my tiny bladder. That’s why I had to get the hell out of here and then return. I’m going to be petty with mine. What stops me in my tracks are character introductions. I feel like there’s two things. Number one, when you tell us stuff that you couldn’t possibly show on the screen in order to say, “Hey, this is Barbara. She’s a Princeton grad who bakes a hell of a fucking double baked potato,” or something. I’m not going to see that on screen, so just give me what her physical description is, maybe a little bit about her attitude, and move on. Second thing is assuming that all characters are white as a default, so not listing the ethnicity of a character as white-

**Craig:** Unless they’re not white.

**Chuck:** Unless they’re not white. That’s what I’m saying.

**Craig:** [crosstalk 01:20:35].

**Chuck:** I think in order to really help me understand what I’m seeing, I want to know who everybody is. A lot of times, I understand if it’s not pertinent to whatever the story is, it might not feel like it’s a big deal. For me, in order to paint the picture, which is what we’re supposed to be doing as writers, I want to know who that is. I don’t want to assume that everybody’s white unless stated otherwise.

**John:** Catherine, thank you for your question.

**Craig:** Well spoken. Well spoken. I have a very short answer for you. The thing that stops me in my tracks is when I read somebody saying something and I just go, “That’s fake. Fake.” Almost everything I read, at some point I’ll go, “Fake.” It’s tempting, because sometimes we, “Oh, I’ve got a great, clever… Oh my god, I’m so clever. I can’t wait to… This line of dialog is so clever.” Fake.

When I read things where I just feel like the writer is disconnected from the simple question, like Alec was saying, what would a human actually do in this situation? How would they respond? So much of what we talk about when we’re doing our Three Page Challenges, which is this endless “where did I stop reading” challenge, is when a writer writes something, and both of us say, “Who would say or do that in this circumstance? No human being.” As much as you can, try and be honest.

**John:** I’m going to just phrase it the other way around, what keeps me reading. To me, the things that keep me reading is envy, where I feel like, “Shit, I couldn’t have written that. Oh yeah, that was really good.” That’s a big one, “I don’t know if I could’ve done that.” That’s the thing that keeps me going. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m intrigued and impressed and a little intimidated. I love it. That’s the person I want, because you can see that talent. That’s great.

**Phil:** Can I add one more thing on that, that I think may be [crosstalk 01:22:30]?

**Craig:** Sure.

**Phil:** Is mystery, is the confidence-

**Craig:** You love a mystery.

**Phil:** … to ask a question and not answer it. That is so intriguing to me, because that shows so much confidence. Also, what you want to see is confidence, someone who is just boldly doing their thing.

**Craig:** That’s how I know you’re not a network executive. You enjoy mystery.

**John:** I love it! Like humans for thousands of years.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Brenda:** Don’t have to know the answer.

**Craig:** You like not knowing things.

**Phil:** I was saying this in another panel. The best spec I ever read, I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t stop, and entirely because I’m like, “What lunatic wrote this? This could never get made.” It was Being John Malkovich. The reason that got made is Spike Jonze read it and went, “This is unmakeable. I have to make this movie.” It just was the most insane thing I’ve ever read.

**Craig:** Just do that.

**John:** Do that. That’s all.

**Craig:** What have we learned?

Catherine: I’ll do that. Thank you so much. Thank you.

**Craig:** We learned be Asian, I believe was one of the things we learned, write Being John Malkovich. What other lessons did we cull out of this?

**John:** Authenticity.

**Audience Member:** Tiny bladders.

**John:** Tiny bladders.

**Craig:** Tiny bladder. Tiny bladder.

**Brenda:** Talk like a boy.

**Alec:** Doesn’t have to hold you back [crosstalk 01:23:49].

**Brenda:** Don’t be humorless.

**Craig:** Don’t be humorless.

**John:** I think most crucially, we managed to avoid any political content in this episode.

**Craig:** Correct!

* Thanks [Heidi Lauren Duke](https://heidilaurenduke.myportfolio.com/performer) for singing our intro!
* [Brenda Hsueh](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1597674/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/bhsueh/?hl=en)
* [Chuck Hayward](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1643388/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/chuckoff)
* [Phil Hay](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006534/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/phillycarly)
* Alec Berg on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0073688/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by John Venable originally from 266 — this is the outro Jerry was looking for! ([Send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/572standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-live-in-la-2).

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

Hi.

**Craig Mazin:** Thank you. Thank you. That was so jaunty. Love it.

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

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

**John:** This is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about what?

**Audience:** Screenwriting.

**John:** And?

**Audience:** Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Honestly, for a second there, I thought maybe none of them listened to the show.

**John:** Oh my god, that would be so amazing if no one knew what that was.

**Craig:** Literally no one.

**John:** Not a one. Jerome on the piano, thank you [crosstalk 00:00:52]!

**Craig:** Thank you, Jerome. Thank you.

**John:** What a lot of people may not know is that Jerome is with us every week on Scriptnotes. Matthew just doesn’t cut him in to the actual show. We have to have backing piano. Jerome, it’s so great to have you here with us tonight live to provide [crosstalk 00:01:08].

**Craig:** Finally mentioning your name after 590 episodes.

**John:** Matthew and Megana get mentioned all the time. I believe Megan McDonald’s also here in the audience, one of our previous-

**Craig:** Megan right there!

**John:** There she is!

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** I didn’t see, is Stuart Friedel here?

**Stuart’s Dad, Lee Friedel:** Stuart’s sick.

**John:** Stuart’s sick, oh, no!

**Craig:** Seriously sick?

**Unknown:** [inaudible 00:01:26].

**Craig:** Oh, fuck him.

**John:** We’ll be fine. Craig.

**Craig:** Yes?

**John:** It’s our first live show in three years?

**Craig:** Three years, yes. Something happened along the way, and we weren’t able to do it. Lovely to have everyone back. I feel like it’s like riding a bike. We couldn’t have possibly gotten worse at it.

**John:** We possibly could have gotten worse at it.

**Craig:** We might’ve.

**John:** I remember early in the pandemic we did our live show with Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It was exciting, but also, it was on YouTube.

**Craig:** This is nice.

**John:** Now we have one and a half glasses of wine in us, and we’re better prepared for a live show.

**Craig:** Might’ve gone up to one and three quarters.

**John:** Who do we have on our live show this week?

**Craig:** We do have an amazing show. For starters, we have the amazing Joel Kim Booster.

**John:** So excited, Joel Kim Booster. We have Megan Ganz?

**Craig:** We do. We have world-famous Ike Barinholtz.

**John:** We love Ike Barinholtz. It would not be a return to Scriptnotes without our own Aline Brosh McKenna. Plus, we have things we can only do with a live audience, including a raffle, a dumb little game show I made up about streaming, and we have to have Megana on the show, because she’s become a crucial part of the show.

**Craig:** I believe I heard a yeah and a yass, and I agree with both of those. Megana will be helping us out tonight with spooky audience questions, because she loves the spooky season.

**John:** The spooky season.

**Craig:** Which I will reiterate is horseshit.

**John:** What is not horseshit, Craig… Segue man.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** We actually have breaking news to share. I texted you this afternoon about this news that is so fundamental to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Just so you guys know, you get breaking news about four hours after I get breaking news. This is great.

**John:** I do tell Craig first. If I told him onstage, it would be maybe more authentic to the experience. We’ve talked about doing a Scriptnotes book for a year or so. Some of you have signed up for updates about the Scriptnotes book and sample chapters. We put together a full proposal, which we will happily email to all of you, because we sent it out to publishers. We got offers. We’ve signed a deal today to do a Scriptnotes book.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s Crown Books. They’ve done small, little things like the Obama books.

**Craig:** That’s about right.

**John:** That’s about right.

**Craig:** We should be up there with them.

**John:** We should be up there with them. 2024 probably. It could be sooner. 2024 feels like a safe bet. If you want to see the sample chapters and the proposal that we put out, go to scriptnotes.net. We have a special little thing there where you can put in your email address, and we’ll send you what we’ve done so far. We’re so excited. I need to thank Dustin and Megana and Drew and Chris, who were doing the real yeoman’s work of putting together this proposal and getting this book ready to go. We’re so excited to share it with everyone.

**Craig:** It actually looks quite good, I have to say, as somebody that has nothing to do with it. It looks gorgeous. It will be an excellent stocking stuffer for those of you who care about screenwriting or things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** It’s like 500 pages, so it’s a big stocking. Get bigger stockings for 2024 is what we’re saying. We’re so excited to have this in book form. We’re more excited at this moment to be back in live form, in person, to welcome a guest in front of you, who we can ask questions of. Our first guest is Joel Kim Booster.

**Craig:** Joel Kim Booster, let’s give him a hand.

**John:** Let’s welcome out Joel Kim Booster!

**Craig:** There he is. Thank you for coming.

**Joel Kim Booster:** Hey.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Joel:** Hi, guys.

**Craig:** Hi.

**John:** Joel Kim Booster.

**Craig:** Welcome to the couch.

**John:** You are an actor, a stand-up comic. You’re a writer. You’ve worked with television. We’ve seen you on Shrill, Search Party. Your Netflix comedy special, Psychosexual, is terrific.

**Joel:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you for that. Everyone in this audience probably saw you most recently in the Hulu film Fire Island, which you wrote and starred in. Congratulations, Joel Kim Booster.

**Joel:** Oh, man, thank you so much.

**John:** I want to ask you the first question here. We talk on this show a lot about screenwriting, TV writing. We don’t talk a lot about stand-up writing. I want to talk to you about putting together a stand-up set, because you did Psychosexual, you’re probably in development on a new thing. What is your process for figuring out how to do stand-up and how to put together a stand-up that makes sense as a special or at least as one performance? What’s your process for getting stand-up jokes put together?

**Joel:** It’s really sloppy and bad. It’s completely different from my process writing scripts or anything else really. It’s very much a conversation I have with the audience. I’m not a comic who goes to a coffee shop and sits and writes down every setup and punchline word for word and then tries it out that night. I usually show up to a show when I’m working on stuff with premises and bits of jokes that are half-formed. Then I mostly do my writing on stage with the audience, doing a lot of crowd work.

**Craig:** That’s scary.

**Joel:** It was, and it is, but it’s freeing at the same time, because I can show up to a show and know like, okay, tonight I want to talk about the Electoral College and all of the fucked up things about the Electoral College that I can think of. Then I just talk to the audience about it and get a lot of feedback. In the special you saw the repeated crowd work with the guy. That started as just an early stage of writing that special and putting that special together, was in those early stages where I would just find that person to test it. That rolled into how I am writing this special as well.

**John:** It feels so unsafe, because as writers, we’re used to… We are just like, “I’m in my own little bubble.”

**Joel:** I’m raw dogging it.

**John:** You’re just out there. How do you balance that, like, “I want this to be funny for the people who are there with me, but I also want to experiment and find new material.”

**Joel:** I should say I’m constantly writing new material, even slipping it into my longer sets and things like that. When I go to a night, like a bar show or a set here at Dynasty Typewriter, which is one of my favorite places to work out new material, plug, I’m not doing 10 minutes of crowd work. It’s usually four, five minutes of crowd work that I’m doing with the new stuff, forming it, figuring out what hits and what doesn’t hit, and then mixing that in with the stuff that I’ve been workshopping a month ago, so that there are fully formed jokes. Most people paid at least a little bit of money to see me, so I don’t want to completely bite it, but I have.

**Craig:** I’m just fascinated, because you have this raw dog version. You go out there. You wing it. You see what happens. Then on the other side of things, you’re writing a screenplay for a feature film, which is the epitome of not raw dogging it. Not only that, but you’re writing a feature film that is based in part, or at least inspired in part, by Pride and Prejudice. You have this preexisting narrative. You’re obviously doing it in your own way with your own characters and your own vibe. I’m curious, going from the freedom of the stand-up stage to both the rigidity of the form of screenwriting and production, and honestly the rigidity of working inside of a preexisting narrative, was it awesome? Did you ever feel trapped? Talk us through the difference there.

**Joel:** The thing is, as loosey goosey as I am with stand-up writing, I am a very structured screenwriter when I write scripts. I started as a playwright. Even back then, I was outlining my ass off before I would even touch paper, because structure is what turns me on when I’m writing. It is something that I need to tackle and figure out before I actually go into script. That being said, by the time we were shooting Fire Island, the script supervisor hated me, because there were full monologues that I would show up to set and say, “I hate this as written.” I would tell Andrew, the director, I’d be like, “I’m just going to wing it.”

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**Joel:** The monologue that I give to James Scully at the end of the film, trying to convince him to go after Bowen Yang, that was completely made up that day and was fairly different every single take. Everyone from the script supervisor to Andrew to the editor all hated me, but it worked out.

**Craig:** It did work out, because it’s fantastic. I wonder, is the process of writing it and then showing up on the day and saying, “I hate this but let me find something new,” can that only happen if you do write it first?

**Joel:** Oh yeah, absolutely. It only happens when you’re also the executive producer and the star of the movie.

**John:** That does help, doesn’t it?

**Joel:** I wouldn’t recommend that if you’re not wearing all three of those hats at the same time.

**Craig:** You can’t fire yourself.

**Joel:** No one can really say boo. The structure has to be there. The technique has to be there. I went to theater school. I’m very staunchly in the camp of like, theater school, acting school, any of it doesn’t really make you better or can’t give you talent. Everybody who got there who was good got slightly better. Everybody who got there who was bad never got good.

**Craig:** They got poorer.

**Joel:** The reason the people who were good got better is because you learn all of these really annoying techniques that you’re like, “Okay, I’m never going to do this in practice.” When you get it all down into your body and into your brain and it’s running on autopilot in the back of your head, that’s when you can lift off and fool around with form and fool around with structure and make up a monologue on the spot, because you have all of the pieces in place running in the background to make sure that you have a safety net.

**John:** You’re talking about structure. You’ve written features. You’ve written television shows. You’ve written stand-up. We know structure in movies. We know structure in TV shows to some degree. Your stand-up shows also have structure. You have callbacks. You have a plan to go through things. As you’re developing your next special, how are you going from like, “Okay, I have these jokes about this thing and these jokes about this thing.” How do you make it feel cohesive? What is your practice?

**Joel:** That takes a lot longer than just writing the jokes. Right now, I would not say I have an excellent closer. For me, when the special or when the hour really comes together is when I land at the end. It’s very similar to how a lot of people write scripts, I think. I think most of us really start being able to write it when we find the ending. It gives us a good map to get there. Since I haven’t found that out yet, I don’t know what’s tying all of this together yet. I would say too that I don’t know that it’s absolutely vital that there is a cohesive structure.

My special on Netflix definitely had a point. It wasn’t full Nanette, but there was a point being made through the comedy of the special. That is actually a very British thing. They write new hours of stand-up every year and go through this festival system where they take that hour from festival to festival basically all year. They all come from this school of thought that stand-up is very much associated with theater almost. There is always a through line and a message or a point to the special that leads up to it. I spent a lot of time over there and in Australia where they also do that. That was another reason why the special came out the way it did, is because I was absorbing all of that process.

**Craig:** Are you workshopping that as well, the notion of what is this all about and what unites all these things together? As you’re doing your set in development for when you then shoot Psychosexual and it’s on Netflix, are you looking to see what’s landing and how?

**Joel:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Not comedy-wise. I mean thematically.

**Joel:** Okay, because I was like, “Babe.”

**John:** Laughter.

**Joel:** Of course.

**Craig:** I definitely wanted you to call me babe. I’m happy about that.

**Joel:** I’m definitely doing that.

**Craig:** Stop it.

**Joel:** That’s harder, because with the jokes, it’s an immediate feedback system. You know if that’s working or not. I think for me, even in Psychosexual, I dip into moments of seriousness, but it’s a secondary goal for me. The primary purpose of stand-up is to make people laugh.

**John:** Make people laugh.

**Joel:** The rest of it is just set dressing. If that works for some people, then great. Overall, the set should work on its own without any of that as a piece of comedy. That’s more for me.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Joel:** I care less about if that’s working.

**Craig:** Working for them.

**Joel:** As long as I’m closing strong and there’s a good joke-per-minute ratio throughout, I’m happy if that is all funny. I don’t care about the rest of it as much.

**John:** A common theme you see both in Psychosexual and in Fire Island is the specificity of being a gay Asian person making it through the world, and the special things that you’re encountering that other people may not be familiar with. Some of the job you have to do is deciding how much you’re going to tell the audience or explain to the audience about what things are versus just putting it out there and letting them figure it out. What is the balance there? How much do you feel like you have to educate people in like, “This is why this is funny,” or, “This is why this is important.”

**Joel:** You know what? I feel less and less beholden to that the longer I do all of these things, stand-up and writing. No matter what it is, I feel more and more free to let people fill in the blanks a little bit. I’m also coming with a good amount of privilege now, especially because the Netflix special is out. People who are coming to my shows, I’m not having to introduce myself completely to them every single time, which makes things a little easier. Then it also is a real shock to the system when I do get in front of an audience who has no fucking idea who I am, and I’m suddenly like, “Oh, this is good, because now I have to be a real comedian again. I can’t just rest on my laurels.” I really shot myself in the foot though in Fire Island in regards to that, because I added that fucking voiceover.

**John:** At what point did the voiceover happen? Was that always in the script?

**Joel:** It felt like a good idea at the time. It was always a part of the script. I always wanted it to be a part of the script. Actually, fun fact, when it was at Quibi, there was a moment when it was not going to be a personal first-person narrative. It was going to be a third-person narrative done by, we were hoping, Emma Thompson, because she was available to do a Quibi.

**Craig:** That’s right. You’re right. That would’ve been awesome.

**John:** Remember Quibi? Aw, Quibi.

**Craig:** Quibi.

**John:** Vertical video.

**Joel:** The problem with the voiceover for me became in post, because there are a lot of things that are unfixable in a normal movie, unless you want to spend the money on reshoots, which Searchlight was not spending money on reshoots for this movie.

**Craig:** Pour a little VO sauce on it.

**Joel:** All the notes were, “Can we explain this joke in the VO? Can we explain this moment in the VO? Can we fix this with the VO? Can we do this in the VO?” Is it a little bit more than I wanted in the film? Absolutely. Do I hate it? Absolutely no. That kind of stuff makes it a little harder when other people are asking you to explain it, because my thing was, I was always fighting back and saying the audience is smart, and the moments that go over audiences’ heads… I don’t know, when I’m watching movies that are about cultures that I’m not a part of, those are the moments. The moments that I don’t necessarily understand are the moments that make me feel almost the most engaged with the story.

**John:** Because you’re having to pay a lot of attention to figure out what’s happening there.

**Craig:** You’re learning.

**Joel:** You’re learning. There’s stuff that you look up afterwards and you figure it out, and it’s enriching. It makes the movie even better on a second watch and things like that. I think there are plenty of moments like that in Fire Island still. I was happy to leave even more of them in the movie than I think the studio would have liked. That’s the studio’s job, to make sure that it’s palatable to as many people as possible.

**Craig:** They do stand in as a little bit of a proxy of the average person that might buy a ticket. I’m interested in that. That oftentimes is focused on the other. They’ll say, “Okay, but what if you’re not gay and Asian? What will those people think?” I’m actually more interested in if you felt any pressure in the other direction, meaning when you’re telling a story from inside a group, there is a little bit of that syndrome of, “Okay, you’re going to tell our story. You better tell it fucking right.” Did you feel a squeeze that you were maybe going to be held accountable in ways that maybe other writers weren’t going to have to be?

**Joel:** Way more than the other thing. Way more than the other thing. Andrew’s constant refrain to me on set was, “We cannot write this movie for Twitter, Joel,” because it was in my head a lot. I was like, “What are people going to say about this moment? Gay Twitter’s going to drag me for this and that and the other thing.” I’m glad we were able in our press cycle to talk about the movie and how much we loved the movie and loved each other and loved the comedy of the movie, and we weren’t necessarily pressured to make it about our identities as much or anything like that, because I think that that can… I don’t know, people don’t like to go and see a movie that feels like homework.

**Craig:** Homework, that’s the best word for it.

**Joel:** We were really lucky that the studio didn’t pressure us to go in that direction. I think because we were able to present it as a hyper-specific movie… There were definitely people in my community who hate the movie. Trust me, no one is more willing to tell you that than a drunk gay guy, to your face.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Joel:** I think because it wasn’t couched in universal terms… It wasn’t like, “This movie is for all gay people. This movie is for all Asian.” It wasn’t couched in those terms.

**Craig:** It was just the characters that were in the story.

**Joel:** I think I was able to fly slightly more under the radar than I think other projects have been able to.

**Craig:** That makes sense, absolutely.

**John:** You’re saying so many words we try to say on the podcast all the time. You’re talking about specificity, about being a unique, original voice. Whether you’re starring in the movie or just the person writing the movie to put out there in the world, it’s about what is it that you specifically can say about this situation, what is the story that you can tell, that other people couldn’t tell. You’ve been able to do that both with your stand-up and with your film. What is the next thing we can look forward to seeing you in or seeing you writing?

**Joel:** Right now, I’m getting ready to shoot Loot Season Two, which is an Apple TV show that I’m on, that I’m very grateful to be a part of.

**Craig:** Maya Rudolph.

**Joel:** With Maya Rudolph. I’m furiously working on my next screenplay.

**Craig:** Good.

**Joel:** Writing it on spec.

**Craig:** That’s good. I’m glad.

**Joel:** Just trying to keep my hands busy doing that. Then there’s a bunch of other stuff that will come out.

**Craig:** Fire Island was fucking great. If you haven’t seen it-

**John:** See Fire Island, Hulu.

**Craig:** I don’t watch things.

**John:** Craig doesn’t.

**Craig:** I loved it. I thought it was terrific. I don’t know, it was delightful. That’s the word I think is the best word. It was a delight. You should absolutely check it out. It’s fantastic.

**John:** Joel Kim Booster, can you come back for some Q and A after the show?

**Joel:** Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** Joel Kim Booster, everyone!

**Craig:** Thank you, Joel.

**John:** Now, we have a raffle.

**Craig:** Oh, here we go.

**John:** This is all just figured out as we’re doing this.

**Craig:** Now it’s gambling time. Here we go.

**John:** Talk us through how we should do this. I see that there are different prizes here. These are the tickets. There’s a grand prize. Exciting. For listeners that are home, who don’t have the video here, there’s Item 1, Item 2. Item 1 is the Camp Scriptnotes shirt plus a guaranteed question during the show, correct? Is that right? No, I was wrong. I was wrong. I was looking at the wrong card. Matthew, edit.

**Craig:** Matthew, do not edit that.

**John:** Item 1, a Momofuku basket plus two tickets to The Huntington.

**Craig:** Now, the Huntington meaning the garden.

**John:** The garden. I remember bumping into you at The Huntington gardens.

**Craig:** I’m there all the time.

**John:** Before the Scriptnotes show started, I bumped into you and Melissa and your son at The Huntington gardens.

**Craig:** If you have a little baby, it’s a great way to-

**John:** There you go. Having a baby is mostly about how you kill a Saturday and a Sunday.

**Craig:** Just fill a Saturday. You’re certainly not killing it with sex or anything like that.

**John:** We identified Item 1.

**Craig:** Item 1, here we go. Item 1.

**John:** Item 1.

**Craig:** Item 1.

**John:** Craig, I’m going to open this up. You’re going to reach in there and pick one of these tickets.

**Craig:** I’ve got one. The number is 3559437!

**Audience Member:** Yep.

**John:** All right! I see someone back there. You can stay there, but remember, hold onto that ticket, because we’ll remember that.

**Craig:** Hold onto that ticket. I gotta say that “yep” was pretty much the right response.

**John:** “Yep” is the absolute right response. We’re going to put this on top of this.

**Craig:** Based on what we were giving you, yep. What else do we have?

**John:** Item number 2. Thank God for Jerome. You’re saving us here.

**Craig:** Jerome, thank you. Thank you for saving this sinking ship.

**John:** What is Item 2 here?

**Craig:** Item 2 is a pumpkin spice basket and four tickets to The Broad.

**John:** Now, Craig, we know you have issues with spooky season. What is your feeling about pumpkin spice?

**Craig:** Bullshit.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** Now, I will say that pumpkin spice in a pumpkin pie is amazing. Otherwise, get it the fuck out of there.

**John:** I like pumpkin bread. I like pumpkin bread. You like pumpkin bread?

**Craig:** Okay, that’s you. Here we go. Are you guys ready? This is for pumpkin spice.

**John:** Pumpkin spice.

**Craig:** Pumpkin spice, the worst of the Spice Girls. Here we go. 3559411.

**John:** Oh, fantastic! We see you there. You are the winner of the pumpkin spice.

**Craig:** That didn’t even get a yep. That got nothing.

**John:** It got nothing.

**Craig:** Silence.

**John:** We’ll sit this here. Now, we are up for Item number 3. This is bigger. This is bigger.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** I recognize the studio. What do we got?

**Craig:** We have a DreamWorks basket. I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s exciting. Maybe the shark from that shark movie.

**John:** It could be Shrek.

**Craig:** And two tickets…

**John:** I’m excited about this, to the Hollywood Wax Museum.

**Craig:** I didn’t realize we hated them.

**John:** No, it’s exciting. It’s exciting.

**Craig:** Let’s see who the big loser is.

**John:** You could be a winner. There’s three tickets in here.

**Craig:** I know. Nobody wanted this. I’m so sorry, the owner of-

**John:** [crosstalk 00:23:47] now.

**Craig:** Ticket 3559389.

**Audience Member:** It’s me.

**Craig:** I’m so sorry.

**John:** Hooray!

**Craig:** Did you hear what she said?

**John:** “It’s me.” I’m sorry.

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

**John:** “It’s me.”

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

**John:** We’re excited for you. It’s so nice to win things.

**Craig:** Hey, listen, we can’t all be winners.

**John:** Oh my god, now-

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** These are the real ones here. This is serious.

**Craig:** Realer than that?

**John:** Realer than this. The winner of number 4 gets-

**Craig:** Number 4 gets a Camp Scriptnotes T-shirt and a guaranteed audience question. What does this mean?

**John:** That means they will absolutely get their chance to ask their question, no matter what.

**Craig:** What if they’re an idiot?

**John:** That’s the risk we’re taking.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** It’s really on you, because you’re going to draw this ticket. If it’s a terrible question, it’s all your fault.

**Craig:** Gulp. Here we go. Here we go. 355, I’m going to say it every fucking time, I don’t care, 9418.

**Audience Member:** It’s me.

**John:** Yay! Are you going to ask a great question?

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

**Audience Member:** Will you come back next year and do this for Hollywood Heart?

**John:** Sure, we’ll do it again.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Aw, you’re so sweet.

**John:** You can also ask a real question during the time.

**Craig:** She may not have one. Let’s not pressure her.

**John:** We’ll ask you in the moment. If you don’t have a real question, that’s fine too. Thank you very much for bidding on this. Oh my gosh, look how many… This is Item number… Wait, what’s the grand prize? Now I’m confused. What’s number 6?

**Craig:** Number 6 is the grand prize.

**John:** Number 6 is the guaranteed… Oh, that’s the Three Page Challenge. Oh my gosh, this is worth a lot. This is number 5.

**Craig:** Number 5, also a Camp Scriptnotes shirt.

**John:** We love the Camp Scriptnotes shirts. You might think there might even be too many Camp Scriptnotes shirts and we’re trying to get rid of them.

**Craig:** You’re right. And a lifetime Premium membership to Scriptnotes. That’s a lifetime of not spending $5 a month.

**John:** Let’s do the quick math here. Scriptnotes, the annual membership is-

**Craig:** I think we need an actuarial table to see how old they are and also do they smoke.

**John:** This could be worth thousands of dollars, honestly. Thousands of dollars. Look how many tickets there are. There are so many tickets in there.

**Craig:** There’s a lot. Oh god, people want this.

**John:** People want this.

**Craig:** People want this. Guess who’s gotten it? Number 3559487.

**Audience Member:** Yay.

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Hooray! Hooray.

**Craig:** I gotta tell you, I love the way you guys are taking victory in stride. “Yay.”

**John:** “Yay.”

**Craig:** This isn’t making us feel weird or anything.

**John:** Congratulations on this. We’re going to put this over here.

**Craig:** “Yay.”

**John:** Identify yourself later, and we’ll find you for your lifetime-

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Wow, this is worth a lot.

**Craig:** This is the grand prize. The grand prize, a guaranteed Three Page Challenge. That’s right. Bid on the opportunity to have your script pages featured in our next Three Page Challenge segment to receive feedback from John and Craig and a call-out on Scriptnotes.

**John:** Megana will tell you that we will have 200 people write in [crosstalk 00:27:12].

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** She’s reading through a lot. You could jump the line. No matter what, good, bad, you’re there.

**Craig:** A little bit of a monkey’s paw, this one. I gotta be honest. Here we go.

**John:** Craig, draw it out.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, a lot of people wanted this one, but only one person can get it. Their ticket will begin with a 355. The winner is 3559453.

**Audience Member:** That’s me!

**John:** Hooray!

**Craig:** Finally, someone with some passion!

**John:** I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** Thank you!

**John:** 453, what is the script you’re going to send through? Do you have a title for the script you might want to send through?

**Audience Member:** Skullduggery.

**John:** Skullduggery.

**Craig:** That’s a good title.

**John:** Everyone listen for Skullduggery.

**Craig:** I’m into it. It’s going to start with like, “Skullduggery started so well, but then hm.”

**John:** Thank you, everyone, for the raffle. Yay!

**Craig:** Thank you! Way to go, rafflers. Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Now things are going to get a little weird, unfortunately.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** I gotta sit down for this, because this is going to get bad.

**John:** This is going to be a challenging moment here.

**Craig:** Not every segment we do on these live shows are what we would call easy or fun.

**John:** They’re not all giggles.

**Craig:** Some of them are tough.

**John:** Some of them are tough. Over the years of doing Scriptnotes, we’ve been able to highlight some real success stories, like people who are doing good in the world, like Pay Up Hollywood. That’s people who are doing some great stuff.

**Craig:** Hollywood Heart.

**John:** Hollywood Heart! I think we’ve also taken the time to call out some bad actors, people we felt like who were not helping screenwriters, especially aspiring screenwriters.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** What were the words you might use for those people?

**Craig:** The people that we don’t like?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dickheads.

**John:** Dickheads, yeah, dickheads. Sometimes it’s gotten contentious. I’m thinking back to Episode 129, the one with the guys from Final Draft.

**Craig:** They were great, weren’t they? That was fun. I wish you guys could’ve been there to see John like…

**John:** I have serious PTSD from that episode.

**Craig:** Because I’m like, “No, John, hold on.”

**John:** The thing I’ve taken from this is that conflict is not necessarily bad, because sometimes in conflict you illuminate and elucidate some real issues there.

**Craig:** Make things better.

**John:** Yeah, which is why tonight, we want to take a risk and invite on somebody who we’ve talked about a lot on the show. You probably have the strongest opinions about the person.

**Craig:** I am very hesitant about this, but in the spirit of hoping that it goes well, I have agreed to do this.

**John:** You’ve never been shy about telling your listeners what you think about this. Now he’s here to give his side of the story. Please welcome The Manager We Told You to Fire.

**Craig:** Here he is, The Manager We Told You to Fire. Oh, god.

**The Manager We Told You to Fire:** In town. Let me grab my water.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Manager:** Can’t really see past the first few rows, but I can tell it’s a bunch of average-looking people, because it’s writers! Because it’s writers, right? Come on, we’re all on the same team. We’re all in the same game.

**Craig:** We told you to fire him.

**Manager:** God.

**John:** Chad, thank you for coming.

**Manager:** That’s what she said.

**John:** God.

**Craig:** Chad. Chad.

**Manager:** Come on. Come on. It’s back.

**Craig:** No, Chad.

**Manager:** Woo! I’m happy to be here at this New Balance convention. Holy shit. Listen, man, I love the show. I listen to the show. I love it. It’s great.

**Craig:** Do you?

**Manager:** Yeah, I listen to the show when I can get to it. A lot of podcasts out there. I got you guys. I got Rogan. I got Logan Paul, my new client. He’s starting to write now. He wrote a feature, and it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Basically, everybody that rhymes with “ogan,” you have.

**Manager:** Yeah, but also you guys, Pod Save America, Dax, another client, Dax Shepard.

**Craig:** That’s real.

**Manager:** You fucking heard of him?

**John:** I guess it’s good that you listen sometimes, because you know we talk about managers on the show sometimes, and people write in with questions and concerns.

**Manager:** I know. I know. I heard the show. I told you. You don’t believe me? I can do Sexy Craig. You ready? Hey, it’s Sexy Craig. Sexy Craig wants to touch your hair.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You sound like that.

**Craig:** I don’t sound like that.

**John:** That’s what it sounds like in my head every time.

**Manager:** That’s what it is. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** No.

**Manager:** Hey, can I do a One Cool Thing?

**John:** No, you don’t-

**Craig:** You can’t. I’m going to go with no, you can’t.

**Manager:** Can I just say, the problem with you two is-

**Craig:** Oh, please.

**Manager:** You guys have never had a manager. I’m going to get real with you, no cap. You don’t even know what a manager does.

**Craig:** Great. Why don’t you tell us what the fuck it is you do?

**Manager:** It’s in the name. It’s manager, manage from the Latin manage.

**Craig:** What do you manage though?

**Manager:** I manage writers or writer/directors if they have rich parents, that type of thing or, oh, the golden goose is a writer/director/actor, multi-hyphenate. You get that shit, those people are desperate, like a groundling. Oh, give me a groundling. I want a groundling! Yeah, baby. They’ll do whatever.

**Craig:** You’re terrible. You’re a terrible person.

**Manager:** You know what I say?

**Craig:** No.

**Manager:** Hate the player. Don’t hate the game.

**Craig:** I should’ve known that he was going to say that.

**John:** Let’s get back to what you actually do as a manager. For example, do you read your clients’ scripts and give them notes?

**Manager:** John, yes, I read their scripts. Of course I do.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** What’s the process?

**John:** Talk us through the process there.

**Manager:** Okay, the process. I’m on the Peloton, and I get an email. I’m trying to listen to Logan Paul’s podcast. I get an email from whatever. Let’s just call him, I don’t know, fucking Groundling Gus. He’s like, “Hey, I have a script. It’s about two turtles that are in love.” I just write back, “Boring!”

**John:** That’s it? That’s one word. Do you give them anything they can work on?

**Craig:** That’s your management, “Boring.”

**Manager:** I think it’s implied. I’m going to give you guys some free advice. Don’t write boring shit, especially this one about turtles. It was so bad. No one wants to see turtles, guys.

**Craig:** I gotta ask you a question. Did you actually read the turtle script?

**Manager:** I read the email. I read the subject of the email.

**Craig:** Fuck, I hate him.

**Manager:** Listen, man.

**John:** We told you to fire him.

**Manager:** What good is it going to do for me to actually read the script when I promise you no one’s going to buy a fucking script about turtles in love, about turtles in general, unless they’re Teenage Mutant variety, in which case, let’s talk.

**Craig:** To be clear, your entire process is you just read the log lines? You don’t read the material?

**Manager:** Yes.

**Craig:** Great.

**Manager:** Look at the movies that came out this year. I would’ve told my clients, if I represented any of them, not to write them. Bros, little too gay.

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

**Manager:** Fire Island, too gay and too Asian.

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

**Manager:** Double whammy. Double whammy.

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

**Manager:** Double whammy. Death on the Nile, not gay enough.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I will say there was actually a lot of-

**Craig:** No, I agree with him.

**John:** There was a surprising amount of gay coding there.

**Craig:** There’s coding.

**John:** If you look at Poirot’s relationship with Bouc, it felt like there was a thing that was happening there.

**Manager:** I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. Also, I don’t fucking care about subtext. If it’s there, just write it. Who cares?

**Craig:** Great. Let’s get back to the real question. What service are you actually providing to your client?

**Manager:** It’s the service of being their manager.

**Craig:** You don’t do anything!

**Manager:** No, I do, okay. I make it feel like something is happening in your career. You didn’t have a manager, and now you do. Nobody wanted to read your fucking script, and now maybe somebody will. Your mom can tell her friends, “Oh, my son Shmuli, he’s got a Hollywood manager.”

**Craig:** Shmuli?

**Manager:** Hello? Antisemitic much, Craig? The way you said that was fucking weird.

**John:** Let’s move on. A lot of times on the show, we’ve talked about open writing assignments. What is your policy or philosophy about OWAs and your clients?

**Manager:** I love them. They’re my bread and butter. I send all my clients out on open writing assignments, doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** All of them?

**Manager:** I will send literally every client on every writing assignment. As Gandhi said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

**John:** That wasn’t Gandhi.

**Craig:** He didn’t say that. He did not say that.

**Manager:** He did. I think he did.

**Craig:** Just to be clear, he didn’t. He’s a great man. How dare you? Your clients are all competing against each other for every single open writing assignment?

**Manager:** Yes, it’s survival of the fittest. We pit them against each other. It’s like the movie with the Japanese teenagers where they all fucking kill each other.

**John:** Great. Even if one of your clients does book the job, the rest of them have all wasted days or weeks of their life going after that one job?

**Manager:** They learn how to pitch. That is a very valuable skill. Whatever they wrote up, they can leave behind to the executive.

**John:** Oh, gosh, no.

**Manager:** Just walk out and just drop it on the ground.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s not how that works. That’s a terrible idea.

**Manager:** Whatever. Whatever. I’m not a real person, I guess. I’m a straw man that you created to stand in for all the terrible managers your listeners are always writing in about. What you’re forgetting is that a lot of your audience, they hear these tales about terrible managers, and secretly, deep in their hearts, they still want one, even a shitty one like me, because it’s scary never knowing if you’re going to make it-

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**Manager:** … if you’re good enough, if anyone will even care. Getting the tap on the shoulder from one person vaguely connected to the industry is a game changer. Why do you think people do your Three Page Challenge? Because they need that hit of validation. We’re not so different, you and I.

**Craig:** He did the line.

**John:** He did the [inaudible 00:37:44].

**Craig:** He did the line.

**Manager:** These mildly unattractive writers know there is a wall surrounding this industry. You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

**John:** You’re Sorkining. Congratulations.

**Craig:** Sorkining.

**Manager:** I would rather that you just said thank you-

**Craig:** He’s still Sorkining.

**Manager:** … and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!

**Craig:** Just out of curiosity, did you order the Code Red?

**Manager:** I did the job. You’re goddamn right I ordered the Code Red!

**Craig:** I have no further questions.

**John:** Let’s give it up for The Manager We Told You to Fire.

**Craig:** The Manager We Told You to Fire. Thank you.

**Manager:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Ike Barinholtz, everyone!

**John:** He’ll be back for questions.

**Craig:** He will be back at the end of the show! Well done, Manager We Told-

**John:** Nicely done, Ike Barinholtz.

**Craig:** I gotta say-

**John:** Hate you, hate you, hate you.

**Craig:** We were right to tell them to fire him. He’s dreadful.

**John:** Good choices we made. Good choices.

**Craig:** Absolutely fucking dreadful.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** Craig, that’s stressful. It’s stressful having him around.

**Craig:** Can we have nice people [crosstalk 00:39:08]?

**John:** We should welcome some nice-

**Craig:** Nice people.

**John:** … warm, caring people who make things.

**Craig:** Nice, warm, happy, smart people.

**John:** People who make things.

**Craig:** Make things, yeah, not people who exploit us and treat us like shit, in a hilarious way.

**John:** Let’s brainstorm on who these ideal next guests could be, if we were to pick our next guests.

**Craig:** You’d want somebody with the skill of an Aline Brosh McKenna, but also somebody with the stick-to-itiveness and insight of a Megan Ganz.

**John:** These are really good choices, because they’re both TV showrunners. They both created shows. They know how it all works together. Maybe we could even read their credits a little bit before we bring them out, to set up the audience for who these people are.

**Craig:** It’s not that I don’t know what they’ve done, but I’d like to refer to this card.

**John:** I will talk about Megan Ganz, who’s a comedy writer and producer whose credits include The Onion, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Community, Modern Family. She co-created the Apple TV comedy series Mythic Quest, along with-

**Craig:** Starring myself.

**John:** … Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day.

**Craig:** And myself. Aline Brosh McKenna, I’m going to tell you who she is, even though you all know. She is a writer, producer, and director known for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses. Her feature directorial debut-

**John:** Her feature debut.

**Craig:** … Your Place or Mine will come out next year on a small channel called Netflix.

**John:** Megan, Aline, please come out.

**Craig:** Megan, Aline, please come on out.

**John:** Welcome to the couch.

**Craig:** Welcome to the couch. Have a seat. Please feel free to discard all of the cards that The Manager We Told You to Fire has left behind.

**Megan Ganz:** What’s great about having two women is we only get paid 60 cents on the dollar, so two of us-

**Craig:** Sorry, you guys are getting paid? John.

**John:** Sorry.

**Megan:** With two of us, you’re getting a buck 20 worth of value.

**Craig:** [inaudible 00:40:46] nothing.

**John:** It is so amazing to have both of you here. That last segment was very stressful to me. Hopefully, you can talk us all down. You are both people who create TV shows. You run TV shows. This last week, we saw a huge change that’s happening with our streaming services. Our streaming services that have never had commercials before are suddenly going to have commercials. Disney Plus is going to start having commercials. Netflix is going to start having ads in the middle of it. I want to talk to you about that, because that’s a different thing than we’ve encountered before. Megan, on your show on Apple TV, so far there are no ads, but are you-

**Megan:** Bringing back the act break? Is that what you’re asking?

**John:** Yeah, is that act break going to happen?

**Megan:** Bringing back the act break?

**Craig:** Because you have a lot of experience with ad-supported television.

**Megan:** I do. I started out in network television, so I started out thinking about act breaks a lot. In fact, on Modern Family, they always called the first act break the Hey May. Have you ever heard this phrase?

**John:** No, tell us Hey May.

**Craig:** No.

**Megan:** Hey May was that something really exciting had to happen before the commercial break, so that the guy that was watching it would say to his wife, “Hey May, you gotta see what’s happening on this show that’s coming up.” That was the phrase that they-

**Craig:** [crosstalk 00:41:48] name is May. What year are they from?

**Megan:** Cheers. They were watching Oklahoma. I grew up on knowing act breaks and very strict time limits for shows, and now that all went out the window, but apparently it’s coming back. That’ll be interesting. What do I think about it? When I was in network, and everybody was going to streaming and everybody thought streaming would fix all the issues, it was like, it’s just going to become the new dinosaur, right? Then whatever’s next, TikTok, will take over. Then in a few years, we’ll all be desperate to write TikTok shows.

**Craig:** The TikToks.

**John:** We first knew you of course as a feature writer. Then you were [inaudible 00:42:37] Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, when that was going to be a thing. Originally, it was a Showtime show, and then it transitioned to a CW show, so you had to figure out how to do act breaks.

**Craig:** The act breaks.

**John:** Are act breaks natural to you now? Are they part of your blood?

**Megan:** No, they’re not, they weren’t, and they never were. I’ve really only worked on one TV show for any sustained amount of time.

**John:** It was a good show.

**Megan:** We had six acts, which was too many.

**Craig:** CW’s pumping those ads out.

**John:** The network required you to have six acts?

**Megan:** Six acts. There are episodes where it’s 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 2 minutes.

**Craig:** That’s how they did it?

**Megan:** No, you could put them wherever you wanted.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**Megan:** They had to be at least two minutes long. We would sometimes get to the end of the episode and just have just extra shit happen because we didn’t have… It would be a page and an eighth. I would have to be in editing, trying to pump the last act. The first act had been 22… It was a haphazard process. I was saying I enjoy watching things where I feel like, end scene, and then you’re moving. I think it’s a good discipline. Especially it works for comedy.

We’ve been through an interesting shift. For the old people on the stage, we wandered off to a thing where they were like, “This is a comedy,” and you’re like, “This is not funny, has no jokes in it, and is 48 minutes long. I don’t know what’s happening.” It feels like there’s a nice move towards more traditional. The cycles are accelerating at such a rate. People will write more towards those act breaks. Hulu’s always had ads, so they’ve always done that.

Then the other thing is I think formats are getting more… Everything is getting more juiced, because as we were talking backstage, for a streamer, you have to nab people really quickly. Also, you’re competing with things like TikTok now, and so people are… They want to know what they’re looking at, really, so the pace of things. You go back and watch a movie from 1978. You’ll be dead on the ground. It’s all like, “I need to go somewhere.” Then it’s the person opening the door and walking to their car, opening the car door, getting inside the car, backing out of the driveway.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** That’s so funny you say that, because something I would say a lot when I’m directing is, “I know how cars work. I know how walking works. I know how drinking works. We know how eating works. We know how buttering works.” There is a certain genre of thing where we’re going to watch this man unbutton every button. I feel like now it’s to the point where it has to be one or the other. It has to be the most eye-grabbing, attention-stealing thing ever or it has to be so bland that you could leave the room for minutes at a time and come back and miss nothing.

**Megan:** It’s so true. It’s like we’re in TikTok or we’re in profoundly Swedish, slow, slow… You come back and the tumbleweed has just turned over once.

**Craig:** That’s the best kind of Swedish is profoundly Swedish.

**John:** With shows you’re developing now, because Aline, you’ve set up some new shows, congratulations, and Megan, you’re working on new stuff as well, are you thinking about where the commercials will go if they ultimately stick commercials in? Craig, Chernobyl has commercials. We got the email in from France. Chernobyl in France has commercials in it.

**Craig:** That’s fucking France.

**John:** That could very well happen to HBO Max as well when people are watching Chernobyl here.

**Craig:** I must admit that I put blinders on in terms of what happens once it leaves the confines of the United States. I go, “I’m not there.” I’m not there when the tree falls. I don’t know.

**Aline:** Also now, we’re just aware that you’re spending all this time making something beautiful, and people are going to watch it in their bathtub with their grubby fingers.

**John:** Megan, would you…

**Aline:** Are you bothered? You say, “Who cares Chernobyl’s got commercials in France?” If you knew that they were interrupting in the middle of a line of dialog to go to commercial and come back-

**Craig:** It would be kind of amazing if they were just like, “That is how an RBMK reactor… “ Boom, and go-

**Aline:** Then commercials, and then it comes back.

**Craig:** Then it comes back and it’s already exploded.

**Aline:** Can we talk just a minute about the captioning? Now, somebody was telling me today it’s like 70% of people watch their TV captioned. They’re riddled with errors, riddled with misspellings. As you mentioned, I have the movie coming out next year. I desperately want to see the captions, because if the grammar is incorrect or spelled incorrectly, it’s going to make me nuts.

**Craig:** Why are you putting this in my-

**Aline:** I’m trying really hard to get it so that I can see it.

**John:** [crosstalk 00:47:16].

**Craig:** You know what just happened is that her Jewishness went into my Jewishness and just created this awful mega Jewishness of my anxiety now that they’re going to fuck the… Oh, goddammit.

**Aline:** It’s nerve-wracking with a W, come on!

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** Practical guidance though for, let’s say we have our folks out here who are writing their pilots. If you were writing a pilot today and you wanted to be staffed on one of your shows, do you think these people should be putting act breaks into a one-hour, into a half-hour?

**Megan:** I don’t know for one-hours. I’ve never written a drama. For comedies, I did the act break thing for a long time, and then I ended up on Sunny, and they never talked about act breaks. All they talked about was that in every scene, every character should have a specific motivation and a want and that something should happen in that scene that changes the story and that moves them into a different place. Once I got into that mode where I was thinking more scene by scene, now I never think about act breaks anymore, because if the story is moving, it’s moving. I don’t think that your general uneducated TV viewer is like, “Oh, interesting first act. I wonder what’s going to happen once we get into that road of trials. Where’s our atonement coming from?”

Some of it is almost instinctual too. Story breaking has always felt like something to me that’s a little bit like I can almost explain why I think that the story should go this way or that way. It’s almost innate. I wouldn’t push act breaks on, because again, you’re never going to know. Maybe you write them all in, and then somebody yanks them all out again.

**Aline:** If you’re writing a spec for a particular show and you know the format, for that, I would [crosstalk 00:49:03] writing a pilot.

**John:** You just set up a new show with [inaudible 00:49:06]. For that, will there be act breaks?

**Aline:** It’s ABC network, so it’s a network format. Whatever network you’re selling it to generally has a format of some kind, or they have none. They generally have length guides. Actually, there were a lot of restrictions in working on the CW. I got to perversely enjoy them. We only had a certain amount of runtime. Then I got really into something I never thought I would be interested in, which is those previously-ons. You think they’re computer generated or something. We worked really hard on them. Really hard. I loved working on those.

**Craig:** Those are great.

**Aline:** We tried to craft them in editing, so it helped you understand what the episode was you were going to watch. Now I know that most people fast-forward through them. We put a lot of thought into them so that they would frame the episode correctly. I’ve grown to love them as an art form. It was Mad Men that famously had the string of just non sequiturs that you could not… They’re pretty fabulous. I think they can really help a show. Again, I like some of the more traditional format things I enjoy. I think that we might regret throwing out some of the baby with the bathwater.

**Megan:** Structure is good. I like structure.

**Craig:** Having some sort of thing to follow. You just mentioned what’s coming and what just happened. You’ve both worked on shows that have been ongoing shows. There’s the world of cable television or premium cable, whatever they call it, where here’s a limited series, or it’s a series but it’s only going to run for two seasons. You guys are working on shows that are designed to run for a long time. I’m curious, just from a craft point of view, how you guys balance the need to keep the flywheel going year after year without leaning too hard on things that you know are grade Hamburger Helper, like will they, won’t they, or we made it, we lost it all. What do you do to keep it going and fresh when there is this interesting meta problem that you need to reset it every time no matter what?

**Megan:** It’s got to be the same but different-

**Craig:** Same but different.

**Megan:** … every single time you have it. For me, it’s been different on the two different shows that I’m currently working on. On Sunny, they get around that by making them cartoon characters that know-

**Craig:** Learn nothing.

**Megan:** … nothing they do influences the next episode whatsoever.

**John:** [crosstalk 00:51:24].

**Megan:** They never learn their lessons. There’s no third act in Sunny. It’s great. You just get them in a really bad situation, and then you roll credits. Then the next week, they’re out of jail somehow. That’s great. That’s the way they do it on that show. That’s why they’ve been going for 16… I’m about to start on Season 16-

**Craig:** Oh my god. Amazing.

**Megan:** … of Sunny in a couple weeks.

**Craig:** Mythic Quest is a workspace.

**Megan:** Mythic Quest is a workspace, real people that have things that carry over. It has been difficult. We don’t have a romantic relationship between our two leads, so we can’t rely on that. We didn’t want to get into the place, because it’s all about a video game. We didn’t want to rely too much on is the video game going to be successful or not, because I don’t think most people care about that. We really try to pin it on the emotional relationships.

From the very beginning, we tried to make the thing that makes you coming back is there’s this odd couple, these two people, they love each other, they hate each other, they’re making this thing together. It’s like two people raising a kid, where it drives them insane, but they also can’t leave each other, so they’ve got to figure it out for the sake of the kid. We’re hoping that that tension is bringing people back over and over. What helps that is that it’s 10 episodes a season and not 24, which is what I used to do. In 24, you need a love interest.

**Craig:** You’re not going to make it otherwise.

**Megan:** You’re not going to make it.

**Aline:** Also, don’t we love a filler episode?

**Megan:** Oh, I love filler.

**Aline:** I love a filler episode. I love something where they just go to Costco for the whole episode. Honestly, they’re some of the most fun. The great thing about those episodes, they’re often later in the run. You’ve established so much about your characters that you can trap them all in a room together, and then you can really pay off these character-based emotional things. That’s why I love a good bottle episode. I think once you earn that thing where you’re like, “Guess what? We’ve set up so many things that we can put these people in one space and just let them talk to each other, and you’re going to be entertained for a half-hour.”

**Craig:** They can hash it out together.

**Megan:** Great.

**Aline:** Our last season was extended from 13 to 18. We managed to make one of them a live special, but then we still had four. We ended up doing things we never… She had a brother she didn’t know about. We just had a lot of fun.

**Megan:** Find a dog.

**Aline:** She knew that he existed. She’d not really spent any time with him. You can just chase wild herrings. She went to a waterpark. That was some of the funnest stuff we did. It’s not my podcast, but somebody said to me-

**John:** Really?

**Craig:** It basically is.

**Aline:** Never stopped me before.

**Megan:** It could be, by the way.

**Craig:** It is.

**Aline:** I wanted to ask you guys a question, because somebody said to me the other day… I was talking to an executive, and they said my… Their theory is that feature writers can write TV more easily than TV writers can write features.

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**Aline:** They said that if you’re a feature writer, you’ve learned how to wander in the woods by yourself big chunks of time, so then when you go to write TV, you have that sense of the whole scope, but you can write these tinier chunks faster, and it doesn’t have to be the complete thing. I don’t know about that. I’m curious about that.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Here’s the other version of that. It’s that sometimes you see these streaming shows just feel like, “Oh, I see it as a 10-hour movie.” I’m like, “Oh god, I don’t want a 10-hour movie.”

**Craig:** That would be bad.

**John:** I want a sense of [crosstalk 00:54:34].

**Craig:** Episodes.

**John:** Episodes. I want a sense that things [crosstalk 00:54:36].

**Craig:** I’m a big fan of episodes. I do think that feature writers know how to finish something, and a lot of television writers have never actually been in a spot where they had to finish something. It was always designed to keep the machine running. We know a lot of television shows really stumble at the finish line.

**Aline:** In TV you finish-ish.

**Craig:** Ish.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Finish-ish.

**Aline:** Finish-ish. You give them enough of a thing that they can go to bed that night, but then they gotta come back.

**Craig:** They gotta come back, exactly.

**Aline:** Literally, Act 1 is the pilot, then you have 70 episodes of Act 2, and then Act 3 is the last 15 minutes of the entire series.

**Megan:** Oh god, that’s great.

**Aline:** I could do it now.

**Craig:** You’re showrunners. I have been a showrunner, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. One of the things that’s blown my mind, and I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s been a little hard, when you’re not a showrunner, whether you’re a feature writer or you’re working on staff at a show, your job ultimately is a creative job. You’re supposed to be playing, and you’re supposed to be just being creative and writing and all the rest. When you are a showrunner, you have to do these things. You also are the CEO of a fairly large corporation. You are kind of a mom or a dad to a lot of people. How do you guys reconcile those two sides of yourselves when you’re doing the work?

**Aline:** I have a thing that I think may be different from how other people think of it, which is a lot of showrunners and movie directors have this thing where they’re like, “This is my process. Now welcome to my movie. Welcome to my TV show. I’m the boss, and this is my process.” I don’t do that, because I don’t think… I am assembling a group of creative people. Particularly with actors, they’re all very different. They all have a different process. They all approach things differently.

I’ll just tell you guys, we had Reese and Ashton on this movie. We also have Tig Notaro, Steve Zahn, Zoë Chao, Jesse Williams. They’re all really different actors. They approach things really differently. On Crazy Ex, we had people from Broadway, we had stand-ups, we had all different… I like to very much meet the actors where they live and explore what their process is and then even what they need on a particular day.

With the writers, you can only really have one process, but what I like to try and do is figure out how to make every writer there feel comfortable so that they can contribute the most. All writers are different that way. Some writers come in, and they just are very comfortable speaking to authority. They’re very comfortable speaking out. Some need more encouragement and more direction. That’s true with department heads too. I will be collaborating very, very closely with costumes. When I hire a costume person, I’m saying, “You’ll be sick of me. I’m going to go down to the socks with you.”

My process is a little bit different based on who I’m working with, as opposed to like, “This is how Aline does stuff.” There’s a few things that are baseline things with me. I’m not great with lateness. If there’s more than two people in the room, and someone’s late, the disrespect of that is really hard for me. There’s just a few things that I do a certain way.

Basically, instead of coming in and saying, “Gosh, I want this done a certain way. I gotta get everyone to do it,” I try and go more with like, “I have a goal. Our goal is to take the mountain, and we can all have a different approach to that,” because what you want to do is bring out the best creative work that you can from everyone. Everyone’s different.

For example, in the writers’ room, sometimes I will say to someone, “If you don’t feel comfortable speaking up in the room about something, come find me later or send me an email or put a note on my desk. If there’s something where you want to say, ‘I really think we should do X, Y, and Z,’ and for whatever reason, the room wasn’t the place where you felt like you wanted to say that, just let me know some other way,” or for an actor, if someone wants to send me a six-page email, but someone else doesn’t need that, I like to adjust my… I think if you’re trying to get everyone to be you and to approach things the way you would and to think that… You’re going to rob yourself of good ideas. It’s not going to work.

**Craig:** Megan, you’re toxically rigid, so what do you think?

**Megan:** I was going to say, have you-

**Aline:** I’m contrasting myself to Megan, obviously.

**Megan:** I was going to say, so your first room was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Aline:** See, this is why I’m not a really good sample. I had been in other rooms, little, tiny things here and there. Basically, I didn’t come up being a staff writer.

**John:** Megan, give us the real dirt. How does it really work?

**Megan:** That sounds amazing. That is what I am, now that I am a showrunner, trying to do. What that process feels like to me, in an adjustment from the way that I saw showrunners being when I was coming up and the way they acted towards me, the way that I’m trying to be a showrunner is like… I bought mushrooms recently.

**Craig:** Go on.

**Megan:** This woman that I bought mushrooms from gave me this chart of different dosages.

**Aline:** I didn’t know what kind of mushrooms we were talking about.

**Megan:** Sorry.

**Craig:** You thought she was talking about [crosstalk 00:59:58].

**Aline:** I was like, “Are we porcini? What are we-”

**Craig:** Oh, Aline.

**Megan:** She gave me the scale of all the different things you experience, different levels. At six grams of mushrooms was ego death. That is what I feel like I’m experiencing as being a showrunner, because I think in order to do it right, it is exactly what you’re saying.

**Craig:** Ego death.

**Megan:** In order to do it right, what you have to do is go, “I am your captain, but only in the senses that I am here to make everyone aboard this ship feel safe and a part of this team and feel like we’re all rowing towards the same place.” That’s not my experience when I started. When I started, it was like, “I’m in charge. You do what I say. If I tell you to come in at 10 a.m. and sit in a room until 7 p.m. without me entering that room, you’re going to sit there.” I didn’t have that experience coming up. When I was trained, it was very much like you shove a million ideas to your showrunner, and then they take the best ones, and then those somehow became their ideas. Then they go on with that.

**Aline:** Megan, my training ground as a feature writer, which these guys will know, is working for sometimes wonderful, occasionally-

**John:** Often monstrous.

**Aline:** … not wonderful people who are not trained in story often-

**Craig:** Who have authority over you.

**Aline:** … who couldn’t express their ideas with words, to whom I would have to say, “Oh my god, that’s so amazing. That’s so interesting. I love that. I was wondering if we could do something that made sense or advanced the story or had to do with the characters. We don’t have to.” As a screenwriter, it is a certain way similar to being on a staff and being semi listened to.

**Craig:** You’re working for writers.

**John:** Writers [crosstalk 01:01:45].

**Craig:** In features, you are often working for people that just don’t understand [crosstalk 01:01:51]. They haven’t done it themselves.

**Aline:** Most of my really bad experiences, by the way, were with things that never got made. I worked with a gentleman whose entire way of communicating to me was to send me screen caps.

**Craig:** Efficient.

**Aline:** “I was thinking this scene could be like this.” It would literally be a screen cap of a cartoon from the ’40s.

**Megan:** I’m not trying to say that I’ve had it worse than anybody else. Let me just say that. I will say that that is what I’m trying to do as well, which is to say… Really, it’s come out of my experience, because I realize that if you’re not properly incentivized to believe that your contributions matter to your showrunner, you are not showing up every day to do your best work. You are showing up every day to be there until they let you go. Then you go home and you do things that matter to you. What I am trying to do as a showrunner is say, “I hear you. Your voice is important. The things that you say are important. Your thoughts are important. If you need to tell me something, send me an email,” those sorts of things.

**Aline:** You’re saying no 85% of the time.

**Megan:** Yes, all the time. I’m resisting my inner nature to not be like, “You should be so lucky that I’m even listening to you, because I never got that.”

**Craig:** I wish that you would express that more. I want you to release the Kraken. I’m just curious, do you ever miss just being the… Jerry Seinfeld once got an award, and he said, “I don’t want to be up here accepting this award. I want to be back there making fun of the guy accepting this award.” Do you ever miss being the person who, after the showrunner finally lets you go, you can go out in the parking lot and go, “What a dick.”

**Aline:** “What an asshole.”

**Craig:** Now you’re the dick.

**Megan:** I do. I do, because the place that I’m in right now is between the two better places, which is you can either be one of the guys rowing, that’s like, “God, the captain’s an asshole,” or you can be the captain. Being the guy that’s below the captain, that passes along the captain’s wishes to the rowers, and then the rowers complain to you, and then you try to go tell the captain. He’s like, “I don’t give a shit.” Then you’re like, “Okay, I guess I have to go back and tell the… ” That position, that’s where I’m at right now, which is in between those two things.

**Craig:** Which honestly is the dream of most of these people.

**John:** Indeed. It’s honestly the dream of these people to have a show on television. There are so many shows on television. Back when we started our careers, it was pretty easy to keep up with what was on television. You could go into a general meeting, and you haven’t seen the show, you fake it, because you know what the shows were.

**Craig:** There were 12 shows on TV.

**John:** There were 12 shows on TV. Did I ever watch Gossip Girl? No. Could I fake my way through a meeting about it? Absolutely. In 2022, it’s actually much harder. You guys have staff people, so you know it’s hard. We’re guessing that even two fancy TV showrunners like you couldn’t tell us-

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** … where these streaming shows are airing, or if they’re even real.

**Megan:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** We’ll give you the title of the show-

**Craig:** And a little description.

**John:** … and a little description.

**Aline:** Can we confer?

**John:** You can confer, yeah.

**Craig:** And the platform.

**Aline:** Two women’s minds are better than one.

**John:** We’re going to tell you the title of the show.

**Craig:** We’re not going to say the platform.

**John:** You’ve gotta tell us what platform it’s on. If you don’t recognize the show, we can give you a log line and the star.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** It’s hard, because we tried this. Are you ready to play I’ve Been Meaning to Watch That?

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** I’ll do this first. Mythic Quest, where would we find that show?

**Craig:** Is it real?

**Megan:** It’s on Apple TV.

**Aline:** It’s an extra special show starring Craig Mazin-

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Aline:** … on Apple TV, which I have watched.

**Megan:** Yes, it’s starring Craig Mazin on Apple TV.

**Aline:** I have watched.

**Craig:** They nailed it.

**John:** They nailed it.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** One for you.

**Craig:** Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Megan:** [inaudible 01:05:36].

**John:** It’s streaming.

**Megan:** The CW?

**Craig:** That is not a streamer.

**Megan:** What is The CW? Is that Disney? That’s Disney, because-

**Craig:** Did you just arrive in this country?

**Megan:** I don’t know, Hulu?

**Craig:** Tell them.

**Aline:** It’s on Netflix.

**Craig:** It is on Netflix.

**John:** Netflix.

**Aline:** Some people think it’s a Netflix show.

**Megan:** I watched it when it was on legit CW TV.

**Craig:** There we go. Now the game gets-

**John:** Now it gets hard.

**Craig:** Basically, the difficulty level goes like… Here we go.

**Megan:** We know Chernobyl is on Disney Plus. Keep going.

**John:** [inaudible 01:06:08].

**Craig:** It’s very Elden Ring-like, as you guys know.

**Aline:** It would help that I don’t watch TV, right?

**John:** As you keep showing us.

**Craig:** It won’t hurt.

**John:** Our next program is Salvage Marines. Where is it streaming, or did we just make it up?

**Aline:** If it is streaming, it’s on Discovery.

**Megan:** It’s gotta be on Discovery, right?

**Craig:** We can give you a little information if you want.

**John:** We have a log line.

**Craig:** “In a green future of corporate tyranny and deep space combat, Samuel Hyst dares to dream of a life beyond the polluted industrial planet of Baen 6.”

**Aline:** Is it on the Syfy network?

**Craig:** No.

**Megan:** It’s not real.

**Craig:** Do you want to know who it stars?

**Aline:** Not real, I’m going to guess.

**Craig:** You’re incorrect.

**John:** Incorrect. A real show on Crackle. You can watch it now. Starring Casper Van Dien.

**Craig:** It is on Crackle. Here we go. The Old Man.

**Aline:** That’s on FX.

**Megan:** That’s real. That’s on FX.

**Aline:** That’s Jeff Bridges.

**Megan:** On Hulu.

**Craig:** Hulu, you’re right.

**Aline:** No, it’s FX for Hulu.

**Megan:** FX for Hulu.

**Craig:** What the fuck is the difference?

**Megan:** It’s FX for Hulu. It’s FX for Hulu.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** You got it.

**Craig:** You nailed it.

**John:** You got it!

**Craig:** It’s correct.

**Aline:** I watched it. I love it.

**Craig:** Nice work.

**John:** Irma Vep.

**Aline:** That’s on HBO. It was a French production. It’s Olivier Assayas. It stars-

**Craig:** Good Lord.

**John:** Jesus.

**Aline:** It stars the beautiful-

**John:** She’s getting the extra credit here. She’s like, “Teacher, teacher, I know more.”

**Aline:** Alicia Vikander. Alicia Vikander.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Megan:** Wow.

**Craig:** Mostly Fine.

**Aline:** I don’t…

**Craig:** You want a little description?

**Aline:** Sure.

**Craig:** “Two strange sisters deal with divorce, motherhood, and their father’s legendary china shop.”

**Megan:** Is it F-E-I-N?

**Craig:** It is not. It is F-I-N-E. Would you like stars?

**Megan:** Sure.

**Craig:** Lauren Graham and Zooey Deschanel.

**Megan:** No, that’s not real.

**Aline:** No, that can’t be.

**Craig:** It is not a real show.

**John:** [inaudible 01:08:07]. Rutherford Falls.

**Megan:** That’s real.

**Aline:** Rutherford Falls, yeah.

**John:** Where?

**Aline:** God, I did watch that too. I watched it too.

**Megan:** [crosstalk 01:08:16].

**Aline:** It’s Ed Helms. It’s Ed Helms.

**John:** Yes, that’s great.

**Aline:** The showrunner’s name is-

**Megan:** Sierra Ornelas.

**Aline:** … Sierra Ornelas.

**John:** Where is it?

**Aline:** It’s on…

**Craig:** I’ll give you a hint. Meh!

**Aline:** Oh, Peacock. Peacock. It’s an NBC show.

**Craig:** People don’t know that’s what they sound like, but they do. Roar.

**Aline:** That’s real, and it’s an anthology series. Alison Brie was in it.

**Craig:** Where do you find it?

**Aline:** It’s on Apple?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** [crosstalk 01:08:52].

**Aline:** I was at an Apple event literally last night talking to another person that came up and said, “Oh, I’ve got a new show.” I said, “Where’s it at?” He’s like, “Apple.” I’m like, “I never heard of it.”

**Craig:** Gulp.

**Aline:** I’m so bad! It’s so bad. We’re on the same things now, and we don’t even hear of each other’s shows.

**Craig:** There’s too much. Surely you’ll know about this one.

**John:** Woke.

**Aline:** That’s a semi-animated show starring Lamorne Morris.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Aline:** It was on Hulu.

**Craig:** We picked the wrong person to play this game.

**John:** Yeah, dear God.

**Craig:** Let’s see if you know about this one. Heartbreak High. Would you like a summary?

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** “Emory becomes a social pariah when the mural she made of everyone’s past hookups goes public.” Heartbreak High.

**Aline:** This is a blind spot for me, because I don’t really watch high school shows.

**Megan:** I know, yeah. I don’t either.

**Aline:** I’m going to guess that is real and that it’s on… What are those high school shows on?

**Megan:** Freeform?

**Craig:** No, but it is real.

**John:** Real. Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s on Netflix.

**Aline:** Netflix.

**Megan:** There you go.

**Craig:** Heartbreak High.

**John:** Chapelwaite.

**Aline:** Isn’t that a British crime show?

**John:** I don’t know. You tell me.

**Megan:** Can we get [crosstalk 01:10:13]?

**Aline:** Is it a British crime show?

**John:** [crosstalk 01:10:14].

**Megan:** Use it in a sentence.

**Craig:** I have not heard of Chapelwaite.

**John:** “Set in the 1850s, this series follows Captain Charles Boone, who relocates his family to his ancestral Maine home. Charles has to soon confront his family’s sordid history to fight the end of darkness that has plagued them for generations.” Starring Adrien Brody.

**Craig:** Chapelwaite.

**John:** Chapelwaite.

**Craig:** Chapelwaite.

**Megan:** I have never heard of it.

**Craig:** Is it real?

**Megan:** It’s probably real, and it’s on a bus stop near my house I walk past.

**Aline:** Epix!

**John:** Epix is right. Aline [inaudible 01:10:49].

**Craig:** That’s inappropriate. Also, I thought it was Epix. Okay, next. Okay, smarty.

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Wendy.

**Aline:** Wendy.

**Craig:** Not Wendy Williams.

**John:** Yeah, Wendy.

**Craig:** Wendy. Would you like a summary?

**Aline:** Yes, please.

**Craig:** “Based on the classic Harvey comic, Wendy the Good Little Witch leaves the haunted forest but finds new terrors lurking in her high school hallways.”

**Aline:** No, that’s not a show.

**Craig:** That is not a show. You’re right.

**Aline:** It’s about a woman. It’s about a young woman. Why would you put that on the air?

**Craig:** It did say she was a witch.

**Aline:** If they did make it, it would be written, directed, and produced by a man.

**Megan:** That’s true.

**John:** I’m going to jump ahead to our last one here.

**Craig:** Let’s get Joel Kim Booster back up here.

**John:** The Last Kingdom.

**Megan:** That’s real.

**Aline:** That’s on Netflix. It’s a thing that my husband always wants to watch.

**Craig:** He sounds like a man.

**John:** My brother, who doesn’t watch anything, was like, “Oh yeah, we watched all four seasons and the movie.” I’m like, “This whole thing is just… ” You guys have won the-

**Aline:** There’s four seasons of it?

**John:** Four seasons. You have won the game-

**Craig:** You have won the game.

**John:** … I’ve Been Meaning to Watch That.

**Craig:** Well done.

**Megan:** Nice.

**John:** Let us welcome back to the stage Joel Kim Booster and Ike Barinholtz.

**Aline:** Oh, great.

**John:** Ike, I want to say, because in real life you’re not a douche bag manager. We just want to make that clear.

**Ike Barinholtz:** No, not anymore.

**Craig:** Not after tonight.

**Aline:** Not a manager at all.

**John:** I’m wondering if you could please answer this in the form of a question for us. This screenwriter, director, and actor is best known for The Mindy Project, The Afterparty, and Hulu’s upcoming History of the World, Part II. What is your question in the form of an answer, or answer in the form of-

**Ike:** Who is Ike Barinholtz?

**John:** Ike Barinholtz, everyone. Jeopardy champion, Ike Barinholtz.

**Craig:** This is my favorite part of the show, because we don’t have to prepare anything.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** We are deluged by questions.

**John:** Usually on our live shows, we have to give the warning of, if you’re going to ask a question, it actually has to be a question rather than a statement. We’re always nervous about questions.

**Craig:** Make your question a question.

**John:** This time, we did something different. We asked our audience to submit their questions in advance. They filled out little cards. They have been curated by our very own Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yes, Megana Rao.

**John:** Please welcome to the stage, Megana Rao! Where are you, Megana? Megana, should we start with the audience question or your question? You get to choose.

**Megana Rao:** Let’s [inaudible 01:13:31].

**John:** Carefully step down the stage there and find [crosstalk 01:13:34].

**Ike:** Can I just say, this set is absolutely terrifying.

**John:** It is.

**Megan:** It’s very spooky.

**Ike:** That freaking skeleton up there, oh my god.

**John:** If you were the person who has a question for Megana, who won the raffle, do you want to ask your question, or are you passing?

**Audience Member:** I don’t have a question.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** That’s honestly the best gift you could’ve given us.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Megana, I think she’s basically gifted you a question. Do you have a question you want to ask of any of these people up here?

**Craig:** That’s a big no. I can tell.

**Megana:** I spent enough time in the greenroom with them.

**Ike:** You have heard all the-

**Joel:** She’s so sick of us.

**Ike:** [crosstalk 01:14:06]. We’ve been talking for 30 minutes.

**John:** Megana, you’ve looked through these questions. What questions do you have for us here on the stage?

**Megana:** These are all questions from the audience, that came in before the show. Someone who did not sign it wrote, “Writers are upset about TikTok kids getting development deals, but is this different from a comedian getting a deal or optioning a bestselling book?”

**Craig:** Oh boy, here we go.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** How does that feel, gentlemen?

**Aline:** First, writers are just upset about young people being born every day, new people entering the world and trying to change things that we’ve set into place.

**Joel:** The bottom line is that they’re either going to make something cool or they’re not. It doesn’t really matter where you’re coming from. When you get these deals, they’re not meaningless, because you get a lot of money, but they don’t mean anything about the quality of the work. We’ve seen time and time again that a lot of social media stars do get these deals and then they don’t produce anything, because it’s a much different medium than what they’re good at. Some of them do end up making it and doing really awesome work that I enjoy. I don’t really pay too close attention to where they’re coming from. I’m mostly concerned about what are they making.

**Aline:** I love that answer. I love that.

**Craig:** That was the first good answer we’ve had on this entire podcast, ever.

**Aline:** I think that’s really smart. I think that’s really smart.

**Megan:** I met Bloom from YouTube. She just had uploaded her video. It didn’t have to go through a development program and a, I’m really bashing on men today, but another man and another man named Dave and another man named Brad and another man named Jeff to get to me. The thing that I love about TikTok is it’s people in their living rooms, it’s kids, and it’s not all people dancing. I’m going to talk more about that. I think if you create something great and then you’re put in a larger format and you can make it work for you and it’s something good, people will be judged on what they make, not how they broke in.

**Ike:** People are haters. It’s me and my friends living in a house, making our fucking TikToks. If they don’t like it, fuck off.

**Joel:** There you go.

**Aline:** I see you doing one of those where they come at the camera in a row and they’re dancing, and then one goes this way and the other one goes that way. What do you think?

**Ike:** We love it. We love all of our dances, don’t we, folks? Don’t we love our TikTok dances?

**Aline:** Didn’t Robert Evans just climb out of a swimming pool, and somebody saw him and was like, “Hey, you’re a star, baby.” What’s different about that from TikTok? It’s all the same.

**Craig:** I agree. You know what?. If you’re good at what you do, I don’t think you should be afraid of anybody. I don’t care what the new thing is. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a good writer, it’ll work.

**Aline:** I’m sure you experienced it, but when I worked in TV, developing pilots, they would give you a list of who the network was really into. It would be like, “We’re dying to do a show with this person.” It was always like, why?

**Megan:** Why?

**Aline:** Why? Didn’t it seem like the most random selection process?

**Megan:** Yes.

**Aline:** Then you would be walking around being like, “I’m doing a show for this person. The network really loves them.” Your friends and family would be like, “What?”

**Megan:** “Who?”

**Ike:** They’re talking about Mario Lopez, by the way, in case you’re wondering.

**Aline:** Be like, “He’s so funny in those interviews.”

**John:** Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** This one’s going to be a Megana question.

**John:** We love a Megana question.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Megana:** It’s a follow-up, because Joel and Ike were talking about social media. What is your take on writers having social media and the idea of building a brand as an emerging writer?

**Craig:** Brand.

**John:** Brand.

**Craig:** Brand.

**Megana:** I know, I set you up for that.

**Craig:** You’re not a person. You’re a thing.

**Joel:** Developing my brand on Twitter is just my fun, flirty way of saying I’m developing a mental illness.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Joel:** Every day, deepening, deepening, deepening every day.

**Aline:** May I say I love you on Twitter though?

**Megan:** Your mental illness is so funny.

**Aline:** It’s a thing. I’ve found a lot of people. That’s how I knew who Joel was to begin with. There are a lot of great… I don’t know. I’m really shilling for the big corporations here.

**Megan:** I don’t think that it’s the thing that’s definitely going to get you a job, but I do know that when I’ve been recommended writers, I tend to Google them, and the first thing that comes up is their social media.

**Ike:** That’s what I was going to say. I would be careful what you tweet.

**Craig:** I think that your answer was perfect. It does feel like if you are aiming for a brand, then you are probably trying to monetize your personality disorder, and you should not do so. You should try and be as authentic as you can possibly be. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to go crazy. You don’t have to tell everybody everything, because people do that. Calculating a brand, it gives me the willies.

**Aline:** I can’t think of writers who I’m like, “Wow, social media’s killing it.”

**Ike:** Just don’t tweet about other writers, because you might be interviewing them.

**Craig:** Or don’t tweet at all.

**Ike:** That’s another option.

**Megan:** I read that, Ike, what you said about me, by the way.

**Ike:** So sorry. I thought I deleted it. I don’t know how to delete it. Someone needs to show me.

**John:** A question.

**Megana:** “What makes a great elevator pitch?”

**Ike:** It just has to have a pulley system strong enough to lift what’s inside.

**Craig:** I knew it was coming, but I was happy that it happened.

**John:** John Gatins [inaudible 01:19:10] on the stage. We have a microphone. You can share a microphone. You need to pitch something. You have 15 seconds to pitch something to somebody in an elevator situation. What are the crucial things you’re trying to get out there?

**Aline:** Couldn’t be a wronger guy to ask this to. Couldn’t be a wronger guy than John Gatins.

**Megan:** [crosstalk 01:19:25].

**Aline:** Here is one of the things that John has been saying to me for… John and I have known each other since 1997. He’s been retiring since then.

**Craig:** That’s true. That’s fact. That’s fact.

**Aline:** I would say 8 to 10 times a year he’s retiring. The other thing John says all the time is, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” He goes, “I went to the movies. I saw that. I don’t know. I [inaudible 01:19:48] TV. I don’t know. That guy just got made the head of a studio. I don’t know. I don’t know.” It’s actually really great. I’m going to tell you one… I have many, many, many, many, many pearls of wisdom from John Gatins.

**Craig:** “I don’t know.”

**Aline:** One of them is a gift that I have given to many people, which is that John says, “Hollywood remains undefeated.” It is incredible. I wrote that down and hung that up in our office, because it is incredible. So many people look like they’re winning in Hollywood. The car’s about to cross, and then something happens. Hollywood remains undefeated.

Then the other thing that’s actually a helpful tip that I got from John, which is, when you’re upset about something to do with work and something’s really gotten you in the gut, John has this 40-hour rule. We’ll talk about something, and then John goes, “You know what? Call me in 40 hours.” It’s a great amount of time. It’s like the glass and a half of wine. It’s not two days. It’s not two full days.

**Ike:** It’s a workweek.

**Aline:** It’s just enough time for you to… Every time we’ve ever done that and I’ve called him back, I’ve gotten over myself in 40 hour.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Joel:** I think a good elevator pitch elicits-

**Aline:** You wanted us to answer the question?

**John:** Joel, if you’ll answer the question.

**Joel:** I think it should elicit a question. Don’t give it all away in the pitch. It should make the person be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why are you talking to me in this elevator? I’m trying to go to my doctor’s office.”

**John:** That’s actually a very good point, because basically, you’re not saying, “Oh, I only have these 15 seconds.” You’re trying to get them to ask the next question that makes it go on longer than that little, short period of time you had. So smart. Megana.

**Megana:** Chad is a storyboard artist, and he says, “In boarding, we have exercises like retro-boarding or watching a movie and pausing and drawing what the storyboard might have looked like. This helps you learn the craft. Anything like this in screenwriting?”

**John:** I think I’ve told this on the podcast before. When I was first trying to figure out what the hell is screenwriting, I would tape an episode of a show, like Star Trek, and I would actually just write what I was seeing, so all the dialog, but also what would the scene look like around that. It’s a thing you can do. It’s free for everybody. It’s just figuring out what would the scene look like underneath that scene. The good thing about the internet now is we can probably look and find the actual scene pages behind that and see how does mine compare to what the actual real screenwriter wrote. You definitely can do that. It’s a thing we can experiment with.

**Megan:** I actually had to do this when I wrote my spec script that got me my first job in TV, because I didn’t go to… I was an English major, so I never took a screenwriting class. Then all of a sudden they told me I needed to write a spec script, and I didn’t know what that was. I watched an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Then I wrote out all the lines of dialog for every scene, and exactly what you’re talking about, and reverse engineered a script. Then I went, “Oh, it’s about 28 pages long. I guess that’s how long scripts are supposed to be.”

**Ike:** Then you use that as your sample.

**Megan:** Then I sew that back in.

**John:** [crosstalk 01:22:55].

**Megan:** They’ve done so many episodes.

**Ike:** It’s not cool.

**Megan:** They couldn’t tell the difference.

**Ike:** Those morons.

**Megan:** They just hired me and I worked.

**Ike:** “She really understands the tone. This script is awesome.”

**Megan:** It was sort of reverse engineering. Then what’s been useful to me after that is that sometimes I will write down more like an outline of what happened to describe what happens in the scene, because all the best TV shows that I love… If you can’t describe what actually happens in the scene, especially comedies… You sometimes get distracted by the jokes. What I try to do is I broom away all the jokes, don’t write down any of the funny stuff that’s happening, just write the nuts and bolts of what’s happening in the scene, because then when I go to sit down and outline my own episodes that I’m writing, it lets me be more honest about is there anything actually happening in the story or is it just funny.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** “What is the smallest hill you’re willing to die on?”

**Aline:** One space after every period in the script.

**John:** Yeah, one space.

**Craig:** Yass.

**Megan:** No.

**Joel:** No.

**Craig:** Bones.

**Megan:** No.

**Craig:** Bones. Bones.

**Ike:** I’ve been broken. I was a two-space guy, and I’ve been broken to the one space.

**Craig:** You should be, because you only need to do one space.

**John:** I look at old scripts of mine that have two spaces, and I’m like, “Who was this person? I can’t recognize him anymore.”

**Craig:** What was this idiot who needed all this extra space to know that the sentence ended? Please.

**John:** The period did that job.

**Craig:** The period does it.

**Megan:** I think we’re all going to Hell because no one knows the difference between fewer and less.

**Craig:** Ever since Game of Thrones made a point of it, I think it’s been coming around. They did a pretty good job.

**John:** It was in there. It was a little [crosstalk 01:24:28].

**Ike:** The word “desperately,” spelling that one. There’s just certain words, I’m just like, my brain cannot spell it. I can’t even think of them right now, but there’s four or five words that I’m just like, “Man, fuck those words.” I can never spell them correctly.

**Craig:** Fuck those words.

**Ike:** How about you?

**Joel:** I would say that Season 10 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race is an underrated season.

**John:** Remind us who the queens were on Season 10.

**Joel:** Season 10, the winner of course was Aquaria, Eureka O’Hara’s second go at it, Asia O’Hara, the butterflies, tragic but iconic, and then of course Kameron Michaels. That’s the smallest hill I’m willing to die on.

**John:** That’s a small hill.

**Craig:** He stole my answer.

**John:** Megana, one more.

**Megana:** “With all the bleak news about mass buy-offs, show cancellations-”

**Joel:** Ending on a high note, cool.

**Megana:** “… decreased box office sales, etc-”

**Ike:** Global warming, hunger.

**Craig:** My cat dying.

**Megana:** “… what can you tell those of us who are working to become working writers that might give us hope about the future of the industry?”

**Craig:** Oh boy, you asked the wrong group of people.

**John:** Hope, hope, hope, hope.

**Craig:** Hope.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Megan, they don’t know.

**Megan:** Sorry.

**Ike:** I think honestly, if you really focus on stories that you think are important and you throw everything into those stories, there’s a chance that you could end up working on Jeff Bezos’s sky raft. If you’re in the sky raft, you will live through the second atomic war. Once you’re up there, I don’t fucking know. I don’t know. Do whatever he says. To get there, really tell the stories that matter to you.

**Aline:** I’m going to give a more sincere answer. I have a production company. I have four wonderful people I work with. They read a lot of stuff. I read stuff after they curate it for me. If you write a great thing, it’s still really, really compelling, just because there’s more stuff, just because it’s harder, just because I think we have a huge problem with breaking people into the business now. It couldn’t be harder. It shouldn’t be so hard. It’s very hard to break in, very hard to earn a living. If you write a great thing, and that’s really what you want to do, a great thing does still really stand out and will get passed along and will be treated with reverence.

**Craig:** Here’s a little bit of hope. The things that you’re reading about are echoes of shit that’s already happened. It’s already old. Sometimes when we talk to people that work at these places, I’m startled by how they’re monomaniacally fixated on what they’re going to be doing in 2026.

The stuff that happens now, it may feel like you’re in the middle of it. You’re actually not. It’s already happened. You don’t actually know what’s going on, because they haven’t shown it to you yet, but it’s happening now. It may very well be that the evidence of things being wiped away and collapsed is already being undermined by things being created in even larger amounts. We just don’t know. We don’t know. Maybe the Netflix ad-supported thing, suddenly all these new shows get made. We just don’t know.

It’s probably best to not pay attention to that stuff, because you can’t control it anyway. It does go up and down. It’s a very cyclical business. If you concentrate on what you love and anything you feel very passionate about that’s unique to you, that’s all you can do. That’s literally all you can do.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**Joel:** Or you can become huge on TikTok.

**Craig:** That’s the other myth.

**Joel:** That’s the other option.

**Craig:** [crosstalk 01:28:25].

**John:** The one other thing I’ll remind people about is that if productions shrink, if we’re not making as many shows, we probably won’t make for a while, if we’re making fewer movies, if you’re an actor, it’s tough, because as an actor, you’re waiting for somebody to cast you in a thing. As a writer, you always have the ability to create your own stuff and find a new way to make that thing. One of the huge advantages of the people on this stage is we can just go off and do a new thing. Do that new thing and figure out where the next place is that you can create some things for the world. That’s the luxury of being a writer. It’s what sucks about being a writer is we have to do all our own stuff. We have to be entrepreneurs, but we can just do our thing whenever we need to do our thing.

**Joel:** Entertainment is democratized in a way it’s never been before. Maybe there are less opportunities to make a shit ton of money doing writing. There’s also a million opportunities and ways to put out your work now. You can take that screenplay and make it a podcast. It’s so easy to do that now. It can get out to as many people as you can get it to. You just might not make as much money.

**Craig:** I don’t know, those guys just sold their podcast, what’d you say, for $75 million?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We gotta get that.

**John:** We made a book. We’re starting, Craig. [crosstalk 01:29:33]. That’s our show. [inaudible 01:29:37].

**Craig:** That was a great show. That was a great show.

**John:** We have some people we need to thank. We need to start off by thanking Hollywood Heart, Jessica Martins, Sarah Eagen, everyone at Hollywood Heart, our own John Gatins.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Also apparently UTA for their support. Hollywood Heart, everybody.

**Craig:** Of course, we would like to say thank you to all the volunteers who helped make tonight possible, and of course everybody who showed up here in person and online. We appreciate you.

**John:** There’s people watching the livestream. Hi, livestream people.

**Craig:** Hello, folks.

**John:** I want to thank Dynasty Typewriter for hosting us. This is just an ideal venue. This was great. This is terrific. Thank you very much for making this all possible here at Dynasty Typewriter.

**Aline:** Air conditioning in here slaps.

**John:** I love it. It’s so good. Jerome Kurtenbach on piano!

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** As always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Yay! We are the least popular things in our own show. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**John:** Matthew! Thank you all. Have a great night!

**Craig:** Woo! Thank you guys. Thank you for coming. Woo!

**John:** Yay! Thank you so much!

Links:

* Learn more and donate to [Hollywood Heart!](https://www.hollywoodheart.org/)
* [Joel Kim Booster](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5527841/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ihatejoelkim) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ihatejoelkim/?hl=en)
* [Ike Barinholtz](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0054697/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ikebarinholtz), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ikebarinholtz/), and [Celebrity Jeopardy!](https://www.instagram.com/p/CjwlUK4ITxt/)
* [Megan Ganz](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3836955) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/meganganz) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/meganganz/)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna]() on [Twitter]() and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/abmck/)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/571.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/how-much-progress).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 570 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a followupisode.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** We’re taking a look at several of the big industry problems we’ve discussed over the past few years and examining what progress had been made. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to tell a heartwarming story just for Craig about firing your managers.

**Craig:** Don’t go further. We have to talk about followupisode.

**John:** Isn’t that so adorable?

**Craig:** It’s adorable. Did you just invent that?

**John:** As I was typing it up yesterday in the show notes, I decided that’s what it is. It’s followupisode.

**Craig:** Followupisode. I’m actually angry about how many people are going to steal that. I’m angry at them, and I’m angry for you about it. Wonderful.

**John:** I don’t know that I actually invented it. I bet if we did a Google search, we could find someone else who’d said it before. It feels right for our show.

**Craig:** Then I’m going to get angry at you. Here’s the point. I’m going to get angry.

**John:** Craig, there are no original thoughts. Just like you can’t be angry at somebody for stealing your idea for a movie about tennis players, you can’t be upset about-

**Craig:** Followupisode. It’s a followupisode. I love this.

**John:** To help us with our followupisode, we have not one but two special guests. Liz Alper is a writer/producer who’s worked on Chicago Fire, Hawaii Five-0, The Rookie, and Day of the Dead. She co-founded the Hollywood Pay Up movement and serves on the WGA board. Liz Alper, welcome back.

**Liz Alper:** It’s so nice to be back.

**Craig:** Hi.

**Liz:** Hello. It’s so nice to hear your voices.

**Craig:** Likewise.

**John:** Yay.

**Liz:** Yay.

**John:** Brittani Nichols is a comedy writer, actress, and organizer known for Suicide Kale, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and the Emmy Award-winning Abbott Elementary, on which she’s also a producer. Welcome, Brittani.

**Brittani Nichols:** Hello, and thank you for having me again.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** Now, Brittani, apparently we are pulling you out of the Abbott Elementary room. I feel like it’s maybe our responsibility to give you some pitches to take back into the room. Guys, let’s help her out here. What could Brittani pitch when she goes back in there?

**Craig:** That’s what she was hoping for, randoms pitching her ideas on her show, because that never happens.

**John:** I’ve not seen any comic runners about the classroom pets. Sometimes there’s hermit crabs. There can be gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters. One hamster always eats the other hamster.

**Liz:** They always escape. They’re always infesting the school. They’re somewhere. It’s a treasure hunt for them.

**Brittani:** That’s good. Stealing that. Please cut this out so no one can trace it back to this podcast.

**John:** I also have really distinct memories of when it’d be rainy and so we couldn’t go out for recess, how we did recess in the classroom, and thumbs up, seven up. Do you remember thumbs up, seven up?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Brittani:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You don’t see that very often.

**Craig:** Terrible game.

**John:** I remember the way my desk would smell. I could smell the cleaner on my desk when you lay your head down for thumbs up, seven up.

**Craig:** I remember that smell. My parents were public school teachers, so the stories that I could share would just be… I don’t know, you guys run for what, is it 24 minutes?

**Brittani:** 21.

**Craig:** 21 minutes of heavy Jewish sighing. I think that would be a very accurate episode. To my parents.

**Liz:** Craig, I had a similar experience growing up, but one of my parents is Asian. It was just a melding of cultures in one sigh. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful coming together.

**Craig:** Heavy Asian sighing is also-

**Liz:** The disappointment translates to any language.

**Craig:** Oh my god, Megana, tell us about heavy Indian sighing, would you? It’s a thing. It’s just a thing.

**Megana:** It’s an art form.

**Craig:** It is an art form of just disappointment, giving up.

**Megana:** With an Asian sigh, the disappointment manages to carry the entire immigrant experience in that one sigh.

**Craig:** All of it, yes, the whole thing.

**Megana:** The burden.

**Craig:** That’s the generational trauma.

**Liz:** It’s an ancestral sigh. You feel the weight of your ancestors coming out in that disappointment.

**Craig:** That’s right. There are ghosts in that sigh. That’s 21 minutes, for sure.

**John:** I just had the WASPy sort of eh. There was no special pressure on my side.

**Craig:** No, WASPs are not like that. They don’t have it. They don’t have the sigh.

**John:** We got nothing. Generational power but nothing else, I’ll say.

**Craig:** You probably came out better than we did just all around. It’s exciting to have both of you on, because we do have quite a bit of follow-up. John had a really good point that we do these shows and we dig into these movements that happen. There have been quite a few movements over the last five years. It is good to take stock as you go, because it’s very easy to fall into the trap of promoting stuff when it’s exciting and hot and new and everyone is focused on it, because it’s fresh injury. Then we can forget. We don’t want to forget.

**John:** Craig, we have two live shows coming up. Do you want to remind our listeners when our live shows our?

**Craig:** I do. Our first live show, they’re almost back to back, it’s on October 19th here in Los Angeles. It is sold out, because we are the Jon Bon Jovi/Bon Jovi band of podcasts. You can still get tickets for the livestream.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** You can not only see the show, but also you will see all the things that ultimately we ask Matthew to take out. That’s when you’ll realize that each podcast recording is 19 hours long.

**John:** He cuts it down to a tight little over an hour.

**Craig:** A tight hour.

**John:** It’s a lot going into that.

**Craig:** Seven hours of just crying. We will also be doing two, not one, but two live shows at the Austin Film Festival. One of them will be a live Three Page Challenge. The other one will be a good old-fashioned, slightly drunk live show.

**John:** I think it’s a 10 p.m. start on that. It’s going to be fun.

**Craig:** You know when I say slightly drunk I mean medium to seriously drunk. If you’re going to be at the Austin Film Festival and you want to be considered for that Three Page Challenge, we’ve added a new checkbox on the submission form, and when I say we, I mean John and Megana have, at johnaugust.com/threepage. That’s the word three and page.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Megana, I guess we also have some follow-up from our previous episode about our going to Austin Film Festival. What did Melissa have to say?

**Megana:** Melissa wrote in and said, “In a recent episode, Craig and John discuss their initial hesitation to return to the Austin Film Festival this year due to the atrocious political policies in Texas, specifically towards women. As a writer born and raised in Texas, I also feel conflicted whenever I go back there, but ultimately decided to attend AFF again as well. I put together a list of local female-owned restaurants and bars within two miles from the conference center so that at the very least we can spend our vacation money at places that support the women that are stuck in the Texas hellscape.”

**Craig:** That’s a really useful thing to have. Thank you, Melissa, because in all fairness, John and I are returning to Austin with some conflict in our hearts. This is a nice way to help. I like this. We will be doing some other things, I’m sure.

**John:** If you want to follow through, there’s a link in the show notes. It goes to a Google doc that she’s put together. It’s great and talks through some really great restaurants and places that I wouldn’t have considered, I didn’t know existed. Now I will go there and support some local restaurants, some local female restaurateurs.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here. The reason why we all assembled today is to talk about what progress has been made on some social issues, some issues facing this industry. I thought we’d do it in chronological order. We’re going to look at Me Too, assistant pay, policing/cop shows, and abortion rights. I suspect we’ll find common themes between them is that it’s very easy to focus on a thing when it’s new and right in front of you, but it’s hard to keep up that pressure, and that things tend to revert to a mean, and also that the pandemic changed things. I think there was some momentum on some stuff that got derailed by the pandemic. We’ll see whether we can get that back or what is the next step on that. Let’s jump into it.

Let’s start with Me Too. Hashtag Me Too apparently goes back to 2006, but it’s really in 2017 when we first had the Harvey Weinstein articles. There was the Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey article. There was also the Ronan Farrow piece. I think we had a great villain in Harvey Weinstein at the start. We have a movement focused on holding men accountable for terrible things they were doing in the industry and outside of the industry.

**Craig:** We are at the five-year point. When you listen to this, it’ll just be a few days after, but we’re recording this, so essentially the day before the five-year anniversary of Me Too. In my lifetime, I can’t think of too many movements that caught fire and had as much fast impact as the Me Too movement. That is not to say it is complete impact. I think we can all look around and see that there is a line. There was before that, and there’s after that. The after that does look quite different. I guess we should dig into how different and what’s gone well and where do we still need to do work.

**John:** Liz, can you help us out by thinking back to five years ago and as this story broke, what was surprising to you about it at the moment? What did you see happening right away? What impact did you feel immediately, and what were the ripples after that?

**Liz:** It’s interesting that you guys brought up the five-year mark, because I think that was such a crucial point for so many of these movements that we see that took off. Bringing that up at the beginning, because Me Too has been so much more than just holding abusers accountable.

There was a shift when the Me Too movement came on the scene, especially for women like me, who at the time of the Me Too movement, I was basically in my late 20s, early 30s, and was realizing that all of these things that I had been told to normalize – the fact that I would be sexually harassed on set, and I had been sexually harassed on set for many, many years – that that was not okay.

Before, there was this idea of, this is part of paying my dues as a young woman in Hollywood. When Me Too burst on the scene, it shifted this view of what dues meant in Hollywood and the fact that because I was a woman, I was expected to pay a price that was so much higher than my male counterparts, or most of my male counterparts, because Me Too does affect a lot of men, as we’ve heard the stories. I don’t want to ostracize those victims either. I think it really did immediately change how we had viewed the culture of Hollywood. Suddenly, it wasn’t something to be glorified. It was something to be deemed toxic and needed fixing.

I think immediately, when all of this happened, and especially with Harvey being held responsible, it really did feel like, “Wow, maybe these awful feelings that I have, maybe these aren’t my fault. Maybe this isn’t my fault that I feel bad when this supervisor touches my rear when I’m on set or says gross, sexualized things to me when no one else is around. Maybe that really isn’t okay.” It wasn’t.

I think now, we are hopefully helping a new generation of Hollywood newbies come in and say, “You should be be protected.” It’s no longer a, “You won’t be protected. This is an open secret. This is just what you have to do in order to show that you belong here.” Now, it’s, “No, you’re absolutely right. You deserve to be respected, and you deserve to be protected, and you deserve to feel safe in your workplace.” I do feel like that feeling has permeated the Hollywood culture. That’s nice to see.

**John:** Brittani, I’m curious, what was your initial reaction to the Me Too movement, and how has it progressed or changed in your mind? What is your feeling about the impact that calling these people out and calling out this culture has had in the industry?

**Brittani:** When Liz was talking, I was thinking about what I was doing when this first happened. I remembered just how everyone was talking about it, people that weren’t in entertainment. I was still on Facebook at the time, unfortunately, and seeing people there talk about it.

I remember this pressure to share, which was I think another side of it that doesn’t get talked about a lot, because it was really nice to witness people having the freedom to finally tell these stories and feel like they were being heard. Just in my own mind, I was like, “If I don’t do this, if I don’t use this hashtag, do people think that nothing bad has ever happened to me?” I was like, “Am I now hurting by not saying yes, here is another voice, here is another identity that you might think might not be impacted by these things? If I’m not speaking up, do people think it’s happening to less people?” I just remember having that internal battle of, “Do I have to say something now or am I letting someone down by not saying something?” Grappling with that was my feelings I think at the initial moment.

Going forward, I have the same feelings that I think I have about every movement or moment, which is just it’s so hard to keep momentum going. Keeping the conversation going and talking to people about it in your everyday life feels like the stickiest way to make it present and to make it felt is to just keep having conversations with people even when this national moment or the media attention goes away, just letting people know that you haven’t forgotten, that you still are there, is how I think it still crops up for me personally.

**Craig:** I feel like as far as these movements go that sometimes flame up and then disappear a little bit, Me Too has been incredibly successful from just looking at the way it has turned into a steady cultural norm as opposed to a movement. New social morays were established that should’ve been there from the start and unfortunately weren’t. Now, they seem like they’re there. That’s not to say that bad things don’t continue to happen. They don’t continue to happen inside of a culture that nods, quietly approves, passively approves. It does seem like there has been real change in that regard. It’s nice to see.

I think that in a strange way, it also affirmed how many good people there were, in a nice way, because after all these things came to light, there were still so many women who were still working happily hand in hand with men. There were so many men that were still working happily hand in hand with women and continue to. There are men and women, lots, most, I believe most, who are capable of working together in a way that is respectful of each other. Maybe I’m a Pollyanna, but I feel like we did illuminate perhaps some of the better angels of our nature. Am I a Pollyanna?

**John:** I don’t know. Let’s look at what has been achieved, because I think if you’re looking for the good things that have happened out of this, there was accountability for some really terrible people who did some terrible things, and so Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby.

**Craig:** Les Moonves.

**John:** Les Moonves. We had other showrunners who are no longer running their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Maybe a good thing. Also some big misses, like Donald Trump still got elected after doing clear sexual harassment. I would agree with you that this notion – let’s use the term open secret – this idea that we would just look the other way at people who were doing this stuff, that probably has changed over the past five years, that we recognize, “Oh, you cannot be doing that. He cannot be doing that. This is a problem.” I think we’re more likely to believe a woman who says that a thing happened from the start. Actually, this might be a good time to bring out a listener question here, because Megana had a person, Stay Or Go, who was talking about a project that has a known harasser involved with it. Do you want to read us through this question?

**Megana:** Stay Or Go wrote in and said, “Recently, I was in talks for a project when the producer mentioned he had an actor with a proven in court of law history of abuse in mind to play the lead. I’d worked for this producer before, and in the past, he’d been quick to call out abusers. I was surprised and asked if he was aware of this person’s checkered past. He said he was aware, but then segued into a lecture saying there are two sides to every story, Me Too was a good thing in theory but had gone too far, and so on. I politely passed, and the project moved forward with another writer and the actor in question. Then a week later, I found out a different producer that I was currently working for also decided to hire this very same actor.

“I work in the low-budget genre space, and no matter the producer, well-documented abusers always seem to find their way onto the list of casting suggestions and are usually defended any time I try to steer the conversation away from them. I understand getting any movie made is hard. These names still trigger financing. They’re looking to work. No one wants to be reduced to their worst moments for all their days. Yet very few have faced real consequences or shown remorse beyond the customary apologetic press release. That’s not even getting into alleged abusers. Given that a no-name like myself has little influence on who may come aboard later in the process, is this simply a reality one has to begrudgingly learn to live with?”

**Craig:** That’s a tricky one.

**John:** That’s a tricky one, because I think it actually speaks to this moment that we’re in, is that maybe we’ve knocked out some of the worst, biggest offenders, but there’s people we know have some history we don’t feel great about. We’re like, “What are we going to do about this?” We’ve had the conversation about John Lasseter, who was let go from Pixar for his issues. People have the decision whether they’re going to work for him at his new animation company. Liz, when you see Stay Or Go’s letter here, what’s your instinct? Could Stay Or Go choose to not work on a project that might have a bad person involved on it? What’s your instinct?

**Liz:** When I hear that letter, she’s absolutely right, because the people who have seen the consequences of Me Too have been the ones with the highest profile, because they have the most to lose, because what they really value is their public image. Their public image is what gets them work, what gets them jobs. If you are flying below the radar, you are essentially escaping any sort of significant consequence. That’s something that we’ve seen not just for sexual harassers and the Me Too movement but also for chronic emotional, mental, sometimes even physical abusers and bullies in the industry who maybe have no history of sexual abuse or harassment but are harassers of a different nature. I think asking those questions and demanding an answer is exactly what she should be doing. I think to continue doing that, she’s going to be able to find the people whose values align with hers.

At this point in our industry, if you can say no, say no, if you can say no. Don’t ever feel like you are less than or you are condoning something if you are in a position where you have to take the work. That’s the thing that I feel a lot of people in the industry struggle with, because how do you feel like you are a morally righteous person if you are agreeing to work on a project that has a known abuser attached to it? Quite honestly, the reason is because you have to fight another day. You have to be able to be here to fight another day, because you have to be the one that others hook up with in order to actually enact that change. If you’re not here for us to bring into the next phase of justice in this industry, then we’re worse for it.

Really, it comes down to can you take the work, do you think you can forgive yourself for taking the work, knowing that it’s so you can have the money to survive in this industry for long enough to bring about HR reform or any sort of workplace reform that is necessary to ensure that people like that don’t get jobs and that there are actual solid consequences to the actions of those who are flying under the radar. That’s something that you will have to decide.

You should also know that you should be able to forgive yourself if you find yourself in a position that you have to say yes, because that’s usually what happens is that people are in a position where they cannot say no and feel as though they are part of the problem when they’ve been put in that position, they haven’t been given a choice. I think what she’s asking is really, “What do I do in order to survive this?” which is something that I’m asking every single day. There’s no good answer to it. It’s just take it case by case and see what your tolerance for it is.

**John:** Brittani, I remember at the start of all this, we would have workshops, we’d have panels, groups would come together to try to figure out what it was that we were going to do as an industry to grapple with this. There was always talk. There was a special committee formed. Anita Hill was leading a thing. There was going to be anonymous reporting lines. None of that structure seems like it really happened. There’s the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, but there’s not a hotline you call for sexual harassment or for the issues that Me Too was grappling with.

When you encounter a situation like this or your friends encounter a situation like this, what is your advice to do when you’re either facing abuse or dealing with a person who is taking unfair advantage of situations? What is your advice to writers facing these situations?

**Brittani:** Be loud about it to the people that you trust I think is unfortunately where we’ve landed with all this. I think that the things you’re talking about, things that Liz just mentioned, so much of it is about accountability. What I always say when people talk about accountability is that when you’re asking for accountability, something bad has already happened.

We’re not putting in enough effort, I think, into prevention, into how does this stuff trickle down. We’re always having these very high-minded, high-level conversations about bad shit. So much of our energy is put into that, when so often there are just warning signs, red flags left and right about the way that these people interact and the way that they treat people. That’s not the only bad thing they’re doing. That might be the only bad thing that people think rises to some level in which it needs to be addressed. That’s why I think we’re going… When people are weird, you should very openly be able to talk about people behaving weirdly. That is usually a sign that something more nefarious is going on.

I think until, as writers especially, we have an established norm for rooms where even low-level abuse is just not allowed, we’re always going to be dealing with what do we do in the aftermath instead of what can we be doing to make sure that these black dots on the white page, that we pay attention to them and that we don’t just ignore them.

**Craig:** That goes to who actually does carry out the work, because in the early days of these things, there are organizations and there are panels and blue ribbon commissions and so forth, but ultimately, it’s just everybody doing the work. It’s all of us, day to day, who work with other people, trying our best to treat each other better. That part, again I’ll just be a bit of a Pollyanna about it, does seem to have improved somewhat. I think that people are thinking more about each other. It just feels like even if they’re dragged into it kicking and screaming that empathy and putting yourself in other people’s shoes and asking yourself how would this feel to another person does seem like more of a thing.

When I started in this business in the ’90s, the culture was… I don’t know if this was left over from the ’80s and whatever amount of cocaine was still just exogenously in the air, but it was aggressive. It was very competitive. It was all very cutthroat. It doesn’t seem as much that way anymore.

I never want to downplay what a movement has done positively, because we can lead to despair. I think that even though our business is still very imperfect and there are still people that have yet to be exposed, there are more and more people who are being exposed. That’s 2% of the situation. Then 98% of the situation is just the day-to-day business of working with each other, which seems to have improved somewhat. Progress, but not perfection.

**John:** I would agree with you there. I think as I look back to the conversations we had on Scriptnotes early on in Me Too about writers coming and talking about their experiences, I don’t envision those writers having the same experiences five years later that they did then. I think the norms have changed enough about what people can get away with, that the most egregious things have not been happening, and that some better conversations have been happening about how to do stuff. Liz, Brittani, how much progress do you think we’ve made on Me Too over the last five years? It doesn’t have to be a report card, but some progress, a little progress, a lot of progress? What’s your feeling?

**Liz:** Yeah, some progress. This is my opinion. I think it’s possibly going to be an unpopular one. We’re five years into a movement that’s attempting to undue attitudes towards women that have existed for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. The fact that women in I believe it was the 1960s or the 1970s still couldn’t get a credit card without their husband’s approval and signature… This is the very, very beginning of progress. Yes, some progress. Please keep it coming. Also understanding that five years I don’t think can solve what hundreds and hundreds of years of this sort of misogynistic-based culture that we live in in this country has brought. I think we’re trying.

**John:** Brittani, no progress, some progress, lots of progress? What’s your feeling on Me Too?

**Brittani:** I think there’s been some progress. I think that if we think that the progress is going to happen via systems that have always failed us, as Liz has mentioned, we’re never going to get where we want to be. I think Craig is right in that so much of this is about personal responsibility and people reckoning with their own behavior. I think in that letter, it really came down to one dude saying, “No, but this one is different,” until people realize that that’s what everyone thinks. There are a thousand people saying that, “This time, this friend, this person that I know, this was the exception to the rule. I get it, but this one doesn’t count.”

Until people really are willing to be uncomfortable and willing to make other people uncomfortable and really willing to deal with a high level of discomfort themselves, we’re never going to get where we’re trying to go, because we can’t rely on any structure or any corporate entity to inject morality into an inherently evil business, which is everything. Capitalism is evil. We’ll never figure it out if we’re depending on the people whose entire goal is to just make money, and they don’t care about us.

**John:** Fast forward to September 2019, so Episode 419, we reflected on Me Too and asked what other issues we are not addressing in our industry. Listeners wrote in about assistant pay. That was the first episode where we started talking about assistant pay. Megana Rao got so many emails about assistant pay and stories stacking up and stacking up. As we started telling those stories and started getting outraged on people’s behalves, Liz Alper stepped into the fore and helped start up the Pay Up Hollywood movement, where you’re surveying and talking about how much assistant staff in Hollywood were getting paid and how egregiously low it was. Liz, talk us through those early days of Pay Up Hollywood and this discussion, what happened, and where we are now, if you can, the overview of Pay Up Hollywood.

**Liz:** At the very beginning of Pay Up Hollywood, it was, for me at least, very akin to when Me Too exploded onto Twitter, because again, it was this curtain being pulled back, where all of a sudden, all of this anger and these abuses and this entire industry-long history of abuse and culture of taking advantage of people at the very beginning of their careers was really outed as being the awful, demoralizing, corrupt, and just cowardly thing that was happening in our industry. It was this wild time of everyone feeling like they could share their horror stories without fearing repercussion for once. They could share these publicly.

As Brittani mentioned, there was also this pressure of feeling like you had to share your stories whether you were comfortable doing so or not, because you were worried that if people weren’t really coming out and sharing the worst of their experiences, then the worst of their experiences would be swept under the rug, or people would look at the state of the industry and go, “This isn’t so bad.”

It really became this moment in time where assistants felt, I don’t want to say completely a hundred percent felt safe to share these stories of the awful things that happened to them. I don’t think anyone ever feels truly safe sharing that. I think for once, assistants realized how much they deserve to be better treated and better paid and that they’re worth that, when they had spent years and even decades in Hollywood being told that they have to earn that. It was a dangling carrot that just kept being pulled higher and higher and higher. It was crazy. It was a big, empowering moment that happened when we first exploded on the scene.

**John:** One of the big differences between Me Too and Pay Up is that we actually had numbers here, because we can actually ask, “How much are you getting paid? What is your weekly take home pay?” and see that that is not going to actually be able to afford an apartment in Los Angeles. It was more concrete in a way that what we could have with Me Too.

**Liz:** I think the other thing is this really was born… I’m sure you guys heard a lot about this at the time too, is that assistants felt very left out of the Me Too movement, and rightfully so, because for them, the people who had really in their minds seen a lot of progress with the Me Too movement were people who were higher up the food chain, people with larger profiles, who were saying, “If this could happen to me, imagine what’s going on for other people.” Assistants were the other people. It was something that we were able to get concrete information for, because we realized that concrete information had not been gathered necessarily for me too in seeing which pockets of the industry were being left out of the conversation.

**Craig:** I think there’s a nice intersectionality, if you will, when we help people who are at the assistant level while we are also as an industry making an effort to bring in more women and more people of color. You start to hit a lot of different sectors, because that’s where everyone’s coming in. We have this big lobby for our business. Forever until whenever, we’re talking about three years ago or so, forever, the point of the lobby was you’re getting hazed. That was basically it. You’re getting hazed. It was celebrated. It was funny. It was laughed at. There were articles in the LA Times giggling over how Scott Rudin abused his employees. It was part of our culture, the way that frat culture does that stuff. The idea was you’ll pay your dues and this is how it is and then you become an employer and now you continue the cycle of abuse, lol, ha ha ha.

That more than anything I think has been the thing that has been examined. I know that still there are people who mistreat assistants all the time. Even though we did get some big wins with the agencies raising their payments and just some general attitudes, it’s always going to be an issue. I do think that at least we no longer celebrate a culture of abusing assistants. That’s huge. It’s sad, but it’s huge.

**Liz:** I remember, and I’m sure you guys have experiences like this, and Brittani, I think you may have some experiences like this too, but being assistants and almost comparing war stories of who is getting the most crap at work, who had something thrown at them. There was this survivalist mentality, where it was, “Because I’m able to take all of this abuse, this must mean I’m meant for greatness, because look how much I can handle.” There are assistants now who have talked about the worst abuse that they have gotten is coming from some former assistants who had internalized this idea that this is what it’s supposed to be, this is how you become a great contributor to Hollywood. I don’t think anyone has that attitude anymore. That’s great.

**Craig:** That is great.

**Liz:** That is great because that’s normalizing toxicity in a way that Me Too shone a light on as well. It’s huge.

**Craig:** I do think that a lot of us who come to this business have had, let’s just call it complicated childhoods. Not everyone, but many of us. We are already vulnerable. We are already seeking approval and love. We probably, a lot of us, already have some experience doing exactly what you described, which is essentially winning the battle between yourself and a person who’s attempting to drive you insane. I had definitely had experience like that myself here in this business, where simply because I was able to withstand the madness, I withstood the madness. I’m so glad that this is changing, that that is no longer seen as the test of success, because it shouldn’t be. What for? How about we just get rid of the people who create the madness? There’s a thought. Then we can just do our jobs somewhat happily. It’s hard enough without all the rest of it.

I know people complain all the time, because I see them on Twitter complaining about woke woke woke woke woke woke. If I have to see the word woke one more effing time and how, “Oh, the costs… ” It’s the telling of the costs of just going out of your way to be thoughtful. I’m not getting into policies or anything. I’m just saying generally, what is our individual burden when it come to Pay Up Hollywood or Me Too? Take a moment to just be a little bit thoughtful. You will fail. You’ll have your moments. Everybody isn’t perfect. Everybody will mess up. When you mess up, own it and apologize. Make amends. Move on. I think the more you make empathy and considering other people part of the way you go through it, in theory, the more it will come back to you. God, you know what? I’m very positive today.

**John:** You’re very positive.

**Craig:** It’s disturbing.

**John:** Someone check his medications here.

**Craig:** This is really weird.

**Brittani:** If I could just hop in, because I think Liz named me as someone who possibly had assistant experience. I just want to go on record and say I was not privileged to be an abused assistant. I didn’t have a car for the first three years that I was in LA, and so I couldn’t be an assistant. I think that that is also a part of the conversation that sometimes gets left out when we’re talking about this low-level pay, about the people that can’t even afford to have that low-level pay, to get into these entry-level positions. I don’t have the numbers specifically. I don’t think this is a thing anyone is keeping track of.

I see it in the support staff of the shows that I’ve been on. Sometimes, a lot of the times, actually, the room is more diverse than our support staff, because people just can’t afford to be support staff. They don’t have the support system to be able to be paid $17 or whatever it used to be for 6 years and then maybe get a script if someone’s being kind, and you get 22 episodes in year 7. It’s just cutting out so many people.

The people that are getting pushed out of those spaces because they can’t withstand that abuse of pay and emotionally, they never get to make it to the next level, because they don’t have the resources to withstand what is expected of people that are at the, quote unquote, entry-level position, which oftentimes is not an entry-level position.

**Craig:** I think that’s so important. One of the things that we all hoped – I know, Liz, we talked about this quite a bit in the early days of Pay Up Hollywood – was really that we would try, and by improving the entry, improving the starting position, that you would make it possible for people who otherwise could not afford to take on these terrible jobs, that other people could afford it. Otherwise, we were going to get a lot of kids whose moms and dads were paying for their apartment and their car and their insurance, and not a lot of kids who didn’t have that available.

There is absolutely nothing stopping any of the large institutions in Hollywood or even individual, fabulously wealthy showrunners from, for instance, purchasing a car that could be used for an assistant. People are so much richer than they ought to be. There’s this stinginess. By the way, that is also part of our culture. That’s not Hollywood culture. That’s American culture, that poverty’s good for you, and if I give you stuff, then you’ll be lazy. This goes back to the Puritans. It’s very Calvinistic. We behave as if the crucible is what proves merit. We’ll come back around to this when I get to my One Cool Thing today. The crucible doesn’t prove merit at all. At all.

**John:** All it does is burn things. I have some real life follow-up from last night. I was at the Simpsons premier party at Universal, which was tremendously fun. It was the Halloween episode. I highly recommend the Halloween episode.

We were waiting for it to start, and a young woman came up to me, and she introduced herself saying that she was one of the people who wrote in early on in Pay Up Hollywood. The name she used for that was Christian. Hello, Christian. I asked, “What happened after that time?” because I almost vaguely remembered who she was when she wrote in originally. She said she ended up quitting her last assistant job and just focusing on writing, because she came to this town to become a writer. She had realized that for two years as an assistant, she hadn’t written anything. Basically, she had no capacity left to write when she came home. She had these depression piles around her apartment and couldn’t get focused on anything new.

She felt like some progress had been made, at least in terms of having the conversation about Pay Up Hollywood. She was getting originally minimum wage, $13 an hour for this work that she was doing, incredibly long hours. Sony wouldn’t pay for her cellphone usage. She was supposed to have a stipend for cellphone usage for using her own cellphone. She both wanted me to know she was thankful for us having the conversation, but also that things hadn’t turned out so great.

I asked her, “What advice would you give to somebody who’s moving to town to become a writer and wants one of these writer assistant jobs that always get lauded as being the thing to do?” She said she would recommend to get on one show and be an assistant learn as much as you can on that one show, meet as many people as you can, and then get a job as a receptionist at a law firm, where you can actually make some decent money and actually have brain space to write. That’s her perspective on this.

I think it’s worth thinking about that maybe we are so glamorizing the support staff role as how you’re going to get started in the industry that we’re forgetting that it’s not just the money, it’s the time and the brain space and everything else, that we may be over-hyping what these roles need to be and how foundational they should be for a person coming into the industry.

**Liz:** It’s really hard, because what Pay Up Hollywood does… I honestly can’t sum up what we do better than what Brittani said we needed, because our entire mission has been trying to bring a spotlight to the low pay and the fact that this creates a barrier for a lot of people to get into Hollywood, the fact that Hollywood is not a meritocracy, it’s a pay-to-play industry. If you cannot afford to be here, then it doesn’t matter how well you can write. It doesn’t matter how talented of a director or how good of an agent you could be if you can’t even afford to get onto these apprentice traps. Ultimately, it’s going to be a lot harder for you to break in. I think she’s right that you absolutely need the brain space to be able to write. You need to have the emotional and mental health to be able to write.

The one thing that I have to disagree with and the thing that I hate disagreeing is that you really do have to make sure that you’re networking all the time, because it really does come down to who do you know, who are the people that can represent you. I think you guys have talked about this on the podcast before too. When you get signed by an agent or a manager, the first thing that they ask you is, “Who do you know that we could put you in front of right now and they’ll staff you on their show immediately?” That plays a huge role in who’s getting signed nowadays. I think that’s more of an asterisk to her advice, because it’s great advice.

I just want to make sure that this part of it isn’t glossed over because unfortunately, is the assistant track glamorized? Yeah, because there’s this idea that it’s all upward trajectory, just like with movements. With Pay Up Hollywood and from Me Too and everything that we’re doing, there’s this idea that in order to be successful, it always has to be upward momentum. The truth of the matter is it is jagged. It is signs and cosigns. It is all over the place. Sometimes it is flat-lining, and then you’re revived. It’s just about being able to keep going forward. If you can’t afford to keep going forward, then it’s game over, so yeah, it’s hard.

**John:** Liz, unlike a lot of the things we talk about on the show today, there is an ongoing structure behind this. Payuphollywood.com, people can go there. It’s now an official organization that you are helping to run. You have funding from Women in Film. There’s some ongoing work here. That ongoing work is you’re continuing to do this survey to figure out what their real life conditions are on the ground. Obviously, at the start of the pandemic, Craig and I and a bunch of other people tried to raise money for emergency relief for folks who were out of work because of the shutdowns. What should a person do who wants to learn more about Pay Up Hollywood right now? What’s the next step for them?

**Liz:** First, I’m not going to let you gloss over the emergency fund that you two especially helped raise half a million dollars for, because that was massive. That honestly helped a lot of people who really, really needed it at the time that the pandemic hit. It’s important for us too, because it really shone a light with how few protections there are for the support staff and honestly how few resources, how few financial resources, how few mental health resources there are. If you’re in that position, you don’t know where to go.

We’ve just launched our website. We’ve just received funding from Women in Film. That’s huge, because as a grassroots movement, the work has been done mostly by a group of three. Three people trying to change a living wage in this industry, making sure that people are aware of the fact that people cannot afford to work in Hollywood and are going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, most likely, in many instances.

For us, we realize that this structure is going to let us expand. I think a lot of the bulk of our wins have been with what we’re looking at as more administrative assistants, so writers’ assistants, script coordinators, people who tend to work in office buildings, who have set hours, who have more structure in their jobs than assistants on set, like set PAs, hair and makeup PAs, any production PAs. This structure’s going to help us expand our exposure to those people.

It’s also giving us time to hire a couple… Hopefully, if we can raise the donations, we’ll be able to hire someone whose full-time job is going to be figuring out solutions and helping us make connections to expand our influence throughout the industry, in different parts of the industry than the ones that I’ve had immediate access to. Being a writer and producer, it’s easier for me to know how to reach people in the writing world rather than people who work in reality television.

It’s upward momentum. It’s slow upward momentum. Hopefully, with this expansion, we’re going to be able to talk to a lot more people, not just in agencies and in writers’ rooms and with showrunners, but people at the DGA, people who are onset line producers, mail room heads, people who are also suffering from being woefully underpaid, working in parts of the industry that are crucial to the creative process and not even remotely compensated for it, and also areas that people are saying we need to see more diversity, we need to see more women, we need to see more people from historically under-served groups who are also coming from a background that can’t normally afford to work in these positions. We need their presence. We’re just not willing to pay for it. We’re hoping that we can get them to say we need their presence, and we are now willing to pay for it, because we understand how crucial this is to the process.

All of this structure is letting us get that message out and reach more people who feel the same way we do and just didn’t have an outlet to express it. We’re the outlet. We’re the ones who are gathering all of the resources from the Entertainment Community Fund to JHRTS, all of the organizations, SELA, who can help with financial resources, mental health resources, Legal Aid in case you’re in a situation where you feel like you’re being subjected workplace abuse and you don’t know where to turn.

We’re hoping we can be a hub for support staffers in this industry to turn to if you have a question or you need to be pointed in a direction or you’re looking to contribute to the data and to the picture that we’re building, to show really how bad it is, but also how we can fix it, how we can course-correct, to ensure that we’re not just looking at things that are going to fix the current state, but preventative measures.

We’ve always been campaigning for a 3% increase in salary for every support staffer and really every worker from assistant to coordinator to even manager, because a lot of those people are taking on assistant duties in order to just have a better title, just making sure that we are looking at the sort of measures that are going to keep us from being in this situation again, because we really are coming to a head.

It’s what Craig said. We’re looking at a homogenized industry where the next generation of decision makers are all going to be cut from the same background, and there will be no diversity in storytelling, there will be no diversity in thought, because the people who are in those roles are all the same. That’s really sad.

**John:** Payuphollywood.com is the place where you’re going to go to start with that. Liz, again, thank you for everything you’ve done to keep that fire burning. Let’s go on to a listener question from Gabe. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabe wrote in and said, “Post the George Floyd uprisings, I expected some kind of change in our industry that perpetuates the myth of the hero cop, not huge changes at first. The police procedural industrial complex is too big and lucrative to dismantle immediately, but I expected to see less new copaganda shows and movies.”

**Craig:** That’s a great term.

**Megana:** “The tide of new cop shows getting announced hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s grown, often with showrunners and casts from historically marginalized backgrounds, to show how inclusive copaganda can be. Why aren’t there a flood of shows about private investigators, defense attorneys, and restorative justice? Perry Mason was in production before George Floyd, but it shows that you can make commercial procedurals without making cops and prosecutors the heroes. In fact, our industry used to do it a lot. Are they being pitched but no one is buying?”

**John:** Brittani Nichols, based on your Twitter feed, I think you have strong opinions about policing in America. How do you feel about what’s happened on television in terms of our fictional portrayals of policing on the screen?

**Brittani:** I hate it. I can’t even really speak to it intelligently, because I refuse to watch it. I have a friend actually who is going to be directing an episode of the new Rookie spin-off with Niecy Nash. She’s like, “Oh yeah, and Niecy’s character’s dad, who’s formerly incarcerated, and so there’s this really interesting conversation that they’re having.” I’m like, “Yeah, they’re having the conversation embedded in a show that is still largely about how even if it’s not that cops are good, it’s that this one cop is good.” I’m waiting for the show where it’s just plainly, “No, there’s no good cop. This is what’s happening. This is how this is insidious, and you are complicit, even if you think you are good,” and showing the realities of bad cops. What was the show based on-

**John:** The Shield, Michael Chiklis.

**Brittani:** The Shield, sure.

**John:** Reaching way back for that.

**Brittani:** The Shield. I was watching it with my girlfriend, who is a journalist who focuses on police accountability in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Watching it, she was like, “This is satire, right?” I was like, “No, I don’t think that it is.” I’m not really old enough to have been watching it live and only have looked at Wikipedia and articles to be like, no, I think this was a very well-regarded show that just simply because it was a slightly more interesting, greedy look at sometimes cops are bad, that was enough. Just the bar is on the floor when it comes to these shows. I don’t think they should exist.

**Craig:** They continue to exist. My guess is they will not stop making them, because procedurals, they’re easy generators. When you have to make all these shows, you know that a process is going to get us lots of these shows. Copaganda always is heroes. The problem with portraying reality… This is a really interesting question. Let’s say I’m wandering away from the world of the limited series and I’m talking about an ongoing series that is going to show the reality of how police function. That’s going to be a very frustrating show to watch, because basically, every week, the bad guys win. That’s a hard show to write. That’s a hard to show to write. It’s a hard show to watch. I don’t know how I would approach it in a way where I wouldn’t feel beaten down by it. That’s a challenge more than anything. I think I would do it. I would do it if I could figure out how to do it.

**John:** Liz, you wrote on some of these shows.

**Liz:** I did, yeah. I wrote on The Rookie.

**John:** You are a copagandist.

**Craig:** Yeah, you copagandist.

**John:** You must still know people who are writing on these shows. Tell us about the conversations you’re having with them or they’re having in their rooms.

**Liz:** It’s hard. It’s hard. I also want to point out that the script that I wrote that got me on these copaganda shows was a high-concept sci-fi take on Treasure Island. Someone was like, “This is a great cop show writer. This is someone who can write grounded shit really well.” This is not my fault. That said, I have a lot of people on these shows that I love and respect. I know that they’re struggling with exactly this topic, because they feel culpable. They feel responsible putting this on the air. The question is how do we do this show responsibly, because if I don’t, someone who doesn’t give a shit will come in and do it any way that they want.

**John:** Isn’t that people who worked in Donald Trump’s office, that same idea of like, “Oh, it’s going to be someone worse if it’s not me.” It gets back to some pretty fundamental problems. The problem is the structure of the show itself. It’s what you’re doing. I need to credit Megana here, because she actually did a list of all the shows that are on the air right now. It’s staggering. Craig, help me read through this list, because you forget how many shows there are.

**Craig:** It’s extensive. CSI: Las Vegas, Blue Bloods, Law and Order, Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order: Organized Crime, Chicago PD, Chicago FBI, The Equalizer, NCIS: Los Angeles, SWAT, NCIS, NCIS: Hawaii, FBI, FBI: International, FBI: Most Wanted, Cops, and then there’s police-adjacent.

**John:** These are lawyer shows.

**Craig:** Lawyer shows. We’ve got So Help Me Todd, SEAL Team, Jack Ryan, 911, and Your Honor. Then there are new shows coming, Reasonable Doubt, The Calling, East New York, The Rookie: Feds, Criminal Minds: Evolution, and The Recruit. If you are interested in watching some shows about police officers and the prosecution of citizens, you have a choice. You have a choice. Look, we have friends who work on these shows. My thing is, ideally, the shows begin to slowly incorporate a sense of reality. That would be good. I’m honest. I don’t watch most of these.

**Brittani:** I just want to hop in and say they won’t. They’re not going to do that.

**Craig:** They’re not going to do it.

**Brittani:** There are so many of them for a reason. It’s not an accident. It’s not, “Oops, the procedurals are great.” No, the cops want these shows to exist, because they want people to think that they are good people. I would like to challenge that, doing a show that is realistic and does show that these systems suck and that the people that are policing are often the scum of the earth and doing things that are unimaginably terrible in ways that people watching television have absolutely no idea about.

We watch shows about bad white men all the time. People get on board. Mad Men. Breaking Bad. Succession. All these shows, they’re not critically going, “Yes, I understand that they are evil, and I’m conflicted about enjoying this television show.” No, everyone just cheers for the bad guy. I don’t think that that would be an actual barrier, because Americans love cheering for bad white dudes.

**Craig:** Yes, but Americans are also authoritarian. I believe this, that there is this incredibly strong authoritarian streak throughout a lot of white America in particular. They love to, quote unquote, back the blue. They like the badge. They like that stuff. They don’t mind police brutality. I’ve always said that there’s a huge segment of this country that doesn’t protest when Black people are brutalized by the police. They also don’t protest when white people are brutalized by the police. They don’t care. They like it. That’s where some of the audience is here, I think.

I think people like antiheroes or they like rooting for white guy villains like Tony Soprano and Walter White. When you put the uniform on, suddenly it’s this different thing. There’s just something that happens where I think people want to see those people being the dark, vengeful father that protects us. There must be something in our bones, because look how many of these shows there are. It’s hitting some dopamine, right?

**John:** Craig, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this article that Megana found from Vox called How 70 Years of Cop Shows Taught Us to Valorize the Police. One thing the article points out really clearly is that cop shows weren’t always this way. Cops used to be bungling cops. They used to be fools. It was really the rise of the police procedural and the need to actually use the police as consultants and everything else and to shoot in Los Angeles that the police became more noble and more noble and more noble and infallible.

The film and TV industry, there’s some of the responsibility for the current state of policing in America based on it’s assumed that the police know right. We’ve talked before on the show about the CSI effect. We just assume if they’re showing this proof, then that proof is proof, and those bite marks really must’ve come from this person, because we’ve seen it on TV. I’m frustrated. I don’t see a solution here. Brittani, do you see a solution? We take them all off the air. How do you fix this?

**Craig:** They’re not coming off the air, so what do we do to counter this?

**Brittani:** I would love to see anything. These shows are the greatest works of fiction that exist in entertainment. Anything that just realistically counters these narratives I think would be valuable, because yeah, I think you’re right, they’re not just all going to disappear overnight. Having a show that does show what cops are actually like and what they’re actually doing and does not balk at how people will respond, I would like to see that. I would like to see someone actually try.

**John:** I think it’s safe to just summarize that we’re feeling that little to no progress has been made on copaganda since the George Floyd protest. Is that fair?

**Craig:** I don’t see any. I detect no progress.

**John:** Let’s wrap up this topic by something that’s almost brand new. This is showrunners for abortion rights. We have 1,500 of the top showrunners, creators, directors, signing a letter asking the studios for what they are going to do to help safeguard abortion rights for crews who are working in states that are now limiting abortions after the fall of Roe versus Wade. This is new. This is fresh. As we’re recording this, new stuff may have come out. As we’re recording this, no specific plans have come out of any of these studios for what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Shocking.

**John:** Shocking. My question for the group though is, based on the conversation we’ve had about these previous topics, where do we see this going in the next few years? Obviously, thing could change, the legal landscape. We don’t know what’s going to happen there. This movement for safeguarding reproductive rights for people working in these states, what happens? Is there going to be enough of a structure? Is it going to revert to a meme? Are we going to forget about this? Are we going to still be talking about this five years from now? Brittani, what’s your instinct? Do you think this is going to be a thing we’re still grappling with five years from now? This letter from the showrunners, will this still be a part of the conversation?

**Brittani:** Pass.

**John:** Pass.

**Brittani:** It’s just annoying. Whenever I see 1,500 showrunners do anything, I know that absolutely nothing is going to happen.

**Craig:** Nothing will happen. Oh my god, I love you so much. I’m one of them.

**John:** Craig and I signed it.

**Craig:** You’re right. We have to try. I love an open letter. It’s absolutely true. The people behind the open letter have been doing things, which is really nice. Whatever you call the steering committee, there’s a group of women at the core of this who have been trying quite hard. I think getting the list of 1,500… First of all, there is not such a thing as 1,500 top anything in our business. That already is giggly worthy. I sense from you what I feel in myself, which is it’s a good effort but we are still coming hat in hand to the employers and saying, “What are you going to do?” What I think the employers are going to do is nothing. That’s what I think they’re going to do. I think they’re going to put some window dressing up. They don’t want to stop shooting in Georgia. They don’t want to stop, and they’re not going to.

**John:** Liz, do you have any instinct about what’s going to be happening five years from now? Will we still be talking about this letter five years from now, the same way we’re talking about the Time’s Up articles?

**Liz:** Do I think the letter is going to make people at the studios do anything that’s right? Not all of them. I think that what they’re going to see is a financial risk. When we’re talking about the studios, they talk in terms of profits. Right now, Craig, I know you said we’re never going to stop shooting in Georgia.

**Craig:** They won’t stop.

**Liz:** I actually wonder what would happen is that they use it as a smokescreen, like, “We’re not shooting in Georgia because it’s the right thing to do,” but really it’s because Georgia’s getting more and more expensive to shoot in, because I’ve worked on a couple of shows right now where I’ve said, “We could shoot this in Georgia,” and they’re going, “Georgia’s too expensive.” I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens.

**Craig:** They’re still going to be shooting in Louisiana. That’s the thing. There are too many of these places where they want to go. It’s easy for them to say, “Hey, we shot our show in Canada. If we do it again, we will shoot it again in Canada.” That makes me comfortable. I individually refuse to, say, work on a show in a state that does not guarantee reproductive health rights for women. I won’t do it personally, but I’m rich. That’s no skin off my back. I’m not a hero.

The people who are in the situation where it’s like, “Hey, you’re getting a show for the first time. You’re going to make a show for the first time. This is going to be your career. You will go on. We’re shooting it in New Orleans.” There’s a choice. The only people that can prevent that from happening are the studios, and they’re not going to. What they will do is probably guarantee individual employees some sort of payment and assistance.

Look, there are a bunch of things that our industry does that I just shake my head at and laugh. Any time our industry talks about how progressive they are, sometimes I want to barf, because of the people that so many of these studios are in bed with financially and the way that they will go on. They will host Democratic candidates in their mansions, and then they will turn around as the people who run the studios and go ahead and pump more money into states that won’t guarantee the safety of their own employees. They may be waiting to see if Georgia changes, but that’s not going to stop them from shooting in New Orleans. New Orleans isn’t changing. Louisiana’s Louisiana. It ain’t happening there.

It makes me really angry. I’m just blown away that they couldn’t even just do something. They couldn’t even be bothered with window dressing. I don’t think it’s because they’re locked up in a hundred committee meetings sweating over this. I think that they just go, “Oh look, if we wait three weeks, something will happen. Someone is going to send a dick pic to the wrong person, and that’s what everyone’s going to talk about, and everyone will forget about this.” To some extent, they’re right, because no one’s holding their feet to the fire on this, no matter what we do.

**Liz:** I will say just one last thing about that letter though, because I know you and John both signed it. I have talked to a lot of assistants, as I normally do, who were very happy to at least see the letter, because they felt it was a show of solidarity. That’s what I feel that letter did best is show solidarity with a lot of people who right now don’t necessarily have the access to each other like we do, who felt, “Okay, I feel like if I worked for those people, I could be safe. This is someone who actually values my safety, and that means something to me.”

**Craig:** I love that. By the way, the real percentage is probably 80%. If you worked for 80% of these people, you would be safe. I always think at least 20% of these people are absolutely shameless hypocrites, but at least 80%, I think… Again, I want to credit the women that put it together. They’re really doing the work. All we did was we sent money and we signed a thing. They put it together. They’re pushing the agenda. They’re trying to make stuff happen. What they’re doing is the real work.

**John:** We know how hard the real work is, because early on in Pay Up Hollywood, we were doing the real work. I remember being on calls with Liz. We were trying to talk to this agency boss about raising their minimums. We all know how hard that is. I think if we want to wrap up this whole segment, just say that the things we’ve learned is that it’s very easy to focus on one flashpoint moment. It’s very easy to focus on, “Oh shit, this decision came down, and abortion is now up for grabs.” It’s easy to build up a lot of energy around that. It’s hard to keep it going. I’ll be curious whether showrunners for abortion rights will have the structure to keep things going or if it needs a structure to keep things going. Copaganda, there was no force behind that, so it’s hard to make any of those changes happen. Wow, the follow-up is that it’s tough. It’s tough to do these things, man.

**Craig:** Things are happening.

**John:** Things are happening. Some progress has been made. It’s not like we’ve gone backwards on everything.

**Craig:** In the last 5 years, there has been more progress in our industry over all of these issues than there has been in all the other 25 years now, I think, I’ve been doing this. That’s something. At least because I’m old, I have the perspective of time. There was nothing. Nothing at all happened with any of this for about 25 years. Of course, nothing happened with any of it in all the time before I showed up. Really, I think there is room for hope here. Even as we struggle and fall down in some areas, there’s room for hope. There has been a lot of positive change.

**John:** It’s been a long episode. We’ve gotten through so much. I think we deserve some fun. I think it’s time for some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** I will do my One Cool Thing first, which is a New Yorker article by Leslie Jamison on the history of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was going to save this for a How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually just a good article to read independently, the history of how these two men came to form Choose Your Own Adventure and then went to a publisher, took it away from the publisher to defend their brand, how they figured out the algorithm for Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were a really important part of my literary life for about three years in elementary school. I just loved them. I think if you’re a person who read Choose Your Own Adventure books, you will enjoy this article on the history of the Choose Your Own Adventure brand.

**Craig:** I love those books. They’re wonderful.

**John:** Craig, what you got for us?

**Craig:** I have an article. This is an article in Current Affairs, which is a somewhat thinky internet publication, a magazine of politics and culture. It’s wonderful. It goes right to something that I’m very passionate about. It’s written by Aravind “Vinny” Byju. It is called Why You Hate Your Job. It is an investigation. He says, “A theory on the function of bullshit jobs: to maintain the illusion of meritocracy and to provide status and prestige for elites.” Oh, does this go right to my happy place. He draws a distinction between bullshit jobs, which are jobs that they don’t do anything, but they are hard to get, there’s a competition for them, and they signify your elite status, as opposed to shit jobs, which are jobs that are underpaid, where people are treated poorly, but the job itself is perfectly noble, like for instance teaching or being a janitor.

It’s rather long, but it’s brilliantly written. It’s just a gorgeous exploration of how we create a competition system for elitism, and we keep putting velvet ropes in front of things and making people fight over them. When you do that, they will. Then on the other side of the velvet rope is a bunch of bullshit. Well worth reading because I think the entire higher education system is a nightmare in this country. Why You Hate Your Job by Aravind “Vinny” Byju.

**John:** Fantastic. Brittani, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our listeners?

**Brittani:** I sure do. My One Cool Thing is a little off the beaten path, I guess. It’s my girlfriend.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** My heart. We’re in trouble, because I don’t think we’ve ever done… John’s never done his husband. I’ve never done my wife. This is really bad. Go ahead, ruin everything for us. I don’t care.

**Brittani:** Her name is Cerise Castle. I’ve mentioned that she’s a journalist. She has done this thing called A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is a 15-part investigative series. She also just did a study on copaganda for Color of Change. I don’t think it’s out yet. She just has worked on so many of the things specifically surrounding television actually and police. I hope people just go check her out. She has a podcast about it that’s going to be coming out October 19th called A Tradition of Violence. It’s going to hit on just so many of the things that we talked about today. She’s @cerisecastle on Twitter. She’s very cool.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Excellent. Cerise Castle, a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Amazing and romantic.

**John:** It is. I like it so much. Liz, how about a One Cool Thing for us?

**Liz:** It’s not going to be nearly as good as Brittani’s. I’m obsessed with tallowtok. If you watch TikTok, there is a wonderful creator named Mirenda Rosenberg. She lives in Ireland. She’s an expat. She is very much into sustainable living. She lives on a budget, so one of the things that she does is she makes soap with tallow, which is cut off beef fat. She gets it cheap from her local butcher. She walks you through the process of how to make soap. She’ll also walk you through her small homestead in the Irish countryside. It’s really relaxing. It’s something that I watch almost daily, because she’s just a very giving and very generous person when it comes to her knowledge and how she gardens, how she makes soap, all of the different processes.

Her entire philosophy is, “I’m going to teach you how to be zero waste in an easy and affordable way, because I’m broke, you’re probably broke, let’s be broke together, and we can still do good things for the environment.” It’s tallowtok. If you just follow that hashtag on Twitter, it’s easy to find. It is genuinely some of the greatest mental hugs you can give yourself right now.

**John:** Love it. That was our show for this week. Thank you, Liz and Brittani, so much. Reminder, it’s a last call for Writer Emergency Pack XL on Kickstarter. If you want to get a Writer Emergency Pack XL, you can get that now on Kickstarter. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long wait until we get them back into stores. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Holly Overton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Liz, where are you on Twitter?

**Liz:** I am at @lizalps.

**John:** Brittani?

**Brittani:** @bishilarious.

**John:** B is hilarious, it’s true. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. You can ign 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 just for Craig about the success of firing your reps. Brittani, Liz, thank you so, so much for joining us on this incredibly detailed followupisode. You’re the best.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Liz:** Thank you guys. Thank you very much.

**Brittani:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This happened. I swear this happened in real life. I’m trying to think the best way to get into this. About eight months ago, I had a phone call with a TV writer, a colleague. He’d been a staff writer on a couple shows, actually I think some copaganda shows, but was finding it really hard to get his next job and wanted some advice. We did the normal things that Craig and I would do. We talked about what he was writing, what new samples he was working on, what shows he was going out for. He was making really smart choices, but he was really concerned that he was just never going to get hired again. This is also pandemicy times, so everything was up in the air. I channeled that inner Craig, and I said, “Maybe the problem is your reps.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** He said he really liked his reps but yeah, maybe that was part of the issue. He wrote me back the next week and told me he’d fired them and was going to sign at a new place. Fast forward a year. He and I exchanged emails this week. I asked if I could share his experience. Craig, I think maybe you could read the bold parts here, because this is what you want to hear.

**Craig:** This is what I came for. “I just wanted to check in with another update. Thankfully, the switch to new reps has continued to pay off. Frankly, it’s been downright miraculous. I’m several weeks into a staff job on another show and will be heading out of town next year to produce it. In the last few months, I’ve also sold a pilot and a scripted podcast. It’s felt like a complete 180 from the doldrums of the pandemic, my reps, and the lack of anxiety that having bad reps caused has been a huge part of the turnaround. Thanks for the good advice.”

**John:** I wrote him back and said, “What is it about this new reps that is so much better? Are they doing more? Are they positioning you better? Is there something else?” He wrote back.

**Craig:** “It seems to be mostly about relationships. Even though it’s a boutique management company, everyone in television seems to know them, love them, and hold them in high esteem. That patina seems to get transferred to me as a client. It’s also a strategy. They’re very targeted in their approach and push hard for things that are good fits, and they ignore everything else. They’ve been very up front about the fact that they don’t put clients up for jobs or send them on pitches unless they think there’s a 50% or higher chance that it will end with success. I think part of it, frankly, is that I’ve been able to be a better client, because I’m not so constantly panicked about trying to manage my own reps.” Exactly.

“I feel the wind at my back in a way I haven’t in a long time, and it’s made my work better and my approach to everything that much more confident. I didn’t realize how much my lack of faith in my team was affecting my ability to sell myself.”

**John:** Craig, are you misting up a little bit? I’m honestly a little emotional.

**Craig:** I’m horny. I’m horny. This is not sad. I love it. The reason that we say fire your manager, fire your agent, it’s not blithe. I think a lot of times, we are so cultured to think that if you get an agent or a manager, you’ve somehow broken through and made something happen. They are the first people to say to you, “You could be a professional.” That psychological bond is very powerful. It is so powerful, not only can it withstand their poor performance, it often just masks it completely. You just don’t realize that they’re not special, they are not anointing you with any authority that is objectively relevant, and in trusting them to do things for you, you’re actually worse off than you were when you were afraid and doing it yourself.

If things aren’t working, there’s really no point in clinging to that raft. The raft is not there to make you feel good. It’s not there to make you feel like you’re a represented writer. It’s there to get you a job. If it doesn’t get you a job, move on to a different raft.

**John:** Now Brittani, you are in a writers’ room, so you get to talk with writers all the time about what they’re doing, what they’re working on. I bet reps come up a fair amount. Is this the kind of conversation you’ve had with people in your rooms?

**Brittani:** Yeah, I famously enjoy fake firing people. I just tell people to fire people all the time. I don’t currently have agents. A lot of people in our room actually don’t. I tell them just don’t do it unless you really feel like you have a solid reason to do so.

**Craig:** You have a manager?

**Brittani:** I have a manager, yeah.

**Craig:** And a lawyer?

**Brittani:** And a lawyer, yes.

**Craig:** I feel like if you have 15% going out the door, that’s nothing, whether it’s an agent or a lawyer, manager and a lawyer. I know some people have both. My guess is they’re overpaying. Sometimes the combination works well. I continue to have strong feelings for you, Brittani, because I just like your style.

**John:** My role on the podcast is to introduce Craig to people who he’s obsessed with suddenly. Brittani, I’m sorry. This is what happens to you next. Liz, what’s your feeling as you’re listening to this letter? Is this an experience that you could understand or relate to?

**Liz:** Oh yeah, good for that person. I fired a manager and reps before. I’m very happy with my people. Right now, I have an agent and a manager. My agent is someone who has terrorized business affairs until I get the white boy money is what we call it. I’ve gotten paid more with her than I ever had. I’ve known her for 10 years. She’s the only Middle Eastern agent in the game right now. She has absolutely no tolerance for anybody that doesn’t show respect to her BIPOC clients as they do to her white clients. She is my lioness. I love her. I love her to death. It’s a good match.

**John:** Nice. We’ll leave it on that. We’re not telling everyone they need to fire their reps immediately. I guess we’re saying hey, if there’s a problem, don’t hold onto your reps because you think you’re not going to get another one. You’re probably better off without those reps. Brittani doesn’t even have an agent right now, and look, she’s producing Abbott Elementary. You can do it.

**Craig:** You can do it.

**John:** Thanks, all.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Liz:** Bye.

Links:

* [Liz Alper](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3225554/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lizalps)
* [Brittani Nichols](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4575382/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BisHilarious)
* Buy Tickets for our first Live Show post-pandemic – [Dynasty Typewriter Livestream](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/scriptnotes-live-tickets-412411342427?aff=ebdsoporgprofile) October 19 at 7:30pm PT
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/inspiration-vs-motivation).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 569 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you sit down to write? We’ll discuss inspiration versus motivation both for your characters and for you as a writer. We’ll also talk about the phenomenon of showrunners as promotional vehicles for their shows. Does this elevate the writer/creator or amount to unpaid labor? In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, insects. Why do we have insects?

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yeah. First, right before we started recording, I apparently changed your life. In case we have other people out there listening, talk through the problem and solution, and people’s lives will be better.

**Craig:** I am shooketh. For the last all of my life, while I’ve been drinking coffee out of cups like Starbucks, Coffee Bean, whatever, every now and again, I would say half the time… Because I drink an Americano. I’m a straight up black coffee kind of dude. Two shots. Two shots, John, small size. About half the time, the fricking lid is like a dribble cup. There’s just these drips that come out, and they hit me on my shirt or my pants. It’s really annoying and hot. I was just complaining about it, and you said… What did you say to me, John?

**John:** I said, “Craig, is the lid of the cup lined up to the seam?” You were confused by what I meant. Then as you examined your cup, you saw that the plastic lid is on top of the paper cup. The paper cup has a seam on it. If the hole in the lid is lined up to the seam, it will dribble on you.

**Craig:** Yes, it will. I just put the lid back on so that the hole was not over the seam, and it didn’t dribble on me, and I love you.

**John:** Aw, thank you.

**Craig:** I love you, and I’m also very angry, because why… In their training at Starbucks University, I don’t know what… By the way, what is Starbucks’s training university called? What do you think it’s called, Espresso College or something?

**John:** I bet it’s Starbucks University, something like that.

**Craig:** You think it’s just straight up Starbucks University?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At Starbucks U, this should be the first and last lesson. Just don’t put the hole over the thing where the cup seams together. Here’s the thing. I’m drinking coffee without fear. I’m not afraid that it’s going to burn me.

**John:** Megana, you were aware of this life hack, correct?

**Megana Rao:** I was not, and I had to look it up on the internet-

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** … to verify that this is true.

**Craig:** So Millennial.

**Megana:** A lot of forums agree with this knowledge. There’s a conspiracy out there that baristas do this on purpose.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Oh yeah, so people they hate. It’s like, “Oh, that Craig.”

**Craig:** Why would it be half the time the seam is… I don’t know how many… What do you call those, degrees?

**John:** Yeah, degrees, radians. I’m not sure what the math is.

**Craig:** The quantity of radians of that seam is maybe like 3 out of 360. This should be happening 1 in every 120 times I get a coffee.

**John:** The hole doesn’t have to line up exactly, because if you think about when you tilt the cup up-

**Craig:** True.

**John:** … you’re putting the coffee against that whole side of the thing. Really, you just need the hole-

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** … directly opposite the seam.

**Craig:** Really? Okay.

**John:** Yeah. That’s your safe spot.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what. I’m never going to have this problem again. Never.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** Never. I’ll tell you another thing, John. You just earned yourself grace. Do you know what I mean by this? One day you’re going to do something. I’m going to get angry. Then you’re going to say, “Craig, I would like to use my grace.” I will say-

**John:** It’s like real life DnD inspiration, like I get to roll an extra D20.

**Craig:** No, you just say, “Grace.” Now, the grace will get used. It’s not a permanent grace, of course, but you possess grace.

**John:** Love it. While we’re talking about Millennials manifesting things, I would actually like to try to manifest something here on this podcast. I would like to make a Van Halen biopic. I think there’s a great biopic to be made of Van Halen. I’ve done some work to try to figure out who would control the rights to this, what are the complications here, does any producer control some part of the story. What I’ve run into is basically it seems like it’s impossible to do at this point because there’s such disagreement between the Van Halen people and David Lee Roth’s people and that it’s going to be a mess.

There are complicated things to put together to make this movie happen. Obviously, you need all the rights to all the music, not the permission, but the blessing of Eddie Van Halen’s family, whatever representational things you want to get for David Lee Roth. There’s a fricking great movie to make from Van Halen. If you are a listener who has some access to some part of this complicated mess, reach out to me, because I really think there’s a great musical biopic to make of Van Halen.

**Craig:** Pasadena’s own Van Halen. A lot of people don’t know that Eddie and Alex Van Halen are biracial.

**John:** They’re also international. They’re born in Europe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They’re genuine prodigies. They were in several bands before Van Halen. The whole backstory before that is great. The actual story of being in Van Halen and the conflicts within Van Halen and overcoming those conflicts to some degree, they replaced him with Sammy Hagar, all of that is great and fascinating and could make a really amazing biopic.

**Craig:** I don’t know their story well enough, but I feel like Michael Anthony, the bassist for Van Halen, had a very privileged position of just sitting quietly, watching everyone fight around him. He’s just like, “Guys, when you’re done, I’m here, ready to play.”

**John:** I saw Van Halen play at Iowa State University. It was an amazing show. There was a very long drum solo in it. That was appropriate, because that’s what you wanted in that era. You wanted a long drum solo.

**Craig:** Also, Alex Van Halen, incredibly good drummer.

**John:** Yeah, therefore he should have a solo.

**Craig:** Stupidly good drummer. Originally, I think when the parents got them instruments, Eddie was given the drum set, and Alex was given the guitar.

**John:** They both were started on piano, because that’s [crosstalk 00:06:10].

**Craig:** Of course. They are. They’re prodigies. I believe they played a concert at La Cañada High School back in… That’s a scene.

**John:** I’m not sure that’s going to make it into the picture, Craig.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** It could. You never know. It could happen.

**Craig:** (sings)

**John:** If you are a person with the power to manifest a Van Halen movie, know that I want to write this movie. I figured I might as well put that out there and stake my claim in it to some degree.

**Craig:** Maybe Alex Van Halen is a podcast fan.

**John:** Yeah. We have some follow-up. Megana, help us out. What did Andrew have to say?

**Megana:** Andrew wrote in and said, “I appreciated the discussion of casting stars, as it’s a question I have thought about a lot. However, you focused a lot on casting for film, and I’d like to know about the difference for television. Are there different factors involved? I’m thinking of the recently premiered Monarch, in which Susan Sarandon plays a dying woman at the head of a celebrity country music family, or Cobra Kai, where they’ve gotten many actors from the original movie series to come back, but the focus is clearly on the younger characters. I’ve thought about writing a show where the main character’s played by an unknown actor, but have more established actors in a parent or advisor character role. How should writers think about something like that?”

**John:** In television in general, you’re not as star-focused, but also who is a star changes a lot of television. Scott Bakula is a television star. If he agrees to be on your CSI spin-off, then he’s going to be the centerpiece star of that. He’ll be paid really well for that. Television is not generally as star-driven. It makes stars rather than casting stars. Is that your experience, Craig?

**Craig:** I think that that’s been the way it’s been. It has changed to an extent over the last 10 years with the rise of the limited series. The limited series are different. The reason that television stars were traditionally different, separate from movie stars, is because television stars had to make these long-term commitments to one thing. If you are let’s say Tom Hanks, you don’t have to do that, because you don’t want to be stuck on one thing, because Steven Spielberg wants to come and do this movie and someone brilliant over here wants to do this movie, and so you get to pick and choose. You don’t want to tie yourself down, whereas Mariska Hargitay has made this brilliant career but on one show.

Lately, with the rise of the shorter seasons, a lot of television series running between 6 and 12 episodes, and sometimes just once, actors, what we would call traditional movie stars are less concerned and are okay with tying themselves down for a stretch, because they know it’s not permanent. They aren’t going to be stuck on this thing for 10 seasons, 22 episodes a year. That does make quite a difference. You see a lot of people… Matthew McConaughey doing True Detective was a sign.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** There’s been fuzzying of the lines. In terms of how you think about this, Andrew, just don’t worry about it. You write for who you want. For whom you want. How dare I?

**John:** How dare you?

**Craig:** How dare I?

**John:** His second question there is what if you cast an unknown actor in that main role but a more established, better known actor in those supporting roles? That can be tricky. Definitely it’s possible, but think about that as an audience member. If you have no idea who that central person is, and yet you recognize those other people, you are going to expect those other people are going to have really big, significant things coming up. There’s just a weird expectation game that happens. It can totally work. Just be aware that there could be some bump for your audience there if they don’t recognize your central person but they do recognize the people around them.

**Craig:** That too I think has gotten a little bit worse because of the amount of television. Let’s go back once more into the way back machine and think about Game of Thrones. They had Sean Bean. Sean Bean was somebody that people knew, but I don’t think, at least in America, he was what we would call a star. Nobody was building movies around Sean Bean. He was the bad guy in Golden Eye. Spoiler, by the way. You think he dies, and he doesn’t. He’s the bad guy. He’s Trevelyan. Other than that, a lot of people we didn’t know, and Dinklage. Even Dinklage, I have to say, was-

**John:** He was in an indie film that people liked that was-

**Craig:** Exactly. He was in The Station Agent, which is a wonderful movie. He’d been around, but again, not somebody that people were building movies around. Everybody was okay with it because we learned new people. It’s a little trickier now also looking at the new Game of Thrones show, House of the Dragon.

**John:** You kind of recognize Rhys Ifans, but there’s not a lot of-

**Craig:** There’s Paddy Considine.

**John:** Paddy Considine, yeah.

**Craig:** Doctor Who.

**Megana:** Matt Smith.

**John:** Matt Smith, of course.

**Craig:** Matt Smith, right. There are some, but again, for Americans, not these people that anyone’s building a movie around. You can still do it. I think, Andrew, cast who you want in your head, and then we’ll deal with it later when life starts happening.

**John:** I think we’ve talked about this on the show before. I’m a big caster in my head before I start writing. I like to see that there’s at least one actor out there who could play the role. Is that the person who’s going to play the role ultimately? Almost never, but it does help me to be thinking about that in my head. If you feel like you need a person with giant movie star charisma in that central role, cast that that way, but know that other factors are going to determine whether it is a movie star, TV star, or an unknown in that slot. Last bit of follow-up here. We got a lot of emails about burials and cremations and such.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I want to say that we are not going to talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** There’s clearly a market for a burial podcast. If you’re thinking, “I really want to start a podcast, but what should my podcast topic be?” the topic of burials and cremations and what do you do with dead bodies seems to be fascinating to a huge subset of our listenership.

**Craig:** You got to find that small Venn diagram intersection between knows a lot about burying people and interesting. If you can find that person, I’m down.

**John:** Something like internment and interesting, I feel like there’s a thing that can go together there. There’s something about that. People are obsessed with death, because they’re obsessed with murder podcasts. There’s going to be something about dead bodies.

**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead.

**John:** Universal experience.

**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead, even you, Megana.

**Megana:** Never. No.

**Craig:** It’s happening. What, do you think you’re eternal?

**Megana:** I’m knocking on wood so it doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** You’re knocking on wood. Knocking on wood doesn’t even work for things that are forestallable. You’re knocking on wood against death?

**John:** I want to defend knocking on wood, just as a tradition of saying, “Listen, I recognize that what I just said could potentially come back to haunt me.” It’s a public way of doing it. I would never knock on wood privately, but I might do it publicly.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Megana:** Interesting.

**Craig:** Do you think Megana’s really starting to think about her own mortality for the first time right now?

**John:** Based on our previous insect discussion, I think she was already a little bit worried for our own lives.

**Craig:** She was halfway there. We’ll get to that in the Bonus Segment, but first, we have a marquee topic.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s talk about inspiration versus motivation. The idea behind this came from a recent issue of Inneresting, the newsletter we do. Chris Sont, our editor, linked to this blog post by John Scalzi, who is a very good writer of science fiction and other things. He has this blog post called Find the Time or Don’t. Basically, people ask him questions like, “How do I find the time to write?” His point is either you find the time or you don’t do it.

I’ll just read one little quote here. He says, “The answer to the first of these is simple and unsatisfying: I keep inspired to write because if I don’t then the mortgage company will be inspired to foreclose on my house. And I’d prefer not to have that happen. This answer is simple because it’s true — hey, this is my job, I don’t have another — and it’s unsatisfying because writers, and I suppose particularly authors of fiction, are assumed to have some other, more esoteric inspiration.”

I like the post, but I would like to separate out the idea of inspiration and motivation, because I think they get conflated and confused. For our discussion, Craig, if we can talk about inspiration being that desire to write the specific thing and that flash of genius, like, “Oh, this is the thing I’m called to write,” versus motivation, which is what gets you in the chair every day to write, which is getting you to get the work finished.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great distinction to make.

**John:** Both are really important, but they don’t always happen at the same time.

**Craig:** No. One needs to happen all the time, and one sometimes happens when it feels like it. Inspiration does not adhere to a timetable. You can’t plan it and you can’t force it. That’s why it’s inspiration. If it weren’t, if you could just say, “Oh, I’m going to be inspired in 10 minutes,” then it wouldn’t be very inspiring. Also, people talk about the spark of creativity. Sparks last a millisecond, and then they’re gone. They’re just meant to ignite. Then the rest of it, honestly, all the rest of it is motivation.

**John:** Let’s go back to your spark thing, because what I really like about that idea is, as a person who builds fires with flint and steel, yes, you had that one little moment, but then it’s all the work and careful work, diligence of just like, “Okay, now I’m going to get it in the tinder. I’m going to slowly add the kindling and slowly build it up into a thing.” That’s the whole work. It’s not the striking at the flint and steel. It’s the actual building of the fire. That’s what a lot of people don’t do. You see people who wander around saying, “I have this great idea for a movie. I have this great idea for a book.” They have inspiration, but a lot of times they don’t actually have the motivation to actually get a thing done.

On the contrary, sometimes in movies we’ll see this cliché scene of the guy sitting at the typewriter, and he’s like, “I can’t get any words out.” He’s just waiting around for inspiration. That’s not necessarily the case for most people. Really, it’s that they kind of have the idea, they kind of know what they want to do, but they cannot physically get themselves to sit at that typewriter and try to work on a thing. They’d rather do anything else. That’s procrastination. That’s perfectionism. It’s all the other reasons why they’re not willing to sit down to write.

**Craig:** You do hear the dog, right?

**Megana:** Yeah, so cute.

**John:** The dog barking in the background?

**Craig:** It’s not just me.

**John:** That dog is my dog Lambert, who’s sleeping and dreaming in the background.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** I’ll take a picture and I’ll post it on-

**Craig:** Lambert.

**John:** … my Instagram so everyone can see how cute he is as I’m recording this.

**Craig:** Everything you said is spot-on. The marketplace of creative romance overvalues inspiration. By the way, inspiration sometimes is wrong. Sometimes you get so excited. You’re like, “That’s it. I figured it out, this brilliant, wonderful idea. All I have to do now is the easy part of just unraveling it.” Then you realize that you were inspired stupidly, that the inspiration did not stand up to the test of what motivation has to deliver, which is execution and work. You’re allowed to be falsely inspired. Don’t overvalue your aha moments. They’re aha moments if they pan out. If they don’t, they’re not. Simple as that.

**John:** I often say on this podcast that we are our own main characters in our own stories. Let’s think about how characters relate to motivation and inspiration. Inspiration in a movie, that classic call to adventure, there’s a thing that happens early on that’s like, oh, this is the thing that you are destined to do. You can choose to follow that path or not follow that path. Something is going to change in your life, or you have characters who fall in love at first sight. That inspiration in movies tends to be the enduring quest. That’s a thing that they are called to do. That’s not them actually leaving home and doing the work. It’s a siren song, but it’s not the actual plot and story and work of the movie. That’s generally motivation, because the motivation is what’s getting them from this scene to that scene, what’s getting them to say the next line, what’s getting them to move and take some actions.

**Craig:** Sometimes the causal flows in the direction opposite from what we would imagine. Sometimes you are uninspired, and you just have to do stuff. In our own lives, this is true. We don’t want to do a thing. We’re forced to do a thing. We start to do a thing, and lo and behold, something happens while we’re doing it that then feeds into a kind of inspiration. The idea of waiting to be inspired is a trap.

Dennis Palumbo of Episode 99, his big prescription for writer’s block is start writing something, even if it’s nonsense. If you are a writer typer, start typing stuff. Start typing about how you can’t write. Start typing anything. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a pen and paper guy, start pen and papering. Move your hands or fingers in a writing motion. Then, lo and behold, you may find suddenly you are in the groove and inspiration occurs.

**John:** Let’s talk about motivation for writers, motivation actually for characters as well. We’ve talked about this on the show before. You can have intrinsic motivation, which is something that is about who you are. It’s generated from inside. It could be about your self-perception, your self-worth, this vision of who you are as a person. Calling yourself, “I am a writer,” that’s an intrinsic motivation to do the writing because you’ve perceived yourself as being a writer. It can also be negative intrinsic motivation, like shame or guilt, that’s pushing you to do that.

**Craig:** That’s what I have.

**John:** We’ve got those. Those could be the things that are motivating you to do this creative writing or to literally show up and do the work on that day. There’s also extrinsic motivations, as Scalzi’s saying, like, “I have to pay the bills. I have a deadline that I’m required to meet.” Sometimes it’s good to have a balance of the things that you were doing because it’s a part of who you are, the intrinsic things. Also, setting deadlines is a way of external accountability. That’s also motivating you to write.

**Craig:** I wish that our motivations were all positive. I wish that we were all motivated by a sense of self-worth and value. I wish that I could wake up in the morning and think, “I should write today, because I’m good, and people are interested.” That’s not what happens. What happens with me is that I wake up in the morning and I think, “I need to write today.” I’m already in trouble. I just start off the day, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble. I’m behind. I’m bad. The best I could do is try and write my way to just get my nose above the waterline so that I don’t drown in my own shame and misery.

Now, that’s an anti-romanticism. I don’t recommend it. I don’t think it’s good. It is so common that I suppose the reason I’m talking about it is because I don’t want people to feel like that is bad with a capital B. It’s bad with a lowercase B. So many of us have it that if it gets us writing and it makes the work happen, as long as we can somehow find ways to hug ourselves afterwards, and I really do try, then I think it’s okay. It’s okay. I just don’t want people to beat themselves up for beating themselves up, if that makes sense.

**John:** Definitely. I’ve had moments in my career where I could not wait to write. That combination of inspiration and motivation were happening at just the right dose at just the right times, where it was like, “I’m going to leave this party and go home and write this scene, because I just know exactly what this scene is.” There’s been projects where for two weeks at a time, all I wanted to do is write the project, but that’s rare. I think the career of writing is recognizing that will happen sometimes, but that’s not going to be your normal experience.

Your normal experience is going to be probably some mix of the lowercase B bad motivations to get you there to do the work and recognizing that while you’re doing it, you’re going to have some discoveries, sometimes moments that you might happier about the work at the end of the day than at the start of the day.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you that one remarkable motivation… I’ve never had this before in my life. Working on The Last of Us, I had I think half of the script done by the time we started shooting, with the understanding that I had to write the other half. Neil wrote an episode, but I had to write all the remaining ones, including one with Neil, while we were in production. That’s terrifying, because I don’t have to imagine people waiting. They’re there. I can see them. They come and find me. They’re like, “When are we going to… Can you give me a peak? I would just love to know,” because they have jobs to do.

I made a point of saying, “Look, schedule-wise, I need to deliver a draft of a script to everyone, meaning I’ve already given it to HBO, great, now I can give it to everybody, with two months’ time between them getting it and us shooting it,” which in television, sadly, that’s quite a luxurious amount of time, because there are people that deliver these things the day of.

**John:** Classically on network procedural shows, sometimes they’ll get so backed up, you’re prepping off of an outline, if that. Scripts are being written as they’re shot.

**Craig:** There are showrunners that we’ve spoken to on the show, who I have great admiration for, and they’re notorious for-

**John:** Last minute.

**Craig:** When you show up on the day, you find out what you’re… They’re that behind. It all works for them. I did find that the reality of a machine of human beings needing the pages was remarkably motivating. I guess I didn’t have to draw so much from my bottomless well of self-loathing, so that was nice. Instead, I borrowed from my bottomless well of fear, you see, which is actually preferable, I think, to self-loathing, just terror as opposed to disgust. These are my wells that I get to draw from in the morning. Megana, do you… I know John’s not like me. I know that.

**Megana:** Yeah, we’re shamecore.

**Craig:** Good. Thank you. I just needed to know that there was another shamecore on board here.

**Megana:** Yeah, I feel you.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Megana:** I primarily operate out of fear. Writing is just so fun. What you guys are talking about, I feel like it is really fun, and it is all of the fear that gets in the way of me actually sitting down to write.

**Craig:** Fear.

**John:** Megana, when you’re saying writing is fun, is it fun when you’re in flow or is it fun even when it’s a struggle?

**Megana:** I think it’s fun when you’re in flow. To me, the desire to get back to that state has to outweigh the fear. That is when I sit down to write.

**Craig:** That’s quite perfect. That is a great summation of what’s going on with me. I just need the desire to get into the flow of it to outweigh the fear. That’s just perfect. Chef’s kiss. You know what? You’ve earned grace.

**John:** I changed your life, and she says one nice thing?

**Craig:** I know. It’s hard. It’s hard knowing me.

**John:** This is grace inflation.

**Craig:** I never promised you a rose garden, and I’m not fair. Megana, you have earned grace. Here’s the thing. She’s never going to need it. When is she ever going to do anything where I’m like, “Meh!”

**Megana:** Just you wait.

**Craig:** Not that you do, John. Honestly, John just never does anything either. I’m really handing out grace to people that don’t need it. That’s the God’s honest truth.

**John:** I’ve talked about this before with Arlo Finch. Writing those three books was one of the rare experiences where for two or three months at a time, I was just writing those books. My entire life was just writing Arlo Finch books. I did build up some good routines and habits where I just need to write 1,000, 1,500 words a day, and that the books will get done. Sitting down to do that work and finishing that work was actually a lot easier, because I could sit down knowing this is going to take a couple hours to do, and they’re going to be done, and I’m going to feel really good about it. It was a rare case in my life where the motivation was positive, because I knew I’m going to feel good about having finished that work. I’m not going to finish the whole book today. I’m just going to finish this chapter, and that’s going to be enough.

**Craig:** That’d be so nice, just to feel good.

**John:** Recognizing when enough is enough is good. Actually, this last script I did was a similar situation where… Granted I had really good inspiration going into it. I really wanted to write it. With every scene, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing right now is writing this scene.” Sometimes it does happen.

**Craig:** That sounds so nice.

**John:** Recognize that it’s rare when it does happen. It’s lovely when it happens.

**Craig:** Again, I don’t know if I ever feel good. I just make some of the bad go away. It’s just who I am. I have to accept it. This is the therapy thing. Part of therapy is saying you’re okay as you are, also oh my god, you’re screwed up and you have so many problems.

**John:** It’s a dialectical struggle is that you’re both imperfect and you’re doing your best.

**Craig:** I’m trying to change, and also I’m fine the way I am. I don’t see this going away. I think I’m just making my peace with it. At least I can put it in perspective. There is a difference between thinking I am bad and I feel bad about myself. That’s a very important distinction. By the way, this has turned into a therapy session for me and probably Megana. You’re fine, John, again. I think that’s part of it. I don’t recall a time where I ever wrote something and then sat back and said, “I feel great.” I just feel like I made the bad go away. I guess if that’s how it works for you at home, I’m just saying that’s okay. I’m sticking up for the shamecore people.

**John:** For sure. Let’s wrap this up with a… Let’s a quote from Scalzi which I think puts a good bow on this. He says, “Being a writer isn’t some grand, mystical state of being. It just means you put words to amuse people, most of all yourself. There’s no more shame in not being a writer than there is in not being a painter, a botanist, or a real estate agent, all of which are things I think personally I do not regret not being. It’s a weird thing we put this pressure I think on what a writer identity has to be and what it has to mean. If you take some of that pressure off, that can also be helpful for people.

**Craig:** I love this quote, and I love him for saying it. I think it’s so important to hear good writers, and he is a very good writer, deromanticizing what we do. There’s so much BS out there, so much glowy nonsense from people about writing. Makes me want to barf, always has.

Ted Elliott of Pirates of the Caribbean fame and Shrek and Aladdin, the original, and so many other things, he talks about writers describing receiving inspiration from the heavens and how they suck at the crack in the cosmic egg. It just makes me laugh, because he’s right. It’s just so ridiculous. It’s not romantic.

Most importantly, it’s okay to not be a writer, the way we have always said to people, “Hey, it’s okay to stop.” If it’s not working, if it’s not making you happy, or even not unhappy, as is the case for the shamecore people, you can stop. It is not magical. I can tell you from my own personal experience that you can do really well as a writer, you can be successful, you can have credits and go to premiers and know famous people, and it still is not romantic at all.

Don’t think that there’s some magical thing on the other side of the velvet rope. There isn’t. In fact, that’s how you know you’re a writer, because you get to the other side of the velvet rope, you look around, you go, “Oh my god, it’s the same thing as the other side of the velvet rope, and I still have to write.” That’s it.

Anyone that talks about the cosmic inspiration and being kissed by Jesus and connecting with the grand river of energy that runs through all of us or crystals or any of that, just run, because they’re not real. I just don’t think they’re real. This guy’s real. That Polish lady that said that when you’re successful it feels like failing, she’s real. Those are real writers to me. I love this. Love this. This plus the coffee thing has made my day.

**John:** Let’s see if we can keep your-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … streak going. Let’s talk about creators, showrunners, the responsibility for them being promotional vehicles for their shows, for the things that they create. We’ve talked a little bit about this before. Yesterday as we were recording this was The Last of Us day, so you were tweeting out about the new teaser trailer. You were having little conversations online. That got a great response, which was terrific.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** A thing that has happened over the time we’ve been recording this show is that showrunners and creators are more and more responsible for interacting directly with fans about the things that they are making. Back in the day, you might see Steven Bochco interviewed in the New York Times, but he wasn’t responsible for the day-to-day promotion of his show. Now, because of social media, that is becoming much more of an expectation.

I just want to talk through the pros and cons of that, because I think it is great that the people who are able to make these things can get the popular culture credit for the things that they’ve made, which is terrific. It also just feels like so much work and unpaid work to be doing that I wonder I some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do it, because they are just not social people and they don’t want to have that responsibility.

**Craig:** It’s not a requirement. It’s not like it is for actors. Actors have to promote the show or the movie. They’re not paid to promote the show or the movie. They’re paid to act, and then it’s expected that part of the payment for acting is go promote the show and the movie. By and large, that’s who people want to hear from. We can flatter ourselves and say, “People can’t wait to hear what I, the showrunner, has to say.” There’s some people, and I love that, but it’s not like… Pedro Pascal can say anything on any given day, and it will be viewed by vastly more people than anything I say. It will be viewed with more interest, because that’s the way it ought to be. Famous people are famous.

It is not a requirement. Just to be clear, if you are contemplating being a showrunner, and it’s a real thing, you don’t have to be on Twitter at all. You don’t have to. You don’t have to be on anything. They can’t force you to be on it. If you’re not on it already, they don’t even need you to be on it, meaning if you have a social media presence, they want to leverage it. If you don’t, there’s nothing to leverage anyway. It doesn’t matter.

All you can really do at that point is probably screw up, because what’s going to happen is someone’s going to say something stupid, because believe it or not, people say stupid things on social media, and then people who aren’t accustomed to it or people who are new to it are going to react. Then suddenly, there’s a problem. It is not a requirement.

I will say if you are a showrunner on social media, you have to make sure that you can preserve your own legitimacy and authenticity as a voice, because if you start to sound like a brand or a corporate sloganeer, you just aren’t as interesting. People will see through it instantly. I will say the social media system is… Once you start to see how it all functions on the other side of it, not the way I do it, but just the way that very famous people and brand names and the influencers and all this stuff… It’s reality television, meaning it ain’t reality. It’s all so rigged. It’s incredible how calculated so much social media stuff is.

**John:** I’m thinking about showrunners who left social media. David Lindelof famously left social media after Lost and his frustrations there. Other friends of ours are infrequent tweeters, but then when they have a show, they’ve told me that they feel pressure from the studio or the network to be live tweeting episodes and to be hyping stuff up, in some cases out of fear, because if it doesn’t hit out of the gate, then what’s going to happen? I get the pressure to want to support this thing that I love. I always respect that, because it’s one thing for a novelist to be promoting their stuff. You get that. With a TV show, it is yours, but it’s also everybody else’s. You have to grapple with the internet. All the ugliness of the internet, while trying to make something beautiful, is frustrating.

**Craig:** A network will always ask people to do stuff. That’s what they do. Anybody that can possibly go out there and promote and support the show, they will say, “Hey, can you go and promote and support the show?” That’s their job to do. There is no showrunner on the planet that is essential to a show’s success in terms of social media promotion. None. Shonda Rhimes doesn’t go on Twitter and talk about her shows. She doesn’t need to, because people love her shows.

**John:** She’s also beyond that though.

**Craig:** My point is, if you’re not beyond it, then you’re not in it. You can’t help. There’s no special Goldilocks zone where a showrunner is not beyond it but also can make it a success by tweeting. Either people will like it or they won’t, and they will watch it or they won’t. I can’t imagine a world where a network is like, “Look, that show would’ve worked, but the writer didn’t talk enough on Twitter.” No.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s just not a thing. They’re going to ask, and you’re allowed to say no. If you feel pressure, that’s because you’re being pressured, but only because that’s what they do. They just pressure everybody into doing it. If the actor, the star, if Pedro Pascal is like, “I’m not promoting The Last of Us,” oh my god, there would be lawsuits. That’s a huge deal. He is, by the way. My point is, nobody would be like, “Oh my god, Craig isn’t tweeting about The Last of Us. We have to sue him.” They don’t care. They don’t care. That’s one of the best parts about being a writer.

**John:** I want to circle back then, maybe close on a pro of promoting stuff on social media is that the degree to which you are identified with a show that you create can be helpful with your power vis a vis the studio, the network, and future seasons and future negotiations. If people see that the fan base responds to the show but also responds to you as the showrunner, as the person behind it, it’s a little harder for them to fire you or to do crazy things down the road. We’ve definitely seen situations where people who have been a guest on the show have big fan bases who know them, and so it’s going to be inconceivable for them to be booted off one of their own shows.

**Craig:** I will challenge you on this.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** I think that networks prize showrunners who are delivering. If the showrunner is not delivering, then it’s not happening anymore. It’s rare that there’s a circumstance where the show is fine and doing great, but they have to get rid of the showrunner. When things like that are happening, it’s typically because there is an HR problem.

**John:** Yeah, or drama behind the scenes, a conflict with another producer, another-

**Craig:** A massive conflict with-

**John:** … star.

**Craig:** Most importantly, that showrunner is not indispensable.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Now, if you are not indispensable, it does not matter what your fan base is. You will be dispensed with, because what they know is everybody loves the show. The drama that would happen over the dismissal of that person would last all of the day. Then tomorrow, somebody farted on TV, oh my god, everyone, new story, and that’ll be the end of that, because they like the show. That’s how it works. If somebody else can come and write that show and make it great and run it, people will keep watching it. Look at, what was it, The West Wing.

**John:** West Wing, that’s true, [crosstalk 00:39:21].

**Craig:** Aaron Sorkin was like, “I’m leaving.” They were like, “Okay.” Then John Wells came, and people kept watching. That’s how it is. If they think are you are indispensable… Jesse Armstrong, there’s a good example. Jesse Armstrong is the showrunner of Succession. Jesse Armstrong’s not on Twitter. Nobody hears from Jesse Armstrong. He doesn’t have a podcast. He’s the quietest guy. He is indispensable to that show. If Jesse Armstrong was like, “I don’t want to do it anymore,” it’s over, because he’s indispensable to that show, and everybody knows it.

I guess my point is, just like social media itself… Social media overemphasizes the value of social media. Underneath all of it, there is a reality of who has value and who does not. Yes, there is value, promotional value. There always has been to famous people. That’s why we have always had stars in Hollywood. Beyond the actors, Spielberg doesn’t need to tweet.

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

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We’ll start with Kiefer. Megana, can you help us out with Kiefer’s question?

**Megana:** Kiefer asks, “An acquaintance who’s working on a series for a large streamer just told me they’ve been told to put explicit act breaks in their scripts just in case a streamer decides to launch an ad-supported subscription. Are commercial breaks bad? How do you write both for viewers who will just see a two-second fade to black and those who will be diverted from your perfect, shiny streaming show and besieged with two minutes of Fancy Feast cat food commercials?”

**Craig:** Oh, no, Netflix.

**John:** Kiefer, you’re right. You will notice that some streaming shows really do have act breaks in them. I’m thinking of Only Murders in the Building has things. I guess Hulu actually has ad-supported too already, so I guess it makes sense for that. You’re going to see more of this. I would say be aware of it, because if it feels like it’s a thing that could happen, it’s not the worst idea to plan your show in a way that it could work.

Remember that Mad Men never really did act breaks properly. It just suddenly would stop, and there would be a commercial, and they would just keep going. You can get by without doing the explicit buildup to rising actions and things like that. Classically, in the broadcast model, your acts are really clear, because they have to have some kind of cliffhanger, something that gets you back after the commercial break. We don’t do that in streaming, for good reason, because it’s really artificial. It may be worth thinking about if you were to put a commercial in here, where would it do the least harm, and be thinking about it that way.

**Craig:** I assume that the acquaintance is working for Netflix, because Netflix is talking about putting ads in. What’s going to happen is Netflix is going to offer two tiers of subscription, I believe. One is ad-supported, and one is ad-free. The whole idea is, hey, spend more, and then you don’t have this chopped up thing that’s annoying because Fancy Feast just showed up. By the way, it may not be Netflix. It may be another one. I don’t know. Better not be HBO. All I can say is don’t worry about it yet. One of the things that we were just working on here on our show is we were putting the main credit sequence in and the main titles, the credits in the beginning.

**John:** Craig, I want to stop you and say I thought it was a really bold choice to have it all be like this model of the whole world, and the camera flies over it, and there’s a sun, and there’s little gears and things. I thought it was so innovative, what you’ve chosen to do there.

**Craig:** Shut up. We don’t do that. It’s an interesting choice you make. Episode to episode, it’s a little bit different. Sometimes there’s something that happens, and then we stop, and then we do the thing, and then we return to the episode. Sometimes we just do it, and then we do the episode. It’s basically how we feel it works best.

We do have to suddenly go, “Okay, this thing that we’ve put together, we actually have to now find a spot, stop, talk about a fade, talk about a cut, talk about how it works,” meaning if you have an episode that is designed to run uninterrupted, and someone says, “You have to find three interruption spots,” you can do it. You can do it. It’s annoying, and you don’t like it. I would hate it. I would throw a tantrum. I won’t do it. You can do it, is my point. It’s not going to be a disaster, meaning you don’t have to worry about how to write something that is and is not at the same time this Schrodinger’s episode that can both be ad-supported and not ad-supported. Just deal with it when it happens.

**John:** Another thing to stress is that, Kiefer, this is already happening overseas. Many things that are made for cable-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … and for streaming-

**Craig:** Don’t tell me that.

**John:** … here actually debut internationally on ad-supported.

**Craig:** No. You’re telling me that people are watching Chernobyl out there, and it’s being chopped up with ads?

**John:** Ah, that’s a great question and a thing our listeners will know. If any listeners have seen an ad-supported version of Chernobyl, do let us know.

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** I suspect it could be out there.

**Craig:** Write in and break my heart. Do it. Please. We’ve all gotten very sensitive about this, because, John, you and I have been doing this long enough, so we remember that when we would write a movie, the movie would be in theaters, then it would go to home video, and then eventually it would-

**John:** Go to broadcast TV.

**Craig:** It would go on broadcast TV.

**John:** Charlie’s Angels.

**Craig:** Yes, they would put it on television.

**John:** Charlie’s Angels was a $25 billion deal for ABC.

**Craig:** It was so much money. You would get a lot of residuals for that. Of course, they would chop the movie up. They would chop it up. They would replace language. There was a whole network TV ADR session you had to do. It was a thing.

**John:** We had to do that for The Nines, which to my knowledge has never actually been broadcast, but [inaudible 00:45:03].

**Craig:** We had a bunch of stuff running on TBS, I think, or something. Anyway, point being, they used to do this all the time. We weren’t such babies about it. Now I’m a big baby.

**John:** Now everything has to be exactly frame by frame. Craig is going to go to everyone’s house and turn off motion smoothing.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m the Stanley Kubrick of motion smoothing.

**John:** We don’t have to rant. Everyone knows motion smoothing is terrible. The best thing you can do-

**Craig:** No, not everyone knows.

**John:** While you’re home for the holidays, grab your parents’ remotes and turn off motion smoothing.

**Craig:** Turn off motion smoothing or anything that sounds like motion smoothing. Just go to the Menu. Go to Picture. Look for that stupid setting and turn it off. Next question.

**John:** Let’s go with Peter’s question. Megana, can you tell us what Peter had to say?

**Megana:** Peter asks, “I’ve been curious about this question for years. I’m a screenwriting nut like everyone else here, but in my chill time I love to research the projects of my favorite writers. IMDb never has them all. This I’ve known since the ’90s. I scrounge through trade articles as best I can to find them. For example, I’ve confirmed that Sheldon Turner has set up or been attached to at least 104 projects in film and television as a producer and/or writer. Something like 84 of those were scripts he’s worked on and been paid for since he broke into the biz in 2000. My question is, does the WGA have a database that has a list of every project every writer has been paid for in their careers, specs, rewrites, adaptations, script doctor jobs, and quick onset polishes?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Peter, so Sheldon Turner, a busy screenwriter for sure. He came in really about the same time as me and Craig, so he would have a bunch. I don’t know that I have 104. I have a lot.

**Craig:** I don’t know how many I have.

**John:** The second part of your question is does the WGA have a database of every project? Yeah. If you’ve been paid by somebody, a WGA signatory to do work, yeah, it’s in the database there. That is-

**Craig:** Wait.

**John:** … a record that you worked on that project, but not a public thing. That’s just behind the scenes. If you want to check for yourself, all the checks you’ve… No, there’s not a public-facing thing for that, because those aren’t movies that came out in the world. They’re just development projects.

**Craig:** Also, there’s not a database that shows the things that you’ve just been employed on, because part of the credit system is that we say, “Look, here is the credit for this movie.” Now we’ve started changing it. The point is, there isn’t like, “Oh, and here’s the 80 people that were employed on it.” No, there is not a public database with such a thing. Of course, the Writer’s Guild is aware, because you have to pay dues every time you’re employed, so they know. When it says he’s been set up or been attached to, I don’t even… Been attached to is a weird thing.

**John:** It’s a weird thing. It doesn’t mean anything.

**Craig:** Sometimes I’ll see these articles in the trades where someone’s like a writer’s been attached to something. First of all, I don’t want any article about me ever. Then second of all, I can’t imagine having an article that says I’m attached to something. That’s almost like, “So-and-so has asked this girl out on a date. Did she say yes?”

**John:** I think attached as a writer is a strange thing to me. I’d get I guess if there was a book, and this writer’s attached to do the adaptation. Attached as a director means something, although directors will attach themselves to 19,000 things they’ll never do.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Actors will attach themselves to things they’ll never actually do. Also, you’re saying 104 projects that he’s a producer and/or writer. Some of those producer projects there may not be really a record for, because if he’s just producing a movie and he’s not actually writing on the movie, there’s not going to be a WGA contract. He’s not getting paid as a writer. We won’t know to what degree those things were real.

**Craig:** Do you know how there are words that suddenly pop up in our business that are annoying, but people start to use them all the time in meetings and things?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know what I’m talking about, like little weird metaphors and things?

**John:** Yeah. “At the end of the day,” happened.

**Craig:** Exactly, the blank of it all showed up 10 years ago and never stopped. I don’t know, it must’ve been 70 years ago, someone said, “No, this person hasn’t been hired or anything, but they’re attached to it.” That became this cool, new, hip thing to say. Now we just accept it, like that it’s a thing. It’s not. It’s just dumb words that don’t mean anything. What does that even mean?

**John:** It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like hip-pocket deal or something, like wait.

**Craig:** What does that mean? “This agent hip-pocketed me.” They don’t represent you. That’s what that means. That means they chose to not represent-

**John:** They represent you if you’re getting work but not if you’re not getting work.

**Craig:** Exactly, so you don’t have an agent. That’s what that means. You’re attached to something, so they haven’t paid you? Okay, I’m attached to everything. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything.

**John:** I’m trying to attach myself to the Van Halen movie, which does not exist but I believe should exist.

**Craig:** No, you have attached yourself to it.

**John:** I have attached myself.

**Craig:** You have officially attached yourself to the Van Halen movie.

**John:** It’s in the transcripts. People will be able to Google it, like John August attached to the Van Halen movie.

**Craig:** You’re attached to it, absolutely, completely. I’m attached to Scarlett Johansson.

**John:** Do you know Scarlett? Scarlett’s great.

**Craig:** I don’t know her.

**John:** I like her a lot.

**Craig:** I don’t know her.

**John:** I just saw a clip of her on Kelly Clarkson, and she was [crosstalk 00:50:11].

**Craig:** I’ll tell you this much. I know that she married a guy from Staten Island, so that means I got a chance.

**John:** She also married a guy from Vancouver.

**Craig:** Wow. I’ve been to Vancouver. I don’t know. I’m already married. You know what, Scarlett? How about this? No. I’m turning you down. I’m already married.

**John:** You’re already attached.

**Craig:** We are no longer attached, Scarlett.

**John:** Wow. Good stuff.

**Craig:** Brutal.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see what’s here, and I don’t know what this is. Talk to us about your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** This is an advance. This is a One Cool Thing amuse-bouche for what is almost certainly going to be my next One Cool Thing. My next One Cool Thing, there is a game coming from Rusty Lake. You’ve played the Rusty Lake games, right?

**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve played Rusty Lake games.

**Craig:** They’re amazing. There’s a game forthcoming to Rusty Lake called The Past Within. The Past Within is coming out on November 2nd. That will happen-

**John:** The day before the live-

**Craig:** Oh my goodness, that’s coming. The Past Within, the forthcoming Rusty Lake game, is unique in that it requires two people to play it. The idea is that you are both on the app at the same time. You’re either in the same room or you’re talking over Discord or the phone or whatever. You need to cooperate, because you’re each seeing things on your version of the game as Player 1 or Player 2 that impacts how the other person is going to solve a puzzle. As an amuse-bouche, there is a game that does this very same thing. It is called Tick Tock: A Tale For Two. It’s been out for a bit. Let’s see. It looks like it came out in 2017 actually. It’s lovely. I played it with Melissa. You can play this with Mike. You can play it with Amy. Play it with whomever you want. Not Lambert. He is a dog. He’s stupid.

**John:** He’s sleeping too.

**Craig:** He’s sleeping and he’s dumb. It was quite gorgeous. The puzzles were very good. I thought they implemented the back and forth in a very smart way. It was engaging. What I liked about it was that we never got frustrated with each other. It was more like we really had to cooperate. It’s a short game. I think there’s only three chapters in it, or there’s a prologue and three chapters. It’s quite beautiful. The story makes no sense whatsoever. None. That happens all the time.

**John:** They get a mechanic [crosstalk 00:52:35].

**Craig:** Narrative is hard. I get it. The story is really just, what? Then again, the Rusty Lake folks, their stories make sense, but purposefully also don’t make sense.

**John:** They’re surreal.

**Craig:** They’re fully surreal, so I give them a pass on everything. They’re wonderful. I think Tick Tock: A Tale For Two is a very fun game. It is on literally every possible platform. Check that one out if you have somebody you like playing games with, in a good way, not like head games.

**John:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is Whisper by OpenAI. OpenAI are the people who do Dall-E. They have these giant train models of searching the whole internet to figure out what things are. They’ve been able to make Dall-E. Whisper is their version of a spoken language. Basically, it listens to countless hours of people talking and can understand what they’re saying and can give you transcriptions, and nearly real-time transcriptions of what people are saying. Craig and Megana, I have a link in the Workflowy here. Click through that and take a listen to this demo. I want you to see what it is you’re hearing.

[unintelligible audio clip plays]

**John:** Craig and Megana, what was it that you heard?

**Craig:** I’ll go first. That was Scottish. It was a Scotsman speaking with a strong Scottish accent. I heard helmet. I heard three holes. I heard something about weather. The rest of it was unintelligible to me.

**Megana:** I heard something about Merlin, but it was a Scottish accent. It was a man with a Scottish accent who was outside. There was a lot of bird noises.

**Craig:** Yes, I heard the birds as well.

**John:** Great. This is the actual transcription. “One of the most famous landmarks on the borders. It’s three hills, and the myth is that Merlin the magician split one hill in three and left the two hills at the back of us, which you can see. The weather is never good though. We stayed on the borders with the mists on the Yildens or Eildons. We never get the good weather, and as you can see today, there’s no sunshine. It’s a typical Scottish borders day.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** The model could actually figure out what this guy was saying, which is really impressive.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** I thought he was saying holes and helmet, and he was saying hills. You got Merlin right.

**John:** You got Merlin. You got Merlin.

**Craig:** Well done, Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Boy, that is… Wow. The program understood? It knew that that’s what that guy was saying?

**John:** It did. It was able to take that. Even with some of the tools we’re using to do Scriptnotes, we have transcription stuff built in, but it’s really trained on very specific English accents. It’s murky at times and doesn’t get a good sense of this. Here, because they trained it on all the languages, it can hear French and give you a real-time transcription in English. It’s really impressive. As great as all of the “draw me a flying cow” stuff has been, this is so useful and practical. You can imagine a year from now, five years from now, how important and impressive this is going to be.

**Craig:** We’re getting close to that day where everybody understands everybody. Then we can all be yelling at each other faster.

**John:** That’s what you want.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Speed. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Our outro this week is by MCL Karman. If hearing this outro has inspired you to write one of your own, let us provide you with some motivation, because we really do need some more outros. Send us your outros to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Hoodies too. 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 insects. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you!

**Craig:** Thank you!

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, you have an insect infestation in your apartment, correct?

**Craig:** Infested.

**Megana:** Yes, absolutely. My place is overrun.

**John:** How many did you see?

**Megana:** So far, I have seen one earwig.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god. This is like that Creepshow episode where the guy was completely surrounded by cockroaches. You are surrounded by ones of bugs.

**Megana:** I went to bed at 8 p.m. last night because I saw this in my living room, and I was like, “I can’t.”

**Craig:** Wait a second. I got to roll back. You in your 20s went to bed at 8 p.m. like somebody who lives in a rest home, because you saw… Now, by the way, I hate earwigs. We can discuss my horrible run-in with an earwig many, many years ago. It sent you to bed. You were that shaken. You had to get into bed. Did you fall asleep?

**Megana:** I did not fall asleep, no, actually, because once I identified what this bug was, and I Googled earwigs, the second entry that came up on Google… You know how they have those suggested questions?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** The second entry was, “Can earwigs get in your bed?” The answer was yes.

**Craig:** Of course they can.

**John:** They are mobile.

**Craig:** Exactly. They’re mobile. Unless your bed is surrounded by some sort of force field, yes.

**John:** A moat would be a choice.

**Megana:** I don’t know, I don’t really think of spiders as being in your bed.

**Craig:** Oh, they are.

**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had spiders in my bed.

**Megana:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Did you not know?

**John:** I’ve been bit by spiders in my bed in college.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I get bit by spiders. We have so many spiders in La Cañada. I get bit by them all the time.

**John:** That’s why he’s moving.

**Craig:** You wake up, and you have a bite. It’s not itchy. It’s just a bite. You’re like, “The hell is this?” Then you realize it’s a spider.

**Megana:** I guess I just had this willful ignorance that bugs-

**Craig:** Respect your bed?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They know, like, “You know what? Guys, she’s in bed. Let’s leave her. It’s her private place.” No, they don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** While Megana’s dealing with her one earwig, at our house, because of all the heat… This happens whenever it gets super, super hot. A bunch of ants get into our house.

**Craig:** They look for water.

**John:** Ants just suck, and they’re annoying. You see the line going through. It’s like, “Why are you here?” Their entire mission is to get to one little piece of toothpaste that is left on the counter. That’s going to be their meal for the whole colony.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** It’s so, so much.

**Craig:** See, the bugs in your house are cute. The bugs in her house are nightmares that need to be extinguished in fire.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**John:** Then we put out the ant traps. The ant traps do work. It takes the poison, and it kills the colony eventually. It is still just so annoying to have ants and to wake up in the morning and see now there’s a new line headed from point A to point B [crosstalk 01:00:00].

**Craig:** There is a real life horror show when you pick something up… I was actually at a hotel a couple of months ago. It was a really nice hotel, but they had an ant problem. I lifted something, and a billion ants went nyah. I was like, “Oh, god.”

**John:** As we established last week on the podcast, there’s 40 quadrillion ants on Earth. Ants outnumber us 25 million to 1.

**Craig:** There are so many.

**John:** They’re going to win.

**Craig:** No, they already have won. That’s the joke. We are here on ant planet. We have all of our debates. We fight wars where millions of us die. Ants are like, “What? I’m sorry, millions? Lol. That’s not a number. Call us when you’re into the trillions. We’re in the quadrillions, jerks.” We’re just guests on ant planet.

**John:** Craig, you promised us the earwig story, which we heard pre-show. Obviously, this earwig changed your life, and we want to hear about it.

**Craig:** I’m so angry about it. Growing up on the East Coast, I just never saw one. I assume there are earwigs on the East Coast, but there weren’t any in New York. There weren’t any in New Jersey as far as I could tell.

**John:** You had roaches.

**Craig:** Roaches, of course.

**John:** I hate roaches. I did not see roaches until I came to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Roaches in New York, sometimes they’ll cosign a lease with you. That’s no problem, but earwigs, no. I’m in LA. I’m in West Hollywood walking down… I believe it was Fountain. I believe I was on Fountain, John.

**John:** Take Fountain.

**Craig:** I suddenly feel this stingy, pinchy, nasty, bitey pain on my neck, like on the nape of my neck. I reach my hand back, spasm, like ah, and there’s something there, which is the worst feeling in the world. You never want to feel anything. You just want to feel your own skin.

**John:** You want it to be an illusion.

**Craig:** You just want to think, “Oh, this was one of those weird exogenous, no, endogenous pains that just come out of nowhere,” but no, there’s something there. I’m like, “Ah!” I throw it down. Then it’s on the ground. It’s on the concrete. I look down at it, and it’s a fricking earwig. I didn’t even know what it was called.

**John:** Because we have international listeners who may not know what an earwig is, we’re describing an insect that is maybe an inch long. Is that the size for both of yours?

**Craig:** Yeah, I would say.

**Megana:** I would say five inches.

**Craig:** That’s not correct, Megana.

**John:** [Crosstalk 01:02:14] five inches.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** Largely flat. It has just way too many body parts and limbs to it. It’s flat and [crosstalk 01:02:23].

**Craig:** The worst part is-

**Megana:** It has this weird pincer thing.

**Craig:** That’s the thing, its butt.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Its butt has two pincers sticking out of it like a lobster claw. It bites you for no reason. I didn’t ask it. First of all, how did it get on my neck? How did it get on my neck?

**John:** Did it drop? Did it climb up to it?

**Craig:** It dropped down. It paratrooped down onto me. Then it bit me. That’s the thing. Essentially, it bit me with its ass. It ass-bites you. It doesn’t die. At least bees have the dignity to die. They sting you, their stinger breaks off, and they die. You think, “You sacrificed yourself stupidly, but fine.” There’s some poetry to that. No, not this little bastard. This little thing just bites you for no reason. To that day, I have hated earwigs. We’re talking about 20 years, 30 years, still, if I feel a sudden pain, I think earwig. I’ve never been bitten by one again, or ass-bitten.

**John:** We cannot discuss insects without discussing the worst of all insects and the insect that must just be banished from the Earth, which is the mosquito, because when you and I moved to Los Angeles, Craig-

**Craig:** There were none.

**John:** … there were not mosquitoes.

**Craig:** There were none. It was actually one of the best things about coming from the East Coast, which is 98% mosquito, to Los Angeles where there were none. No one ever got a mosquito bite.

**John:** Then we imported some sort of-

**Craig:** What the hell happened?

**John:** Apparently, it was a slow roll-up from the South or some other place. We got these little mosquitoes that are down on the ground level.

**Craig:** They bite your ankles.

**John:** They’re ever-present. They’re always biting your ankles.

**Craig:** Ankles.

**John:** They’re the worst.

**Craig:** The worst. They’re just so terrible. Megana, I can’t explain what a paradise it was here. I have a friend named Linus Upson. I’ve known him since college. I think I’ve talked about this before. He was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google Chrome. He’s since moved on to a much more noble effort, which is trying to get rid of mosquitoes entirely.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** He has one of these groups that is essentially genetically engineering a mosquito to… The women are the problem. The male mosquitoes don’t bite you and make you itchy. It’s the females, apparently.

**Megana:** Oh, really?

**Craig:** Yeah, apparently it’s entirely the females. Basically, they’re genetically engineering these male mosquitoes to only get female mosquitoes pregnant with male mosquitoes. I’m probably butchering this. The point is, through some crazy breeding thing, they’re going to get rid of mosquitoes. Basically, the population eventually just goes completely sterile. They run out of women and they die.

**John:** [Crosstalk 01:05:12].

**Craig:** Like a lot of the corners of the internet. All the girls are gone, and it’s just guys angry at each other, and then it’s over. Mosquitoes are awful. They have been killing people forever with malaria. They’re no good. They’re everywhere now.

**John:** Their role in the food chain must exist, but it’s not substantial. Some bats and other things eat them, but we’ll make it work.

**Craig:** Exactly. I feel like we’ll be okay. We’ll be okay without them. It’s not like ants. We probably need ants to decompose everything.

**John:** They do. They help chop stuff up, which is really useful.

**Craig:** Help chop stuff up. Do we need roaches? Probably not, although again, they probably also break down a lot of garbage. They do show up where the garbage is. Maybe there’s a reason, but mosquitoes?

**John:** My first year at USC in grad school, I was living in campus housing. I had never encountered roaches before. I was in this apartment I shared with a guy. At one point, I unplugged the power adapter for my phone answering machine. This is way back in phone answering machine time. I unplug it, and all these tiny baby roaches were swarming around it because of the heat of the transformer for the adapter. That’s where I first learned about boric acid, the powder acid that you put out that they walk through and it kills them horribly. It’s the worst. Finding a roach on my pillow one morning was just-

**Megana:** Oh, no, your bed?

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** … terrifying.

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** I still have nightmares from that.

**Craig:** We’re not helping. Megana, we haven’t talked about spiders much. Do you hate spiders? Are you afraid of spiders?

**Megana:** I am very afraid of spiders. I do not like them. I feel like I’m slowly making my peace. Is the spider going to eat this earwig?

**Craig:** That’s the thing. The spider is your friend. My daughter is terrified of spiders. She will fly out of her room in tears over this. I’ve tried to explain to her that these little spiders that we get in our house, they’re wolf spiders, they’re not going to be a problem. That said, we do have a lot of black widow spiders up where we are. Megana, can I tell you a little bit of a ghost story about the black widow spiders?

**Megana:** Okay.

**Craig:** I’m going to get real close to the microphone. Here we go. When my daughter was young, she was in the Girl Scouts. One day, we had a Girl Scout event at the house. The girls, as the evening came, they wanted to sleep outside, like camping. We had tents. We have this pretty large lawn on our property, down in the back of the property. We set up the tents. Me and another dad were setting up the tents. There’s this little retaining wall with these little river rocks in it that bound that little lawn area. As the sun went down, the other dad was shining a light, and he said, “What are those?”

**Megana:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I shone my light on the wall, and Megana, I’m not saying there was a black widow or 5 or 10. There was thousands of them.

**Megana:** What?

**Craig:** Thousands, all emerging, because they had been living inside the wall, in the cracks of the rocks. As the temperature lowered, they came out. They were swarming, all of them, black widows. I said, “Okay, let’s calmly get these tents down, go back inside.” Here’s the thing. I didn’t think that the black widows were going to be leaving the wall. It was like, “There’s a lot of them, so let’s go back inside and tell the girls they’re sleeping inside, because… We’ll just make something up.” I can’t remember what we made up. Wolves. “There are wolves.”

**John:** Wolves.

**Craig:** Megana, you would’ve died.

**Megana:** I would’ve died. I’m very close right now. Is that real? Do they live that close to each other?

**John:** They can. They can live in groups.

**Craig:** Why are you asking John, as if I told you a lie? Megana, first of all, John’s not a bug expert.

**John:** I have been bitten by a black widow spider. I’m, out of all the people on this call, the only person-

**Megana:** He’s a Boy Scout.

**John:** … to actually survive a black widow spider.

**Craig:** He is a Boy Scout. That is true.

**John:** I used the venom extraction tool and got it all out and was fine.

**Craig:** That’s good. Did you think that black widow spiders were just loners, where they’re like, “I don’t want to talk to another black widow spider.”

**Megana:** Yeah, I thought you would just, worst-case scenario, see one.

**John:** I’ve only seen one at a time in my life.

**Craig:** There were so many of them. I’m looking up swarm of black widow spiders right now on the internet.

**Megana:** I’m so glad you’re moving.

**John:** He’s going to bring the spiders with him though.

**Megana:** I just want to put out a request to our listeners. If anyone is cool with bugs and they want to be my friend or if they have a good solution for being really scared of bugs, I would love to hear either possibility.

**John:** To be honest, cognitive behavioral therapy is probably the way to get through any of those kind of phobias. Basically, they desensitize you to it.

**Craig:** Some things we’re supposed to be afraid of.

**John:** It’s an overreaction of a natural innate fear.

**Craig:** Megana, you’re supposed to be afraid of black widow spiders.

**John:** We’re hardwired to be afraid of snakes. You can show a baby monkey a piece of hose, and they’ll freak out because, oh, it’s a snake.

**Craig:** (singing)

**John:** We need more baby monkeys, less black widows.

**Craig:** Aw, baby monkeys.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Megana, you’re not afraid of baby monkeys, are you?

**Megana:** I’m not, but monkeys are vicious.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. You’re not wrong.

**Megana:** Growing up, going back to India all the time, monkeys are more of a pest than I think people realize.

**Craig:** I saw those things where in the early days of the shutdown of COVID, there was a town. It was a village. It was a city in India where everyone had just gotten off the street because of the shutdown, and the monkeys took over. Oh my god. They were fighting each other, like monkey gangs fighting. It was amazing.

**John:** Eventually, they formed a society of their own. Were there problems? Yes, but eventually they found a good leader and democracy ruled.

**Craig:** Damn dirty apes.

**John:** Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Starbucks Seam Life Hack](https://www.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/16pvai/does_your_starbucks_cup_leak_sometimes_make_sure/)
* [John Scalzi’s Blogpost: Find the Time or Don’t](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/09/16/writing-find-the-time-or-dont/)
* [Happy The Last of Us Day!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBRRDpQ0yc0) Check out this trailer.
* [Whisper by Open AI](https://openai.com/blog/whisper/)
* [Tick Tock the Game](https://www.ticktockthegame.com)
* [Sign up for the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/) for more writing resources!
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by MCL Karman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/569standard.mp3).