Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/making-the-modern-comedy-series).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 551 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re going to the writers room to discuss the making of two of my favorite comedies of the last year. To do so, we have two amazing guests. John Hoffman is a writer, producer, and actor whose credits include Grace and Frankie and Looking, but most recently was also the co-creator of Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, and Martin Short. Season 2 premiers in June, but we have him here right now. John Hoffman, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you, John August, very much. It’s so nice to be here. I’m a big fan.

**John August:** Thank you very much for coming on the show. I loved your show. I was excited to see it beforehand because of the cast. What you were able to build that we’re… I really want to dig into the strange, very specific tone you got to and where that all came from. I’m hoping we can explore all that.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you. It’s a favorite topic. I love it.

**John August:** We also have Brittani Nichols, who is a writer, actress, and organizer, known for Suicide Kale, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and the phenomenal Abbott Elementary. Welcome, Brittani.

**Brittani Nichols:** Hey. Thanks for having me.

**John August:** Now, I want to talk to both of you about going from the whiteboard to a finished episode, about alt lines, tone, table reads, what you learn as the season unfolds, so just a few things. In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, if you’re up for it, I want to talk about the pressures and possibilities of being openly queer writers, because all three of us on this call are, and something we don’t get to talk about a lot. If you guys are game for that, we can do that as a Bonus Segment. Sound good?

**John Hoffman:** All in.

**Brittani:** Sounds great.

**John August:** Fantastic. Now first, you guys, we’re all working on acclaimed shows that got second seasons, so congratulations. This past week was a bloodbath for a few shows that didn’t make it to their second seasons or didn’t make the cut. Seventeen shows canceled in 48 hours, which is so brutal. Now, Brittani, you’re on a network show, so it’s a reminder that there still is a season to network shows. In the spring, a bunch of shows don’t make the cut. When you were working on Abbott, at what point in the process did you start thinking, worrying about a second season? Did you know early on, okay, our show is doing great, we’re going to be able to go back for a second year?

**Brittani:** I think we were all pretty confident from the first moment that we saw the cuts of the early episodes coming in, and so we were like, if we’re able to just get this out there, we feel pretty good about it, which was definitely a unique position to be in. I think that second-guessing varies a bit within a room, and the people at the top are a little more hesitant to be confident. Us lower-level, mid-level writers are very much like, “We think we’re going to be okay and feel pretty safe.” We’re not going to be out shucking samples, looking for something else to hop onto.

**John August:** Now, you got your renewal notice. Were you still working on the show when you got the call that you were going to have a second season?

**Brittani:** No, we were out of the room. We just were playing the waiting game and hearing about all of the backroom details that go into renewal, and based on if the studio has other shows that haven’t been renewed and if it’s a shared production and all the sort of stuff that I never really knew about, I learned about as we were waiting for something that we knew was going to happen and hadn’t happened yet and we were trying to figure out why.

**John August:** Now John, for your show, I went into watching the show thinking it was just going to be a limited series. I really thought there would just be one season. Did you know going in that you wanted a second season, that there was more to do? What was your process about thinking about a second season, and when did you know that it was a possibility?

**John Hoffman:** I actually did want and assume there would be a second season, I think because of the auspices around it and the desire to dive in and explore these characters and this world in the way that we were talking about in development. I think there was the sense like, okay, I think there’s a good shot. It’s how we went into a second season which was concerning to me. That was the big question mark of whether the show would be embraced, whether everyone involved with the show, who I loved and respected so much, would feel good about it. These are the questions that I obsessed on and just thought, oh god, what a nightmare if this doesn’t get received well or what a nightmare if Steve, Marty, Selena aren’t having fun or enjoying it or thinking it’s worth their time. That was where I was thinking more, and just entirely on story and entirely on fulfilling that crowd.

**John August:** Your shows are so different in a sense of Abbott Elementary is like a classic sitcom. It is an engine that can keep generating story. It can just keep going in a way that’s so nice and refreshing, we don’t see as much anymore, as opposed to Only Murders in the Building, which resolves. There’s a murder, and the murder is resolved. I guess it wasn’t until those last episodes I realized, oh, you were setting up hooks for a second season. That was always part of the plan.

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, it really was. It was the pitch from the beginning. When we sat down with Hulu, it was in the pitch, at the end of Season 1 we have three newbie true crime podcasters who find themselves suddenly the suspects in a new murder and the subjects of a new podcast that’s being done by their beloved mentor. That was really where we were aiming. I think when you’re making a murder mystery, you have to know where you’re aiming, to twist your way there. I felt, I know where we’re going and I know how to set it up so that it doesn’t belie the truth of what really happened in this mystery, but also it was just necessary in some way for the storytelling to have it be satisfying reveals and a leap forward into, oh god, now what, that takes you beyond how many people can die in one building.

**John August:** Now Brittani, you’re back in the room on the second season of Abbott Elementary, so obviously you can’t give us any spoilers, but as you were writing that first season, did you have a sense of like, okay, this is the territory we want to cover in this season, this is where we want to leave characters at the end of this season? Did that change at all during the time you were in that room?

**Brittani:** Quinta came in with a pretty good idea of where she wanted things to start and where she wanted things to end. It was really on us to fill in that middle and figure out how we got from point A to point B. It feels a bit like that this season as well, where she has what happened over the summer planned out and where we’re starting the characters and we’re figuring out where we want them to end up now, especially with… We’re hoping to have more than 13 episodes this season, so seeing what we can do with a little bit more time to play.

**John August:** You say you’re hoping for more than 13 episodes. That just gives me a panic attack. I can’t imagine doing 13 episodes, much less 18 or 22. It just seems like so much. Yet as we were talking before we got on the call, you were able to shoot your episodes in five days, which is just terrific. It’s so smart that you can do such a great show in such a limited period of time. John, I see you nodding here. Do you want 13 episodes? Do you want 20 episodes?

**John Hoffman:** No. I’m right with you in that. I admire so much. I talked to Quinta about this too. I’m like, “God, the idea of it seems so daunting.” To keep it alive and as fresh as you guys are doing on that show, and knowing the work that goes into the 10 that we have to do, and to feel like it’s fulfilling and deep and funny and all of those things it has to be, yeah, it makes me sweat.

**John August:** Brittani, you first came onto my radar because you had a tweet that showed some of the handwritten alternate jokes from one scene on Abbott Elementary. Can you describe what we saw in that tweet? Because it was just such a revelation to me, all the different ways you were trying to get out of that scene or what the anchor points were for that dialog. Talk to us about that tweet.

**Brittani:** We are lucky enough that we’re not under the gun constantly. We have a little bit of time to play with alts. We also are lucky enough that when you’re the writer of the episode, you get to be on set for your episode, which I think was really touch and go during COVID. We felt so lucky that we got to be there and also that we were given the opportunity to do that, because I know a lot of shows, if the showrunner’s there, if the upper-level producers are there, just because it’s your script doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be able to talk to the actors, look at the director, and figure out spots where you can play with things, play with lines. Actually, when I was on A Black Lady Sketch Show, we certainly did not have time to do that, but I would still prepare each day or have alts and just show up with alts.

With Abbott, I tried to do the same thing. I would have alts prepared, and I would also be writing while I was on set, depending on the blocking, depending on how things felt, on the tone, on what was hitting, what wasn’t. I tweeted a list of alts for a joke, because I thought I had some pretty good ones that didn’t make the cut and just really wanted to share them. I thought it was fun. That’s I think a practice a lot of the writers here do, just trying to make ourselves laugh, keep it fun on set, keep the actors surprised, guessing. Also, it encourages them I think to have some fun as well. We’ve definitely had a couple of lines from this past season that the actors came up with themselves. It’s been really fun, especially with some of the inspirations for me, like Parks and Rec and Community, where I know some of the famous lines from those shows were alts or were improvs.

**John August:** We had Mike Schur on the show recently talking about Parks and Rec. That mockumentary format is so handy for being able to just throw out ideas. The camera’s rolling, you pitch a thing, and they could say that thing, and you could see what actually lands, as opposed to I’m guessing Only Murders in the Building. It’s a really tightly shot, cinematic show. Are alts a thing that happen on your show, John?

**John Hoffman:** It’s so funny. Marty and I were just talking about this last week and dinner. He said, “I get asked all the time about improvving and alts and things like that.” He said, “Honestly, it’s so rare.” As you point out, it’s necessarily so in certain ways, because it is very densely plotted. Also, what I love is that I get the benefit of Marty Short’s phone calls after a script lands in his laptop, I want to say 45 minutes after we sent it. He’s already pitching on… “There’s just two lines, John.” I get one-sentence emails from Steve, always, three times a week, which I love. They’re either ideas for the show or there’s one line. Steve will walk onto set, ready to do a scene, and inevitably, “John, John, there’s just one line.” I’m like, “I know. I’m sure there is. Let’s make it better.” That will happen. In general, the other thing that happens is Selena, every now and then… They’re all just lovely, generous, open people. Selena, when she feels something is not right or false or this doesn’t feel… Nothing is better for me than hearing her say, “This is what I think I would do,” and we have a good phone call or two about it. It’s great. That’s really the limit. Sometimes for alts, I’m reaching or thinking or popping another line just to button a scene or something like that. Otherwise, it’s pretty straight to script.

**John August:** Let’s talk about the script and the actors encountering the script. Do you guys have table reads for Only Murders in the Building? Do you table read each script?

**John Hoffman:** We have blessing of table read over Zoom that’s only for cast and myself and for Dan and Jess, Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal. We don’t have studio or network there for that. It’s very familial and very Zoom-like, Hollywood Squares with a ridiculous cast. It helps them tremendously on a Saturday afternoon to read through it and hear it. Then many times the actors will make appointments on Zoom with other actors to say let’s go over our scene. It’s great, and yet there is a freedom that doesn’t put the angst around a table read as much either. Everything’s been signed off by the time we have them.

**John August:** Now Brittani, for Abbott, do you guys table read?

**Brittani:** We do, yeah. We do Zoom table reads. The actors have their videos pulled up. When you are the writer of the episode, you’ll cast the day player parts with the other writers. That’s always fun. You might get your feelings hurt a little bit if you’re not cast. Then we’ll have network and studio folks on the call as well, but without their videos on.

**John August:** Let’s talk through the whole process for coming from the whiteboard, the start of the season, blue sky, we could do anything, to a finished episode. John, for yours, you started with, I assume, a pilot script and then went to a room to figure out the rest of it. What was the process for you?

**John Hoffman:** That’s exactly right. This one, I just felt the onus immediately of being as prepared as I possibly could. I did have a full three-act structure to the whole season. I had a real sense of how it would move. I had the main thematics of the character arcs across the season, and a pilot, a pilot I worked on with Steve and got great input from Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal as well. All of that was in plan in a big pitch. Then got together with the writers and tried to make sense of the pilot, because I had certain specificities in the pilot which posed questions that I didn’t quite have the answer to yet, one of them being who is the ultimate killer. I knew I would need that pretty quickly. The writing team and everyone else got in there, and we sorted out how that would make the most sense and how that would make the most bang for our buck.

**John August:** It sounds like the pilot was asking provocative questions, and then it was the job in the writers room to find provocative answers.

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, I saddled them with that. I was definitely like, “Yeah, we got to figure that out.” I was happy to have a group to work some stuff out that way. It was all strangely though infused, I should say. Also, just on a personal level, I had been through this very profound year before this show landed in my lap, a personal experience around the murder of a friend of mine that I had been out of touch with for a while. I found myself investigating and getting involved in that in a way that was revelatory to me. I’ve had a very personal connection to the kind of story we’d be telling in this show. A lot of it was guided by the underlying truth that I had experienced in that journey. That helped guide us a bit into the-

**John August:** John, let’s dig deeper on that, because I think those writers, as they’re approaching a piece of material, the question you’re always asking them is what is your personal connection to this. It sounds like your personal connection to this was you had the experience of being a person investigating a murder or asking people questions about a murder. Your assumptions of what you did, what you didn’t know, and the ethics of what you’re doing in terms of this investigation, how much of that carries through into the script, and how much of your quest is really the quest we see the actors going on, the characters going on?

**John Hoffman:** I think the spirit of what I had experienced is in the show. It was something Dan… I don’t know why I told this story in the first meeting with Dan Fogelman, but I couldn’t not, because I was so deep in it. It made us connected. I think that was the core of the show. That became the core of the show. The funniest moments can come at the most traumatic. The best laugh is at a funeral. The best laugh is at the most inappropriate time. The most bonding moment can be in the most shocking moment that you share with people that you may not know that well, and therefore your vulnerabilities are stripped bare and you are investing with people and around people that you wouldn’t normally.

All of those things felt like a basis of where I wanted the funny to live in this show and where I wanted the poignant to live in this show. It’s very much what I was experiencing. I was taking big leaps in my own life to go and meet people I didn’t know around my friend’s death, his family, his children. I didn’t know they existed before I found myself in Wisconsin meeting them and being completely charmed and having huge laughs with them out of this huge traumatic moment that they had all experienced. There’s that that feels to me connective tissue that we could play with. It felt like a bit of a guiding force for how to best play the comedy and the drama in our show while trying to keep it all fairly buoyant.

**John August:** Brittani, Abbott Elementary exists in a world that has The Office and Modern Family, so this convention of characters acknowledging the camera’s established. For that aspect of tone, you had it. Yet Abbott is so specific and uncomfortable at moments. We’re seeing things we don’t normally see on screen. Can you talk to us about when you’re in the room pitching on an Abbott Elementary or pitching an idea for that, what does that feel like? Because it sounds like [inaudible 00:17:34] that you were probably describing some really uncomfortable things and trying to find a funny way into it. What is the process of… You are a story editor on the season. What are you doing in the room as you’re pitching an idea?

**Brittani:** Luckily, I’m a producer now.

**John August:** Fantastic. Congratulations.

**Brittani:** Congratulations to me.

**John August:** Second season, love it.

**John Hoffman:** Go get it, Brittani.

**Brittani:** One of the first things that we did the first season was talk about the characters’ relation to the camera. Obviously, Ava really loves it. She brought them there. She is living for them. The rest of them, it varies from tacit acknowledgement to trying to hide to being caught by it constantly. I think even as far as character development, their relationship to the camera I think tells that story as well, so seeing how people are going to be reacting to the camera in the second season. Is there a way to even use the camera against other people or for your own devices? Are there ways to manipulate the camera? That’s definitely something that we are talking about all the time, because we also want to be very careful in how we develop the camera’s relationship outside of the school.

I think with mockumentaries, as they go on, you tend to expand the world a bit. This being set at a school, that will be outside of the school, possibly at apartments. It’s going to be a decision from us about where is it realistic for this camera to follow people. How much are we going to hang on to this convention? Because shows like Parks and Rec, they at a certain point left that behind a little.

**John August:** They can go anywhere.

**Brittani:** I think we just want to be aware of it so that if that ever happened, it’s happening because we’ve made a collective decision to move away from that. Right now, we’re still pretty firmly planted in the boundaries of that reality.

**John August:** I’m thinking back to The Office. This may not be the first time we really left The Office, but I remember the Diwali episode was one of the first times where we seen people outside of their normal space and comfort zones and you get a sense like, oh people go home to a place after they leave work, and they have a whole other life. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we really have not seen outside of the walls of the elementary school in that whole first season, but we really have been locked in there. I guess we go to the zoo in the last episode, but it’s literally a field trip.

**Brittani:** Yeah, we go to the zoo and we go to the nail salon.

**John August:** That’s right.

**Brittani:** At the nail salon, it is very much a topic about the school. We still buy why we’re there. We still get why we’re there.

**John August:** Let’s talk about the topics you do get into in Abbott Elementary, because especially in those first couple episodes, the stakes feel a little bit higher than most of these mockumentaries in the sense of there are kids who you want to see getting a good education, yet the system seems stacked up against them. The first episode is about literally getting rugs for the classrooms and the shenanigans you have to go through to get them. As you’re discussing those, do you bring up the uncomfortable idea and everyone kicks around trying to find the funny? What is the pitching process in the room about it, that goes from here’s a general idea to this becomes a center of an episode?

**Brittani:** We don’t pitch lesson-first. It really is what do we think is funny, what is the situation, and then from there we will layer things on or we’ll find things. It’s just an inherently political show, I think just from the fact that it’s at a public school, and we do have a very contentious relationship with public schools in our country right now. All of those things I think are really naturally interwoven, and it’s really easy for us to organically find those tie-ins that I think a lot of the time just come from a moment of dialog, a scene here or there. It’s not what is driving the story. It’s the background. It’s something that is constantly present and that we acknowledge when we have to. There is no separating the show or the characters or the situation from reality.

I think that’s something that makes some people a little uneasy if that is something that they’re facing in their real lives. It could be a pretty hard show to watch because we are having people not laugh at the situation, but laughter and humor is a coping mechanism. I think that that’s one of the ways that we want to use the show overall is there’s so much that’s happening constantly. This can be a nice little reprieve from that, while not completely divorcing yourself from what’s happening.

**John August:** Great. I want to talk to both of you about the documents that come along the way. We’ll start with you, Brittani. You’re in the writers room for Abbott Elementary. You’re figuring out an episode. That’s literally done on a whiteboard. I guess probably it’s a virtual whiteboard for a lot of this, because of the pandemic. At what point does it come off that board into an outline form? Are you pitching story areas? What are the documents that happen before there’s a script?

**Brittani:** For us that is a sort of general brainstorm doc of one or two lines of I think this would be funny, what if this happened. We just blue sky that for a bit. Then we’ll identify from within those what seems like an A story, what seems like a B story, do any of these seem like thematically they resonate with each other and trying to pair those together. Then we will do a story area. We’ll do just a few paragraphs about the A and B story. Then after the story area we’ll go to a pre-outline. We’ll have all the scene slugs and just some sentences below that about what’s happening, a little bit of dialog, a little bit of jokes. Then that’s when we’ll go to the outline.

**John August:** The story area is the first document that you’re turning in to other people outside of the room, that’s going to a studio and a network, taking a look at what the general idea of the episode is?

**Brittani:** Yes.

**John August:** John, curious on your side, what does it look like for the documents along the way? You have such a puzzle piece of a show. A lot of stuff can happen in an episode that ties into things two episodes later. What do the documents look like along the way?

**John Hoffman:** It’s so much so early for ours, because in some ways we have to have the whole season mapped out in general terms in order to make sense of episodes. A lot of it is focused early on in the writers room to map out the full thing. Mystery-wise we have what I call clotheslines. We’ve been nothing but a Zoom room. We couldn’t deal with whiteboards on writers room. It’s terrible. I know I should be better about these things, but I was like, no, I can’t. We had no whiteboards. I would call them clotheslines, the mystery clothesline, the character arc clothesline, the bucket of things that we want to do that feel like comedic premises that feel fertile. There was all that. Really, I have to do a full season pitch over Zoom to Hulu and 20th. We work on that pretty quickly to get that together.

**John August:** How long is the full season pitch?

**John Hoffman:** Forty-five minutes to an hour. It’s very visual and slap-happy and gets you all of the things we’re exploring in the season, a general three-act beat of a three-act structure for the season, and then the character arcs for the season. Then we jump into Episode 1, Episode 2. Then we accelerate it through all the things we still don’t know yet to come, but we can give general blocks of areas. Since the show itself is set up so that each episode has its own way in, a perspective through the narration of the podcast that is being done, and the template we now have of walking in from a perspective of a kind of New Yorker that you might not expect to be telling the story, we’re making this little bit of a tapestry of characters of New York through episode per episode. The big arc is laid out, and then each one feels like its own little episode I can hold in my hand is what I keep on saying to the writers, and understand what we’re telling in that story. We actually do not go to outlying stage to present to anyone but ourselves. We only give full scripts into studio and network. It’s painstaking to get there, but they have understood the entire arc of where we’re going by the time they’re getting a first episode.

**John August:** This presentation which is taking the place of the outlines, how far are you into your writers room by the time you’re putting together this presentation?

**John Hoffman:** It’s been at least two months, two and a half. It’s the most painstaking part of it. You make commitments to it that you have to be able to toss away. You also have to be prepared to fulfill them in better ways than you pitched them in that 45 minutes to an hour, for sure.

**John August:** Is Only Murders in the Building block-shot or are you shooting it episode by episode?

**John Hoffman:** We shoot two episodes in a block. We have one director handling two episodes. They’re always back to back, or have been so far. We have it mapped out in twos.

**John August:** Brittani, you were saying earlier that your episodes shoot in a five-day week.

**Brittani:** Yep, Monday through Friday.

**John August:** Wow, such a dream. We were also saying that that set that we’re seeing in the school is truly a set, and so you guys can do whatever you need to do in that one standing set, which is just remarkable.

**Brittani:** Yeah, we’re on a four in, one out schedule, or we were the first season. I think we might get a few more days out this season.

**John August:** Four in, one out means that four days you have to be on your sets and one day you can be out in the fields with trucks and trailers and doing all that stuff. That’s to get your exteriors for places that couldn’t be on there or if you need to go inside some place. Before this, you were working on A Black Lady Sketch Show. Is that entirely out?

**Brittani:** The season I was on, which was the first season, we were completely on location for everything.

**John August:** With Abbott, John’s talking about one director’s doing two episodes back to back, you’re mixing in scenes. With you guys, how far ahead of the episodes shooting do scripts tend to be?

**Brittani:** I think we’re going to have turned in maybe 10 episodes I believe is the goal before we start shooting the first episode.

**John August:** That’s fantastic. That’s great. I want to talk a little about career trajectories. We got right into the shows you’re making and not where you came from. John, what’s your origin story? I know you’re an actor as well as being a writer. How did you come up the ranks to be doing what you’re doing?

**John Hoffman:** I know, I make no sense when I look at my own IMDB or whatever it is or any resume I look at. I started as an actor in New York after college and then found myself working really hard to get cast in plays that I was then embarrassed to have people come and see. I thought why not try and write something. I found myself writing for myself as an actor. When I wrote, I wasn’t just writing monologues or one-man shows. I was writing plays. I found myself learning structure in certain ways. I’ve always been a storyteller, I think when I was a young person. That segued into coming out here to Los Angeles and getting work as an actor in TV shows, many TV shows that weren’t very good in certain ways. Some were wonderful experiences. It was again that muscle in me that was saying I think I do better with the things I write than it was a crazy ride of screenwriting for me where my writing got picked up by certain producers, certain studios.

At the time when writers got deals at studios, I was getting deals at Disney and Warner Brothers and writing screenplays and learning how to do that while being able to make a living. I segued that way, mainly into growing into more deeper love with storytelling that way, but also finding myself picking the projects that were harder to get made and finding my way into getting very close to getting certain things produced that felt very close, and after years of work and things like that, challenges all around, and finally relented and joined a team at HBO where I’d been developing many shows for them.

They finally said, would you like to join this new show called Looking? I thought, I’m going to have trouble hitting someone else’s target for a show. They know what they want. Let them do it. I consulted on it, because I loved the people that were involved. I remained great friends with them to this day. It allowed me to feel myself as like, oh I could be valuable in a room. I learned a lot and very quickly moved through the television world to land in this crazy place.

**John August:** Now, Brittani, you are an actor as well. What was your journey coming up as a writer?

**Brittani:** I started as a PA, background actor, writer for a website called Autostraddle just to make a few pennies here and there as I was trying to become a writer, because I really was steadfast that I was not going to work in a service industry. I just was going to be broke until I wasn’t broke. I did a web series called Words with Girls. Then I wrote a pilot version of that. I was part of this Listserv for Black people in the industry. Denise Davis, who was one of Issa Rae’s producers at the time, and continues to be, sent out an email, and I cold responded with a pilot of mine. Issa ended up independently producing it alongside two other pilots. Right when we were going to try to take those out on the town, Insecure got picked up. That was enough to give me a little bit of credibility.

I ended up working on a BET variety show. I ended up doing Billy On the Street in one of the earlier seasons, and really just through luck and randomness and being prepared, just continued to I guess somersault from one thing to the next, until I made a feature called Suicide Kale that did the LGBTQ film circuit, won a bunch of awards there, audience awards, comedy awards, etc. That is ultimately what landed me my first scripted job, which was Take My Wife on Seeso, RIP.

**John August:** Oh, Seeso. It sounds like you say lucky, but also you were putting yourself in positions where luck could strike, having the courage to blind submit to Issa Rae’s producer. You’re making those choices. You had the material that you could send, and you weren’t afraid to share it with people. It sounds like you were happy to work for people who wanted to employ you. Didn’t matter whether Seeso was a real network or not, you were there and eager to do it, ready to step up and show that you could do these things. We have a couple questions from listeners. Most of our listeners are aspiring writers and writer-directors. Maybe you guys could weigh in on what you think they should do. Megana, do you want to start us off?

**Megana:** Great. We got a question from Tim from Washington, D.C. who asks, “I’m an East Coastie writer-director who moved to Los Angeles from 2016 to 2021 after having made an indie film that sold at Sundance. Though I improved as a writer and improved my network, I had so-so relationships with my reps and wasn’t really able to get anything going during my time in LA. My question is whether I’d be better served living in LA year-round versus instead living where I would like and visiting Los Angeles for a few weeks or months out of the year. I’m trying to cobble together one of those careers where I can write feature scripts for myself to direct, occasionally write features for hire, develop television, and occasionally direct for TV.”

**John August:** John, what’s your instinct? Do you think that Tim from DC should come to Los Angeles? Should he go to New York? Right now in 2022, what should Tim be doing?

**John Hoffman:** It’s hard to say for Tim personally. I don’t know what his life is like. It is hard for me to imagine a place, I hate to say this in this way because it sounds so corny, but more embracing of talent than Los Angeles. New York is tough. New York was tough for me. New York is theater-based. I love the theater. I found it hard to break into television and film through New York. People do. I know they do. I think in general the swath, the breadth of opportunity in Los Angeles is just greater for what it sounds like Tim wants to do. In the world of film, independent film, you can find your way easily. I was just talking about Looking and talking about my friend Andrew Haigh who broke in by making an independent film in England for $45,000.

**John August:** That’s Weekend.

**John Hoffman:** Exactly. That’s a great model. Not to say you can’t do it. It can happen anywhere if you’re working at your craft and making it in the way that you want, bring yourself to it. I do think there’s no way to get around the fact that there is more work, more opportunity, more people in the business, more conversations you can have with people that can lead to opportunities.

**John August:** Brittani, what’s your instinct for Tim?

**Brittani:** I can’t speak to the feature aspect of it, because that just might be something that’s completely different. As far as the jobs that I’ve gotten and the friends that I’ve made that have helped me make my feature, that was all a product of being in LA. Every job that I’ve had I can connect back to a chance meeting or a random text or some event rather than I can trace it back to me being incredibly talented, which I am.

That is an additional thing that never would’ve been any use to me if I hadn’t been out there making connections, making friends, and just being around. I tell people this all the time. I hear people when they’re hiring. I hear people when they’re casting. So much of it is, oh, I just saw so-and-so at this coffee shop. Oh, I just ran into so-and-so at the movie theater. There’s so much just recency bias of the last person I saw is the person that I’m thinking of and the person I’m going to hire. If you just do not show up and be in people’s faces, it’s just easy to forget you, no matter how talented you are, unfortunately.

**John August:** I’ve said this on the podcast several times. I bumped into Melissa McCarthy at Starbucks. She’d been in Go. She’d had a tiny part in Go. She was great in it, but the movie hadn’t come out yet. I bumped into her in Starbucks off of Melrose and said, “Oh, you’re amazing in the movie. I’m going to write something for you.” Then I did. Then we ended up writing a bunch of stuff together. She ended up being in my little short film, and our careers grew together. Being in the place where people are trying to make film and TV is really helpful just for the accidental overlaps of interest. I think, Tim, if you have the opportunity, if you didn’t like LA the first time, maybe give it another shot and maybe just find ways to put yourself out there more so you’re bumping into people the way that I bumped into people and Brittani bumped into people. Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** Yeah. Jason asks, “I understand that new writers are generally expected to specialize if they want to get anywhere with their career. How do you choose which path to take when, for example, your first love is feature comedy but your idea generator tends to produce six times as many pitches for TV dramas? Assuming the quality of my writing in both is comparable and at a professional level, and that I would enjoy drama television writing only slightly less than feature writing, would I be better off investing in writing this one comedy feature idea or pursuing several drama samples?”

**John August:** Brittani, what do you think, sample-wise? You were writing samples I’m guessing for years. Were you trying to specialize? Were you trying to just write a huge variety of things?

**Brittani:** I knew I wanted to work in comedy, but even comedy right now, there’s such a diverse set of what is considered a comedy. You got hard comedies, you got drama comedies, you got mixed genres. I think honestly, it being good matters more than it necessarily falling into any specific bucket. I’ve been writing off of the same sample for, I’m not kidding, probably four years at this point. It’s just because it’s really good. It’s just the one that people gravitate towards the most. Though I have a large selection, it’s really just getting it to the point where you feel like it really exhibits your voice and really is something that only you could write. That should come across no matter what genre it is.

**John August:** John, what’s your instinct? Do you think Jason should try to specialize or branch out?

**John Hoffman:** I agree with Brittani. I came at this, as I said, as an actor. My path to what scripts I wrote, the genres and all of it, was wildly an actor’s point of view, like I want to play every part and be comedic and be dramatic. I confused a lot of people, truthfully, in the screenwriting world when I was doing a World War II epic and then I was doing a really straight down the line comedy. Then I directed and wrote a family film for MGM. It’s all over the map. I agree with Brittani. You find the thing that is the great story and tell it the best way you can. That’s going to be the ticket I think more than anything, than genre or anything like that. I think the most personal and the most connective to what you do and what you love and what you respond to or what you recognize out in the world as a great story that no one’s told yet or a great story no one’s told in the way that you want to tell it, that’s the thing that ultimately will feel signature to you. That’s everything.

**John August:** I’ve said before on the podcast that I got pigeonholed really quickly as a guy who does kids movies. My first two paid jobs were A Wrinkle in Time and How to Eat Fried Worms. I was just getting sent material that was about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I was just very much pegged as a safe family guy. Writing Go was really helpful for me, because that became my sample for years. You could look at Go and see it as a comedy. You could look at it and see it as a drama, an action movie. Whatever you wanted to see in that movie, you could see. Writing something like that that can serve more than one purpose can be really helpful as well. It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend things that people should check out. Brittani, do you have anything you want to recommend our listeners investigate?

**Brittani:** I want people to check out the Knock LA Voter Guide because we have an election coming up on June 7th.

**John August:** I had a hunch that you were going to talk politics. Tell us about this guide. Tell us what are some races that we really need to be keeping our eyes on.

**Brittani:** The races that I think people should really be paying attention to are the mayoral race. We have a billionaire who is running, Rick Caruso, not great. I don’t know if you’re a billionaire yourself.

**John August:** There are no billionaires on this Zoom.

**Brittani:** Then maybe that might be your guy. If you are not a billionaire, then I would caution against supporting his candidacy. The sheriff’s race, our sheriff currently, Alex Villanueva, is the laughingstock of the nation. Actually was just on John Oliver’s show. He has been putting out some really, I think, hilarious while also deeply disturbing ads, if you haven’t had a chance to check those out. They’re very cinematic. If you’re a filmmaker, they’re worth checking out. Paying attention to the sheriff’s race and seeing who else is out there that you might consider supporting, because those are the two really big ones. The Knock LA Voter Guide if you are progressive, which I think most people in LA consider themselves to be, even if that’s not necessarily the case. You should check it out.

**John August:** One thing I would stress is that this election could be a preliminary election. There could be runoffs for mayor and for sheriff, but not if either of these candidates get over 50%. You may have different opinions about who you want to be the mayor that’s not Rick Caruso, but if you really don’t want Rick Caruso to be the mayor, just don’t vote for Rick Caruso, but definitely vote, to keep him below that threshold, same for sheriff. We can have a whole other podcast about why we vote for sheriff, which just seems really crazy, something you’d want to appoint and then be able to fire when they are terrible. That’s a whole different podcast on law enforcement. John, do you have anything to share with us? Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**John Hoffman:** I love that we go political deep, because it’s all I can think about these days. I do think that we’re in a time, we’re heading to a time, it’s the most tumultuous time I’ve known in my life. I think any time you’re wondering what to do with yourself as a writer or a creator, if you’re not looking to tell the stories that are happening now in real ways, that I watch what’s happening in the Ukraine and recognizing that’s a camera sitting in someone’s house that’s changing the world right now. The personal stories are going to be the ones that make the most impact. To me, that’s everything right now is to look to ways to lean into making the world better. It’s our vote. It’s our activism for the things that matter most to us right now. Find the ones that feel straight to the heart for yourself, and don’t hesitate to get out.

**John August:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ameena Walker, who’s writing for a newsletter called The Prepared, which is actually a really great newsletter you should also subscribe to. Basically, it talks through the logistics industry and how products go from place to place and how things get made. This article that she did was about… The headline is, “Each year, millions of barrels are shipped from New York City to the Caribbean. Here’s why, how, and the economics behind it.”

She’s talking about how people from the Caribbean Islands who live in New York City are always sending stuff back to home. They’re always sending stuff back to the islands. The way they do this is they buy these barrels that are about 40 bucks, and they pack it full of all the stuff that they can find to stick in there. It could be toasters. It could be rice. It could be whatever. They seal it up, and they take it to a specific delivery place that just ships stuff on boats to the Caribbean Islands. Then it carries from there to individual homes. It’s just such a specific thing that I’ve never seen before, because I always think about sending money home. I always think people who live here are sending money back to the countries they come from. In this case it literally is a barrel.

It just felt like such an amazing story opportunity for getting that barrel, what you’re putting in that barrel, that barrel gets lost. It just felt like a very cool story area that I’ve never seen before. It’s a good reminder to me about why it’s important to try to make sure we get writers on staffs who have a range of experiences, because I wouldn’t know this was a thing that existed. It just feels like such a great comedic or dramatic potential that I wouldn’t know about if I hadn’t found this article or if someone hadn’t pointed me to it. This is by Ameena Walker in The Prepared. We’ll have a link in the show notes to this.

That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Daniel Mix. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Brittani, what are you on Twitter?

**Brittani:** @bishilarious.

**John August:** It’s true, B is hilarious. John, are you on Twitter?

**John Hoffman:** I am, yes, @johnnyhoffman.

**John August:** Fantastic. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. 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, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 being queer in Hollywood and queer stuff, queer stuff in general. John, Brittani, an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you.

**Brittani:** Thank you so much for having me. Really would be wild to go back to 2010 me and say this is happening.

**John August:** Why so? You read my blog, didn’t you?

**Brittani:** I did, yes. I credit your blog for really teaching me a lot of the underpinnings of screenwriting.

**John August:** Fantastic. Makes me feel so happy and so old.
[Bonus Segment]

**John August:** There are three queer writers on this Bonus Segment for the podcast. I guess I just want to start, I was out really from the very start of my career. Was that true for the two of you as well?

**John Hoffman:** Almost. I would say because I started as an actor, it was a tricky moment and a tricky time for me. I was very cautious about that, because clearly I’m leading man material. No. It was all that dance. It was just a different decade. I came out probably very shortly after I realized I don’t want to be an actor. I actually wondered if the last part I got on a television show is actually a replacement happening that never happened. It was a question as to whether I was going to get replaced, because I was supposed to be a character that was deeply invested in women. I don’t know that I was pulling it off as clearly as I could’ve been. That was a moment.

**John August:** You were Frasier Crane-ing it a bit there?

**John Hoffman:** Exactly.

**John August:** Or Niles maybe, a little too Niles?

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, a little bit of Niles. That was for a moment. Then it was just the greatest relief and creativity just opened me up completely to be able to just own everything and be honest about it.

**John August:** Brittani, how about you?

**Brittani:** Yes, my professional career, was out the whole time. I think when I first started writing plays in college, I was definitely still grappling with some things. I think the arts is how I figured some of that stuff out.

**John August:** John, I would say your show, there’s not a lot of directly queer content. I would say it has a queer sensibility. I’m not even sure why to say that. I guess there’s a New Yorker quality. The aesthetics of it feel kind of gay. To what degree do you think your show has queer elements to it?

**John Hoffman:** I hope it does. I think all the things you point out, like New York, the theatrical way we’re telling the stories.

**John August:** Splash the musical feels like a-

**John Hoffman:** Splash the musical.

**John August:** It’s a very queer idea.

**John Hoffman:** Not to mention the poster of the show I really want to see, which is in Marty’s, Oliver’s apartment, Newark, Newark. All of that sensibility, I can’t help it. It was crying out for everyone I knew in prewar apartment buildings in New York City when I was living there, when I was forming my creative identity there, all of the characters, all of the richness of New York. It’s representation within the fabric of the truth of New York. There are representations, Detective Williams, played by the amazing Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who narrates our Episode 6. She and her wife were struggling with naming their child.

**John August:** I forgot that, but yes, absolutely.

**John Hoffman:** That’s what I hope. It’s almost like you want to blend it all together as New York does. I think that’s part of it is the sensibility and the storytelling feels not afraid to be filled with pathos and filled with struggle and vulnerability and everything that makes people laugh in the deepest way in the queer community for me.

**John August:** Brittani, on the projects you’ve been working on, how often do you feel like you’re able to bring some aspect of queer culture into it, or to what degree do you feel like that’s helped you sell some jokes, make some things work? To what degree are you able to bring that into the room?

**Brittani:** The first couple of scripted series that I worked on both had queer main characters. With Black Lady Sketch Show, definitely was able to get some queer sketches in there. They’ve continued to do that even now that I’m gone, because there are plenty of queer women in that room. Then with Abbott, I think this is probably the first time where there hasn’t been a very obvious queer hook to the show, and so finding moments in Abbott I think has been interesting. I think the moments that we have found, people think they’re really fun. As we grow the world, I think we’ll be able to see more queer characters in ways that I would like to see them more, which is just existing and just living their lives and having normal jobs.

We did have a moment like that in the first season actually, where there’s a delivery woman who is just very clearly a stud lesbian, and it’s very quick, but so many people messaged me just being like, “That person was hot. Is there a way to bring them back? Also, it’s so fun that there’s just a queer person existing and there was no commentary on it.”

**John August:** A person existing on screen is such a signifier. I just remember growing up watching TV shows, and you just see like, oh, that’s an actual person who does that thing. I grew up with… We had Paul Lynde in the center square of Hollywood Squares, but we didn’t have a lot of actual… I think part of the reason why we love Bewitched so much is that, again, you have Paul Lynde, but you have that sense of it has a queer sensibility even if there are not openly queer characters. I feel like the one delivery person in that background shot isn’t a big thing and yet it is for that kid who’s watching that wants to say oh, I see myself in that character.

**John Hoffman:** In the storytelling, I feel that. That’s so right. I was recently talking to someone about What’s Up Doc and how that’s informed our show in a certain way. Again, not outwardly queer characters, but the sensibility in the storytelling, I remember that so clearly opening up my brain and like, why am I into this and why am I so deeply intrigued and all of that, poking around at that to give people the sense of possibility and wonder about a way to tell a story that’s a little bit heightened maybe and connective tissue to more characters than would typically be on your TV screens.

**John August:** One of the things I loved about Looking was that that show was full of gay men and other queer people who were not saints, and they were actually kind of obnoxious at times. They didn’t know what they wanted. There’s that thing, either the gay people have to be funny or they have to be heroic and saintly. In this case, they were neither. That was remarkable in its time.

**John Hoffman:** Not to mention Chris Perfetti from Abbott Elementary.

**John August:** Who is delightful. Let’s get back to Chris Perfetti because he’s great. He reads as gay to a gay person immediately, and yet the show holds off on the reveal until pretty late on that he has a boyfriend. Clearly, everyone else in the universe knows that he’s gay, even though it hasn’t been said. When his boyfriend is revealed, they first mention his boyfriend, that’s news to the characters in the show. Did you guys always know that the reveal was going to come about when it did?

**Brittani:** We did. We talked about it early on, because there are certain things that we as writers know about the characters that we’re just keeping close to our chest. I think for queer people, we definitely were like, oh, obviously this is family. Most of the world is not queer. People were genuinely surprised. We even tried to point to it a little earlier in the episode where he gets roasted. Someone calls him gay Pete Buttigieg, which he says is repetitive. A lot of people didn’t catch that. A few people on Twitter did. I think it’s looking back when you rewatch the season, a lot of people will be like, okay.

They were layering that in without explicitly saying it. We definitely didn’t want to make it a huge moment, because he’s existing in a world that knows that he’s gay and has accepted him. It’s more about what is it about his relationship that is revelatory to his relationship with Janine, rather than it just being a shock that he has a boyfriend, and then being sure to bring that boyfriend in later in the season and not just be something that we pay lip service to and then never really see that relationship.

**John August:** In some ways I think I blame Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory for people being confused about the Chris Perfetti character, because Sheldon Cooper, any queer person can see that’s a gay person, that’s a queer person, and yet the show makes them straight. It always feels off to me that it’s not acknowledging that this character is who we think he is.

**John Hoffman:** I agree.

**John August:** That’s my little rant about Big Bang Theory.

**John Hoffman:** I agree. I also just want to say what I love is the thing that we’re doing now. I don’t know, starting with Looking for me, just because that was something I worked on, but I loved that discussion. I loved so many of the discussions around the writers room on that show and how it always had to be about character. It wasn’t the fact that they were gay that you were talking about by the end of Looking. Maybe that was one of its problems with connecting to the gay community in some ways. I think it was about the character flaws and about other things. Of course they’re all in bed with each other. They’re all looking for people of the same sex and all that. It’s all there. It’s connecting through character and the moves of which, the way in which you approach love and romance and relationships and struggles with your own history that tie in, certainly, but make it more dimensional. That’s all I hope for, to continually make this all the more dimensional and just unafraid.

**John August:** I think what’s crucial about the Chris Perfetti character… I’m sorry, I’m forgetting the character’s name, so I’m just calling him Chris Perfetti.

**Brittani:** Jacob.

**John August:** Jacob. What I love about Jacob is he’s sipping a character independent of his being gay. We can see all of the choices that he’s making and what he wants to do and how he keeps bringing up Africa. Those are all very specific things that have nothing to do with his sexuality, so that he doesn’t have to carry a lot of water for being gay. He doesn’t have to carry that into the storylines.

**Brittani:** Yet we really try to make him being queer inform that specificity. We talked so much about how does that white person become that sort of white person. We’ve talked really extensively about his upbringing and what it was like for him coming out and what are the situations that led to him being the way that he is. I think that it is deeply informed by the fact that he grew up a queer kid. Getting to explore that and finding ways to explore that as the show goes on is something I’m personally really excited about.

**John August:** Talk to us about those conversations. Are those being written down in some sort of bible form? They’re not canon yet, but they’re what you guys are thinking about for his history. You have some sense of who his parents are, what his family is, where he’s from, even though it’s not been established in the show yet?

**Brittani:** Yeah. We just have tons and tons of notes. What we’ll find I think a lot of the times right now in the second season is a lot of false starts where we think this is this story that’s going to bring this to the surface, and then we’ll get to writing it and we’ll go, “No, not yet.” It’s a little bit there, you’ll get a little bit here, but we’re not going full bore into that yet. It’s just I think a lot of excitement about really wanting to explore so much about so many of the characters, but still the confines of a half-hour sitcom. You really only have so much time. Wanting to give it the space that it needs to breathe and really hit I think is just something that we’re going to keep trying to do and keep finding exactly which stories are going to allow us to tell those stories the way that we want to. We’re just tracking all of it, talking about it all the time.

**John August:** Fantastic. John and Brittani, absolute wonderful time talking with you both about queer things. Congratulations to both of you on your second seasons. I cannot wait to see them.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you, John, so much. Great talking to you.

**Brittani:** Thank you.

**John Hoffman:** Great talking to you too, Brittani.

**John August:** Cool.

Links:

* [Only Murders in the Building](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12851524/) on Hulu
* [Abbott Elementary](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14218830/?ref_=nm_knf_t3) on ABC/Hulu
* [John Hoffman](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0388971/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JohnnyHoffman)
* [Brittani Nichols](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4575382/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BisHilarious)
* [Remittance by the Barrel](https://theprepared.org/features-feed/shipping-barrels) by Ameena Walker
* [The Knock LA Voter Guide](https://knock-la.com/los-angeles-progressive-voter-guide-june-primary-election-2022/)
* [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 Daniel Mintz ([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/551standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/entrances-and-exits).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hey, Yankee fans. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 550 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you move characters in and out of a scene? Do you even need to? It’s a very technical, crafty, words on the page topic, the kind we haven’t done in a while, because we haven’t had Craig for a while. We’ll also have listener questions on bad behavior by producers, managers, and even good friends.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, do we want to live forever? We’ll discuss longevity and the possibility of never dying. First, Craig, we got two pieces of Craig-centric follow-up for you.

**Craig:** Oh, all right.

**John:** This one goes all the way back to your Q and A episode, which I’m sure you don’t remember. There was a guy who wanted you to convince him to drop out of film school. Megana, we got an update from him, don’t we?

**Megana Rao:** Yes, so Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School wrote back in, and he said, “Thank you so much for answering my question on Episode 544. The first thing I want to do is apologize to Craig. Everything you said made sense, and I couldn’t have agreed with your thoughts more, but unfortunately, I just can’t bring myself to drop out. Given my situation, dropping out would force me to step my part-time work up to full-time and find a new place to live. However, while this would be difficult to do, it would still probably result in a boatload of money saved and give me far more time to work on my writing. The real problem is I just can’t stand the idea of everyone in my life looking at me like I’m an idiot. Dropping out of college, especially when I’m this close to finishing, isn’t going to make sense to anyone around me. While I know Craig might be on my side, it won’t really sway the opinions of my family or friends. It’s not like I have some concrete thing I’m dropping out for to point people towards. Being in school makes it look like you’re working toward something. While in this business, that might not really be the case, people on the outside aren’t going to understand that. I wish I could be the kind of person that didn’t care about this and just did what I knew was right, but there’s something inside of me that just won’t let me.”

**John:** Craig, I listened to that episode, and I thought your advice was my advice. I would encourage him to drop out.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what, Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School. I don’t want you to beat yourself up too much, but do me a favor. Don’t make this a final decision, because I’m not sure everyone in your life is going to look at you like an idiot. In fact, I’m pretty sure that everyone in your life is going to spend about seven seconds on this and then move on with the rest of themselves, because that’s who they’re thinking about all the time. I just don’t know why people will really get that worked up. Your friends are going to get that worked up over it? Really? Because honestly, I didn’t really care whether my friends graduated from college or not. That’s not what I valued about them. Yes, being in school makes it look like you’re working toward something. That’s how they get you. That’s what you’re paying for, an illusion, which you now realize, I think, is an illusion.

I also notice that you said, “Given my situation, dropping out would force me to step my part-time work up to full-time.” Yes. This is okay. Here’s the thing. I think you’re scared, and I get that you’re scared, but take a moment. Don’t necessarily think of this as a final decision. It’s okay if you stay in college. I won’t be angry.

**John:** One additional thing this makes me think of is this theory that you have 4,000 weeks in your life. Basically, if you live to 80 years old, you’re going to have essentially 4,000 weeks to spend. If Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School decides to drop out of film school, he’s really basically taking that chunk of time and deciding to do something different with it. I think it’s his time alone. It’s not his friends’ time. It’s not his family’s time. It’s really how does he want to spend that time. If it’s at school, great, but if it’s not in school, that’s also fine.

**Craig:** You get once, one trip. It’s okay if you finish. Go ahead. I’ll tell you, what’s waiting for you on the other side is a lot of other things that your family or friends may not get. This seems like maybe time to start worrying about that, or at least worrying about it but facing it anyway, because nobody really gets what we’re doing over here in this business. Most people in this business aren’t in this business. They try and be in the business, and they fail. Everybody’s going to be looking at you. You’re going to have to face it at some point.

**John:** Megana, we have more crucial Craig follow-up here.

**Megana:** Yes. Andy in New York asks, “I Googled Craig Mazin orthotics to find the name of the product that Craig mentioned as his One Cool Thing in Episode 492, and he said as he unboxed and deployed them that they felt like other insoles he’d used, but that over time he’d see how they worked and report back, which he did a week later but not since then. I’m wondering, what is the long-term verdict now that a year has passed? Are they still holding up and supportive? I’m a runner with high arches and developing a murderous heel problem that some store-bought Dr. Scholl’s type inserts are helping a little with, but I need something more substantial.”

**Craig:** I’m glad that you checked in on this, Andy. They held up. The sneakers that I generally wear right now are pretty supportive for my flat feet. I have the opposite problem that you have. I don’t use them with these, but I will slip them into boots. I will slip them into dress shoes and things. They absolutely work. They are, as far as I can tell, the exact same damn thing that we were paying way too much money for when we went to the orthotic foot podiatrist. I think actually that that’s what they were doing there. You would go to the podiatrist and you would step on something and they would take a thing of it and send it off to some factory. These guys were like, we’ll just give you the box of foam and you can do it yourself, go to the same factory.” The answer is, Andy, yes, I think they are worth giving a shot. They do seem to me like they are pretty much exactly what you would get if you went to a doctor.

**John:** Nice. All right, Craig, it has been way too long since we’ve had you here so we can do a craft episode. I really want to focus in on entrances and exits. I thought we might start with an iconic entrance into a scene. This is from an independent film called The Room. It finds one character coming onto this rooftop and meeting his friend Mark and initiating conversation. Let’s take a listen.

**Johnny:** I did not hit her. It’s not true. It’s bullshit. I did not hit her. I did not. Oh hi, Mark.

**Mark:** Oh hey, Johnny. What’s up?

**Johnny:** I have a problem with Lisa. She said that I hit her.

**Mark:** What? Did you?

**Johnny:** No, it’s not true. Don’t even ask. What’s new with you?

**Mark:** I’m just sitting up here thinking. I got a question for you.

**Johnny:** Yeah?

**Mark:** You think girls like to cheat like guys do?

**Johnny:** What makes you say that?

**Mark:** I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just thinking.

**Johnny:** I don’t have to worry about that because Lisa is loyal to me.

**Mark:** Yeah, man, you never know. People are very strange these days.

**John:** Craig, there’s so much to unpack here.

**Craig:** There is not.

**John:** It really is a remarkable occasion. Even the most perfectly performed version of this scene has some real issues in terms of characters coming onto the scene. Let’s talk about entrances. Let’s talk about exits.

**Craig:** Oh hi, John.

**John:** Hi, John.

**Craig:** Oh hi, John.

**John:** I’m going to monologue to myself for a second. Then I’m going to notice that you’re there. Then I’m going to start the conversation.

**Craig:** “I did not hit her. I did not.” On a roof?

**John:** On a roof.

**Craig:** On a roof.

**John:** I’m going to throw this football to nobody on a rooftop.

**Craig:** First, I’m going to throw my water bottle on the ground, and then, “Oh hi, Mark.” Entrances and exits are extraordinarily important, and to me, afford you a possibility to find the spine of your scene, the structural aspect. We’re not necessarily talking about all the lovely little bits and bobs that happen through relationship and dialog and thoughts and unspoken feelings, but rather the structure of it all, what does it look like, where are we, what’s the pace and the tempo. One of the things that I think about when I’m directing scenes is entrances and exits and how they occur, from whose perspective, why are people entering, what kind of energy do they have when they’re entering, where are they going, where are they leaving. Entrances and exits will take more time to shoot if you’re doing them properly. Bringing people in and out of spaces matters. Let’s dig in to how we can help shape those moments on the page so that when they get to the screen, they don’t look like what we just saw.

**John:** Let’s go into the history of entrances and exits, because obviously, originally, before there were motion pictures, there were staged plays. Characters need to enter into a scene. You look through Shakespeare’s plays, characters enter and they exit, and that’s great. It’s fine. People are coming in from the weekends or you are lifting the curtain to reveal people already in the scene. Through the wonder of film and television, we can just be in the middle of a scene. We can cut to the middle of a scene, and we don’t need to have characters enter and exit, except sometimes it’s incredibly helpful.

I want to talk about how we make those decisions as writers. I think Craig makes an important point, is as a director you are also making some decisions about shooting those entrances, shooting those exits, making sure you have choices and options. You can be thinking about does the camera find the character there, is the character already there. You’re going to be making those choices from the start. A lot of it is about POV within the scene and also from the audience’s perspective, who is important. A character that we follow coming into a scene, we are with them. We know that they are the person we are centered upon. If we’re just in a scene where a bunch of characters are there, we may not know who is the person who’s our point of view. It may only be when we follow one of those characters out of that scene we realize, oh, this person now is carrying our point of view.

**Craig:** You can obviously make a handoff of POV, where you start with one person’s POV and then it turns to another. The camera just now picks up a new person. Typically, that’s probably not going to happen in a very typical way. Somebody enters a space and ideally, they enter with purpose. This is the most important thing. Obviously, this clip from The Room is really funny because the dialog is ridiculous and the acting is terrible. Underneath the ridiculous dialog and the bad acting, there is a root cause. The root cause is purposelessness. There is no reason for this man to be entering and walking out onto that roof. None. He just does it, because the movie needed him to be on the roof.

While we may think of this as the domain of movies like The Room, I actually see this in writing all the time from people. People just enter. They walk into a space purposelessly, and then something happens. I refuse to do this. Everybody who’s going into a space has a purpose. It doesn’t need to be earth-shattering. Sometimes it’s I can’t find my keys. There needs to be a reason you walk into a room. If you walk into a room without a reason and then something happens, without ever understanding why they don’t like it, the audience will not like it the way you want them to.

**John:** 100%. I see this on the page a lot too. I see it in some of our Three Page Challenges. I see it in scripts written by newer writers, where they are constantly having people enter into spaces. Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you might want to have a character enter a space, which I think are sometimes more limited than you’d imagine. Obviously, you’re saying there’s a purpose to it. Obviously, the character has to have a purpose. You as a writer may also want to give them a purpose, because you need that entrance to show geography, to establish geography. It gives you a chance to move from one space into another space and give a layout of what this space is going to be like.

You might have a character enter the scene because you want to build tension, build tension with the other people who are in there, or because in this new space is going to be some danger, some peril, some immediate attention that’s going to be happening. Show that character entering, as I said before, because you want to establish that this next scene is happening from their POV and that you make it clear that this is the central character I want you to be following as this next scene happens. All that only happens if you need to have a character walking in, because you always have the choice to just start the scene with the characters already in it. You could start with just a line of dialog. Characters don’t need to physically walk in in most cases.

**Craig:** That’s really where you can expose that you’re missing something, because if you do imagine starting the scene with somebody already there, you probably start feeling a bit ill as you’re writing it. What are they doing? Because there’s supposed to be a whole scene that happens. There are these meta requirements. I need a scene where Mark listens to whatever the Room guy’s name was, where the Room guy tells Mark about his troubles with his girlfriend that he did not hit. Fine, okay, I need that. Great, that’s what I need as a writer. Now, the characters are not accountable to my needs. They have to present as human beings with their own needs and their own purposes. They don’t need to be there unless I can see them on screen going, oh my god, there’s only one person who could possibly understand the position I’m in. Then maybe I can see it. If you imagine them just starting on the roof together in their weird chairs, it would be a very awkward beginning, because there’s really no reason for them to be there.

One of the things that we have to think about when we are writing is drawing a line between the fact that we need people somewhere and that they don’t know that. You can come up with almost anything. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. It doesn’t have to be even impactful as a character. If I needed to get Room guy on the roof, he’s angry, he walks into a bathroom, he tries to splash some water on his face, and no water comes out. He slams his hand on the sink, “Dammit, nothing’s going right today. My girlfriend’s-”

**John:** “I did not hit her.”

**Craig:** “She’s falsely accused me of domestic violence, and also the plumbing is not working. I have to go to the roof and check the water tower,” blah. Then he goes to the roof and he’s like, “Bah!” Then he’s slamming on it. He’s like, “Mah, mah.” Then Mark is like, “Hey, Johnny.” He’s like, “What? Oh hi, Mark.” I understand why he’s there. Now, Mark is going to have to explain why he’s there. That’s the first question. The first thing that should be out of this dude’s mouth is not, “I did not hit her. I did not,” but they need reasons. It could be mundane. It could be anything. It just has to be compelling is the most important thing.

**John:** Let’s talk about if you wanted to remove the entrance of a character. You want to actually start the scene with the two characters talking. How do we do that? It comes from the scene before that. Basically, are you leaving the prior scene with enough of a slant, with enough forward energy that we can come into that next scene understanding what it is that they’re doing? This could be an intervening scene. Basically, when we see those two characters there, do we understand what each of them wants, what their motivation is, and what this conversation or this moment could be about? That’s really what we’re asking. That’s why you don’t have to have characters enter into every scene, as long as we understand what they’re doing there, which is why Mark is on the roof, why Room guy has come up onto the roof. Then it’s fine. We can do it. Otherwise, you’re going to probably need to show some connective tissue to get us up into that space, because otherwise it won’t make sense why we got there.

**Craig:** Roofs are challenging, because people generally aren’t on them. Now, if they were, say, at a restaurant, then you could start it in media res, meaning, for those of you who have saved money and not gone to film school, right in the middle of stuff. Right in the middle of the action, you just cut into the two of them are sitting there at a table, halfway through lunch. One of them is shoving salad into his mouth, and the other one’s like, “I don’t know, I didn’t hit her, and she’s saying that I hit her.” The other one’s like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” because we understand as human beings, I don’t need to see them enter the restaurant, be seated and all that. That’s okay if the place requires it.

Now, there are places where you must enter. New places. You must enter a new place. When I say new place, I don’t mean a new place like a new restaurant. I mean a new place of significance in your story. You don’t want to just start with people in the middle of, for instance, a basement in a house, where they went looking for a murder victim, and they find bones. They should enter the house. They should look for the basement. They should walk down. It should feel creepy.

**John:** Let’s talk about why you want someone to enter into that basement. You probably want to establish some geography so we know, how do I get from where I am to where I get out, because that could become very important, and also just to establish what is this place. If you just show us this dark room, we don’t know where we are. That’s why it’s so helpful to have a character lead us from a place we do know into this place we don’t know.

**Craig:** Yes. Here’s a little fun technique I use sometimes. I guess I’ll call it the reverse entrance. You do start in a space someone has not entered. They’re already there. We don’t know what it is. We are confused. They have a moment. Then when they exit, we go, oh, that was a basement, or oh, that was a fake thing or whatever. I guess the best example of the reverse exit are all the simulation scenes where something’s happening and then the lights come on. It’s like, you weren’t really in an airplane. It was a simulation. That’s a reverse exit. You can try these things. You just have to give people signposts as you do it.

**John:** Now let’s talk about exits, because so often the standard of screenplay advice is basically get out of the scene quicker. Getting out of the scene quicker often means leaving before the characters are leaving the scene. If you think about how movies generally work, if you and I were having a conversation, we wouldn’t get to the crucial point and then just one of us just leave and physically walk out of the room. Craig and I sometimes, that would happen. Instead, we would keep talking. We don’t want to keep talking. We want to get to the next thing, and so we just cut to the next thing.

There are times though where you may want to show that exit. We talked about that at the start. You may want to hand off POV from one character to another character. You might want to really just make it clear that the scene has ended, that there’s not going to be an ongoing continuation of the dialog, of the conflict that we saw, that it really has ended and one character has left and headed in the direction that’s taking us to the next part of the story. I would suspect that, Craig, even in the scenes you’re working on right now, the scenes you’re shooting, you probably anticipate characters exiting, that you’ll make choices ultimately though in post about whether you’re going to show the exit or not show the exit.

**Craig:** I try and write that in. I try and plan that on the page. If there are two people in a scene or more, the reason to show somebody exiting at the end is to then put the camera on the face of the person who is remaining, so that I understand how they feel about what this person just said. Walking away from somebody indicates finality. It’s a pretty good way of saying you have a choice to make, figure it out, I’m going to walk away from you now, or perhaps it’s I’m leaving you. If somebody is breaking up with you, they should definitely exit the room. That would be a weird… Sometimes on soap operas they’ll do that, where someone’s like, “We’re through,” and then they just cut to the other person’s face, but the other person never leaves, just to save time. If the point is I’m leaving you, leave.

If I want to see how somebody feels by what that other person has said, and they’ve essentially left them in a space where they could go different ways, sometimes, sure, it’s interesting to watch them leave, because their leaving is meaningful to the people who are left behind. If it’s not, then it’s not necessary. Then you absolutely can just end on someone’s face, considering what’s happening. If you are alone in a scene and you leave, the only real reason that I would ever need to see someone leave alone is if something then changed after they left. They’re playing with their puppy, and then they’re like, “Oh my god, I wish you could talk.” Then they leave, and then the puppy’s like, “If you only knew.” Yeah, sure, but otherwise-

**John:** That’s going to be a really unusual situation.

**Craig:** Very, very rare.

**John:** Let’s take a look through some of our own scripts about some moments where we’ve had characters enter and why we scripted them in to have characters enter into scenes, because I think it would be sometimes better to actually look at things on the page. I’ll start with a little snippet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’ll just read this aloud. “The front door swings open, revealing Charlie’s father, a lanky, hardworking man in his late 30s, who manages to be grateful for his blessings, however slight they are. ‘Evening, Bucket.’ ‘Hi, Dad.’ Mother says, ‘The soup’s almost ready. I don’t suppose there’s anything extra to put?’ Off her husband’s look, there’s clearly no more food coming. Ever chipper, Mother says, ‘Well, nothing goes better with cabbage than cabbage.'”

This is an example of a scene that’s been happening, and a new character enters into the scene. Father Buckets could’ve already been in the scene, but it’d be very hard to shift our focus to Father Bucket’s if he was already in the scene. Having him come in the door changes what this moment is about and lets him drive the next little bit of conversation. Bringing a new character into an existing scene is a classic example of why you’d have to show the entrance of the character.

**Craig:** Also, sometimes somebody needs to share information with the audience. In this case, there’s information that you are putting out there through some nicely done exposition. The information you’re putting out there is that they’re extremely poor and short on food to the point where there’s no protein to put in their cabbage soup. I say protein because somewhere along the line restaurants started saying protein. They used to just say meat. Then they switched over to protein.

**John:** It can be tofu.

**Craig:** I guess I’m going to go with that, as if Father Bucket was ever going to say, “Oh no, no, I’ve brought tofu.” That’d be kind of amazing actually, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if he just brought home tofu. You need people to know that. The problem is, if Dad is already there, why would she just suddenly say, “Hey, by the way, now, even though you’ve been here this whole time, I have a question for you.” Because he enters, it allows Mom to ask a question that’s been on her mind. It gives us a chance to have some natural exposition, as opposed to some weird, forced exposition.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s take a look at a little snippet from Chernobyl. Do you want to read this aloud for us?

**Craig:** Sure. “Brazhnik, 20s, enters the control room in a panic. ‘There’s a fire in the turbine hall. Something blew up.’ Dyatlov pauses, lost in thought. His face is unreadable. Agonizing seconds tick by. Then he turns coldly to Akimov.”

**John:** You made the choice to have Brazhnik enter into the scene. Again, it’s an ongoing scene, and a new character enters with new information. That’s crucial. I can imagine a version of the scene where Brazhnik looks at some sort of terminal thing or he gets a call and he says this, but it makes much more sense to have a new character enter into the scene to let us know this.

**Craig:** This was about keeping a sense of panic. People running in and saying things, and that person looks confused, tells us a lot, more so than if someone looked at a monitor and goes like, “Uh-oh, there’s a fire in the turbine hall.” People can go, okay, I guess that’s a fact, but I get to see somebody’s face. I get to see how someone reacts to somebody running into the room, which is interesting. I also get a sense that there’s a world beyond this room that is very different than what’s happening in the room. There’s a lot of information that can happen, but only happens if somebody new can enter and disrupt the conversation that exists.

**John:** Also giving us a sense of geography. We know how do I get into and out of this room, which becomes important. You’re establishing a new character, Brazhnik. This is the first time we’re seeing him.

**Craig:** And the last, as it turned out.

**John:** It gives a moment to put a spotlight on this character, which would’ve been hard if they were all already in the room milling about. A very classic thing.

**Craig:** There was an interesting thing where he runs through and says this. Dyatlov makes a decision. Brazhnik is like, “What do we do about the fire?” Dyatlov says, “Call the fire brigade.” Then Dyatlov walks out, leaving him. This guy came in figuring something would happen, and then somebody walks out and makes an exit, sort of like your entrance changed nothing, my friend, goodbye. Entrance and exit there doing almost all of the work.

**John:** Lastly, lets take a look at a clip from The Nines. This is Melissa McCarthy’s character, Margaret. It’s the first time we’re seeing her. She’s in a police station. It’s again one of those, I guess we could call it a reverse entrance, where we’re not really quite sure why we’re here or who these people are until the second character comes in, which is Gary, played by Ryan Reynolds. “Margaret says, ‘He’s coming. I’ll call you back later.’ She hangs up, wrapping the earpiece around her phone. We reveal Gary being escorted through the glass doors by a polo-shirted parole officer. Margaret moves to intercept them, offering a hand. She says, ‘Hi, Margaret, I work for Lola.’ Gary, ‘I know.’ She says to the parole officer, ‘We need to go out the back.'” We’ve established a new character and that she is going to be interfacing with him and actually has some authority over the situation here. She could tell a parole officer what they’re going to be doing. Again, I’m using the entrance here to allow me to establish this character without getting a full proper introduction and then changed POVs when we finally see this character we’ve already established in the film come out.

**Craig:** In the How to Write a Movie episode, we talk about these different axes of action. One of them is internal, and one of them is interpersonal. Exits and entrances give you a chance to blend both, which is a nice thing. If you think about how we go throughout our day, much of our day is spent with ourselves thinking. We’re in our own heads. Then there’s parts of our day where we get out of our own heads. We have an interaction. The entrance and exit forces somebody out of their internal state.

When Margaret’s on the phone, technically she’s interacting with somebody, but in fact it feels internal, because we’re just looking at her. We’re in her head. We’re thinking about things. She hangs up. In the space between her hanging up and Gary suddenly appearing, there’s this brief moment where she’s in her head, and then boop, you got to get out. That helps actors. It gives them things to do. It gives them changes, which they love. It allows Margaret to move. It says, “Margaret moves to intercept them.” She’s got purpose. She’s driven by the fact that he has entered, as opposed to him just being there and her saying, “Hi, my name’s Margaret. I work for Lola. We need to go out the back.” She wouldn’t feel like much of a person. She has life and existence because she exists prior to his appearance.

**John:** All through these examples the actors who play these characters can know what their motivations are. They know what they’re trying to do in the scene, which I think is so crucial. I think the entrances and exits are helping them there figure out what it is they’re trying to accomplish next, because when you’re on the set as the writer or the director, and they’re coming up to you, it’s like what am I trying to do, here it’s on the page. You can see what it is they’re trying to accomplish in these small moments. Great. Craig, it’s a pleasure to get to do another craft little segment with you here, but we have a ton of listener questions stacked up, so maybe we’ll try to get through some of these listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s go.

**John:** Megana Rao, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Can I ask a question about the thing you guys just talked about?

**Craig:** Wait.

**John:** Please, please.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on, so you’re just going to jump the queue, Megana, and put your question first? Fine.

**Megana:** You’re right, you’re right. Fine, we can go-

**Craig:** No, put yours first. I need to know.

**John:** Please do this.

**Craig:** Do it.

**Megana:** This topic came out of a discussion where John was saying that one of the things he’s learned as he’s grown as a writer is to avoid writing characters into scenes where they don’t have anything to do. In a project that I’m working on, I have a few scenes where it’s about a girls cross-country team, and so they’re traveling. They’re on a bus. They’re in locker rooms together. The dialog is mostly between one or two teammates. Occasionally someone will jump into the action of a scene by interjecting. That feels true to just flitting in and out of conversations and jumping in. I guess I’m reluctant to block or stage it too much, because I don’t want to over-describe and make it difficult for the reader to follow. That feels like a more directorial thing for me. I’m curious if you think it’s easier for the audience and the medium if I show these characters physically moving in and out of a space more. Does that make sense?

**John:** It does. The scene you’re describing is on a bus, you said?

**Megana:** Or let’s just say it’s in a locker room.

**John:** Obviously, we talked before on this show about how in a bigger space you’re going to still have smaller spaces, and you’re going to have groups of people together. People can move between those groups if that’s helpful. I think finding a way to describe this place versus that place, this larger space is going to be your friend. If you need to have one of the characters move from one group to another group, that’s great. You try not to make it too complicated on the page, and really just focus on probably just the dialog, the conversation between those people, and not have it be a big thing. If it was on a bus or in a locker room, up with Cheryl and Sandy, then back with Robin and Kennedy, as they’re talking, their things. You can move back and forth between them. It can be pretty natural. Craig, any more thoughts for Megana there?

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t worry too much about this sort of thing. If you have a couple of people talking and then you just needed one chime-in line from somebody, just say so-and-so passes through frame, tosses this line out, and then they’re gone. You actually use the frame as your exclusive aspect. In this way, we’re not staring. We don’t have to look at the people not doing something. They can go not do something outside of the frame of what we’re looking at. Then what I try and think about is geography and where two people might be and why other people aren’t right next to them, listening to them. If other people are right next to them, listening to them, then they are doing something. They’re listening and they’re reacting and they’re feeling. If you want one of them to vaguely overhear, drop a little thing, you can also just hear them start the line from across the room, and then the camera cuts and shows them across the way. They have been listening, ha ha. Lots of ways to do it. Is it a comedy?

**Megana:** It has comedic moments, but I wouldn’t say it’s a comedy.

**Craig:** Little more leeway in comedies, but honestly if there’s a vaguely comic moment, that gives you more leeway. Even if there isn’t, just think of the frame of what you’re showing the audience as the space. And any character that’s not in the frame, you’re not accountable for in that moment. If you want to bring them in, you can. You can always bring them in just by having them enter.

**John:** Craig, I have a question for you. Because you’ve been doing this show and directing things or working with other directors, if you have a character exiting the scene and probably exiting frame, if they’re exiting on the right, what is your expectation about where in the frame that character will enter the next time we see them? Is that a thing that’s top of your mind or just whatever works works?

**Craig:** No, unless we’re continuing with them. If they exit right, and then immediately the next cut is them entering, then I would want them, if they exit right… Actually, it really doesn’t matter.

**John:** You could make both things work.

**Craig:** Yeah, a new space affords you a new line of action. Certainly, if there are things in between, then nobody cares who entered right or left. If you’re doing a scene in an airplane, for instance, and somebody exits, heading towards the back of the plane, and the next time you see them they enter the front of the plane, if it’s really close, if it’s only one short scene in between, people might go, wait, she went towards the back of the plane. If you’re walking out of a restaurant and you head out left, and the next shot is you enter your house, you can enter it from any direction you want.

**John:** I was thinking about this, because I just went back and re-watched the pilot to Lost, which holds up incredibly well. In Lost they’re constantly trekking across the island. In my head, I think about them heading one direction when they’re going to the island, one direction when they’re headed back from the island. I don’t think it really matters that much. There are a lot of sequences on the plane where they’re heading up towards the cockpit or back to the back. In those cases, I think even within inter-cutting scenes, you need to keep them moving in the same direction across the frame. We establish a mental geography of where… If a character’s heading this direction, they’re going to the front, if they’re going this direction, to the back. It’s really a situational, based on the kind of thing you’re shooting.

**Craig:** I feel like if it vaguely makes sense, then it’s pretty good. I’m way more concerned about the continuity in the moment.

**John:** Great. Let’s get to some listener questions. We have a whole bunch of them backed up here. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Yes. Wynn wrote in and asked, “Podcasts are large profit centers. Your decision to remain unsponsored is admirable and appreciated. Could you please enlighten us on the details of this decision? Thank you for this wonderful resource you’ve created. I for one would not stop listening if Casper Mattresses began paying you six figures.”

**Craig:** Do the mattress people pay six figures?

**John:** I don’t think they necessarily do. A lot of podcasts have ads. Podcasts make money off ads. There’s nothing wrong with having ads in your podcast. Craig and I just didn’t want to do it, because even reading stuff on the air, that would be fine, Craig would have a fun time with it, but getting the ads, getting all the stuff together, even when you have a service that’s giving the stuff for you, it’s a hassle. Life is too short, and we just didn’t want to have the hassle. Plus, our members are paying us the five bucks a month for the Premium stuff, and that is paying for Megana and for Matthew, so we’re good. This is not a profit-making endeavor for us.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what it comes down to for me. I just like the fact that I’m not accountable to anybody. We spend so much time in Hollywood being accountable to the people that are spending the money, paying us, paying for the production. You hope that you can find people who are responsible and nice and humane and have taste. For this podcast, we can do or say anything we want. We are beholden to no one other than each other and Megana. That’s the way I like it. I don’t want somebody from a mattress company calling me and saying that they don’t think I should be telling people to stop going to college. Not that the mattress people would care, but still.

**John:** I think the mattress-college connection is really under-explored.

**Craig:** Also, honestly, I think every podcast has ads except for us. At this point now it’s just become a matter of principle. We’re the only ones left. We’re PBS. I like it that way. John and I are fortunate enough to have careers that work. We don’t need the money, and so the hell with the mattresses.

**John:** I love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Typing While Mortified writes, “I just discovered that my manager has been sending his scripts, unsolicited, to companies I’m either currently working with or with whom I recently met to discuss other projects. When I say that he’s sending his scripts, I don’t mean his other clients’ scripts. I mean his scripts that he’s written himself and is hoping these companies will produce. To be clear, these are not connections my manager previously had. They came about through me. I had no idea he was doing this or that he even had aspirations of being a writer. I only found out because one of the companies reached out personally to let me know and asked me to get him to stop.

“The burning embarrassment I feel for myself, and to be honest, even more so for him, is probably a strong indicator that it’s time to cut this guy loose. However, being that he’s had a successful decades-long career as a manager and represents several legitimate writers, whereas I’m in the early stages of my career, I thought I’d turn to the pros for confirmation. This is absurd, right? Or at least a major conflict of interest? It doesn’t feel like there’s a way to salvage this. We’re also right in the middle of negotiating a sale. In the past he’s worked closely with my lawyer to hammer out deals. If I fire this guy, should I wait until this deal’s wrapped up, or is this a situation where no representation is better than his representation?”

**John:** Oh my god, I’m mortified for you. I think you need to get rid of this manager. I think you should let your lawyer finish this up. I also think you should talk with this manager’s other clients who are more established and just make sure that they know that this is happening, that he’s doing this, because this is just not acceptable, what he’s doing. It’s just gross and icky and wrong. Unethical, yeah, I guess, but also just icky. It just makes me feel really uncomfortable, as it makes you feel uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Managers, I swear to God. This is the kind of crap that doesn’t happen with agents, because agents don’t want to be writers. They want to be agents. It’s nice and clean. Agent represents you to try and get work, negotiates deals. Deal negotiated. Doesn’t produce your work. Doesn’t send in his or her own script like a pathetic, sweaty idiot. Your manager stinks. I don’t care who these other clients are. Their manager stinks. It’s pathetic. It’s not absurd. It’s pathetic. It would be a conflict of interest if anybody had any interest in what he’s doing, but it doesn’t sound like they do. It’s just lame. I would fire him now.

**John:** It’s lame.

**Craig:** Just get rid of him now. It’s lame. Get rid of him, because you don’t need him to hammer out the deal. Trust me, he’s not hammering out anything. The lawyer will do the details of the deal, and you don’t need to wait until the deal’s wrapped up. Furthermore, managers are not like agents where they get paid their money on commission for sale. They’re being paid money on commission to manage. There’s this concept of on the wheel, off the wheel. They are on the wheel when they are managing you. They are off the wheel when they are not. If they are not going to be managing you through the process of writing this, I don’t see why they should get 10% of it at all. I think you should fire them now. Save yourself 10%. Get an agent. Get an agent or an actual agency, and get out of this manager crap. I swear to God, more of these ding-dongs are out there just…

**John:** I agree. Get yourself an agent. I think you should have high hopes of getting an agent, because you just made a sale. Agents want people who are working, who are selling things. I think you’ll be able to get an actual proper agent. You don’t need this manager. Questionable whether you need a manager at all. You need somebody better than this person representing you, so get rid of them. Craig, I don’t think you and I have ever talked about The Player, the great Michael Tolkin movie The Player. I’m remembering a moment in The Player where Tim Robbins’s character opens a door, and you see he actually has a screenplay of his own that he’s wrote, that he’s never actually taken out any place. It got me thinking about, we haven’t discussed executives who write, because there are some of them. Some of them are okay, but it’s just a weird thing.

**Craig:** It’s rare. There are certainly executives that thought about being writers and ended up being executives. There was one executive at the erstwhile, the old version of Fox, who was infamous for inserting his own dialog into things. Pretty rare though. I’ve actually never worked with an executive that wrote. Toby Emmerich, who runs Warner Brothers, was a screenwriter, then became an executive, so he went in the other direction. I think in The Player, that’s a nice indication. I love that movie. It’s the most writer revenge movie of all time. Of course, the evil studio executive secretly wants to be a writer but can’t. That’s pretty classic.

**John:** James Schamus is probably one of the best, most acclaimed executives who also is a writer on his own.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s the one guy that does that.

**John:** Megana, who else do we have here?

**Megana:** AJ from LA writes, “Frequently when I tell someone about what I’m writing, I’ll get the response, ‘Oh, that sounds like blank.’ My issue isn’t that I am worried about being original, but that it stops a conversation dead if I’ve not seen the show or movie they’re referencing. The conversation then shifts to this thing they just saw, and I get defensive trying to identify how my script is different from a show I haven’t even seen yet. To defend against this, I’ll just default to saying the genre of the thing I’m working on. This feels like a wasted opportunity to potentially get someone interested in what I’m writing. I do live in LA with industry friends. Do you have any tips for how to talk enthusiastically about what I’m writing without making it an invitation for people to tell me what it reminds them of? Do you still have to grapple with the originality police, or is this something that is a non-issue with professional writers?”

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. I like that question.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** AJ, here’s what I would recommend. It’s okay when they say, “What are you writing?” to say, “It’s a such-and-such story, but ultimately what it’s really about is this woman and her relationship with this guy. Here’s what the story’s really about. It’s about da da da da da.” Get into character, relationship, theme, the purpose, the function, because the truth is everything sounds like something. If all you do is tell them, “It’s a story about a bank heist that takes place on the moon,” they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, there’s 14 of those.”

“It takes place in space, and it’s set against a bank heist, but here’s what it’s really about. It’s about a man who got divorced and he’s trying to get back with his daughter,” and da da da da da and blah blah. That’s where all of your passion’s going to be anyway. If your passion’s only about the bank heist and the moon, then I think people are going to get a bit sleepy anyway. Talk about the characters. Talk about the relationship. Talk about the theme. Talk about the heart of it. Talk about the stuff that makes you excited. Don’t worry if they say it sounds like something else. You be like, “Yeah, plot-wise, probably a lot of overlap, but here’s what is original about what I’m doing.”

**John:** I completely agree. I’ll say things like, “I’m writing a thriller about trust and these two characters who can’t trust each other but are forced to deal with each other in order to solve the situation,” which sounds vague and hand-wavy, but if they’re curious then I can get into more specific details. What I try not to do is the heist on the moon or something that just feels like such an obvious type previous that they’re going to compare it to other things or it’s really clear it’s the next version of this thing. It’s Speed on a dirigible.

**Craig:** I’d watch it.

**John:** It’s called Slow. I also get, AJ, you’re working in this town, and you do have those conversations. It’s important to be able to have those conversations and bounce things off. People can sometimes be helpful. You want to be able to talk about what you’re writing, but I think Craig’s instinct is right. Talk about what it is that’s exciting to you about the thing that you’re writing, not just the trailer of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. AJ, it’s okay to agree with them. You say, for instance, you start getting defensive trying to identify your script as different. Don’t be defensive. Embrace it. Just be like, “It’s similar, except it’s completely different. Here’s how it’s completely different.” Just talk about the stuff that makes you excited. There’s no difference, by the way, between the position that you’re in and the position that John or I are in. If someone asked me what I’m working on right now, I’ll say, “Post-apocalyptic pandemic. Hang on.” I’m okay with them going, “Oh for God’s sakes, another one?” I’m like, “Hang on. That part is not what it’s about. This is what it’s about.” Then I talk to them about what it’s about to me. Then they start to lean forward. Embrace that your project is both original and not original at all. That’s the nature of what we do.

**John:** You’re making a piece of filmed entertainment that’s going to be about 100 minutes long. There’s nothing original about that at all.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** People have been making those things for 100 years.

**Craig:** Exactly. It’s got scenes in it? What? That other thing that I saw had scenes.

**John:** Is there a horse? I said no horse movies. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Em asks, “I’m working on a script that centers around sexual assault. Due to the subject matter, I have a problem I need to resolve. I need a trigger warning. I never show the assault, but I do include other scenes that are traumatic in its aftermath. I need to warn readers in advance. Have you ever included a trigger warning in anything you’ve written? What did it look like? Currently, I’m planning to use a statistic on the first page. Do you think that that would suffice? The statistic is below, and it’s upsetting but tonally consistent with the story I’m telling. I’m not comfortable handing the script to readers without a warning, and this is currently my best idea.”

**John:** The statistic they have listed here is that, “In a study of college age men, 84.9% said they had no intention to rape a woman. Of those same men, 17.8% said they would force a woman into sexual intercourse.” That was the statistic they’re thinking about putting. Craig, I think we’ve talked about trigger warnings before, but not in terms of on a screenplay. What’s your instinct for Em here?

**Craig:** I think it’s fair for you to just put a little page between the title page and the beginning of the script that says this script is about sexual assault and contains scenes of sexual assault. That’s it. I wouldn’t use the phrase trigger warning. I would just simply consider it a disclosure. Just disclose it. That’s all. Then leave it be. I don’t think the statistic is going to help. I think the statistic might feel more like when somebody puts a quote from Oscar Wilde on the front page to steal some drama from something. I would just be very plain and very simple, like you said. You want people to know that there are scenes that are about sexual assault. Actually, it looks like it says you don’t actually show the assault in the script. Just say the script centers around sexual assault and those themes are discussed. Anyone who doesn’t want to read a script that involves sexual assault will go, “Oh, okay,” and then move on to the next script. Other people will say, “Got it, I will now continue.” Just real simple. That’s what I would do.

**John:** We’ve talked about it on the show before. There’s been some scientific studies of are warnings helpful or are warnings triggering in and of themselves? There’s genuine debate about that. I think what Craig is proposing is probably the best answer, because it’s similar to what people are now used to in terms of if you’re watching a show that has flashing lights that could trigger epilepsy, that’s there. There’ll be an M warning for this episode contains episodes of sexual violence. I think those are reasonable steps to take and let people make smart choices about what things they’re going to consume or not consume. Putting it there after the title page, before the script starts, in a very plain way, is probably the right choice for you right now in 2022.

**Craig:** Look, we could get into a whole debate where we ask questions like, do I not mention the fact that my script has murders in it? If it’s a script where there’s a scene that takes place in war, should I put a mention there about war in case a veteran is reading it and they have PTSD. Everybody has something. Drama is constantly circling around violence and destruction, because it’s drama. It’s about our mortal selves and about pain. To the extent that drama is therapeutic, it requires difficult subjects. I guess I would just say follow your instinct. Seems like your instinct is to say something, so say it as plainly as you can say it. That’s my advice.

**John:** Absolutely. That’s why I added the in 2022. I just feel like in this moment we’re in right now, I see these kinds of things being done for this. That’s why I’m not going to put something like, “Just so everyone knows, there’s a scene of murder in this.” That just doesn’t feel natural. I would do it for something like this, just because that’s pretty common, and I think it’s considered helpful. Cool. Great. Let’s get on to our One Cool Things. It’s been a minute, and I was expecting this would be your One Cool Thing, so I did not poach it from you.

**Craig:** You sensed it that it was on the way.

**John:** It feels like a very Craig Mazin…

**Craig:** Oh my god, so Craig Mazin. I appreciate that you know me so well. My One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, maybe for Android, I don’t care, called Knotwords, that’s K-N-O-T, Knotwords, by I think at least one of the same guys that does Flip Flop Solitaire, Zach Gage, I believe.

**John:** Yeah, Zach Gage.

**Craig:** It’s a brilliant little concept, very easy to do at first, and then becomes extraordinarily difficult as you proceed, but very rewarding. I guess the way I can say it is that you have a little crisscross crossword, not a standard crossword where it’s one solid square, but one of those crisscrossy ones where there’s lots of gaps. What they’ve done is they’ve basically highlighted a region. That region isn’t always… In fact, it rarely is covering the entire word. It’s usually covering half of one word, a little bit of another. They’ll tell you, these are the letters that have to be in that region. You’re applying logic and word skills and solving.

I’ve gotten into the tricky ones now. They start to give you limitations, like okay, in this row there can be no more than two vowels. It starts getting really, really crunchy. I’m in the tricky version now. I’ve run into one where I’ve been working on it for a day. It’s great. I really love it. I can always go back over to the cas ones to just proceed if I’m feeling like spending some time. Strongly recommend. It is free, although I suspect that occasionally there will be more packs and things that you can buy. It’s available at the app store and Google Play and Steam, Knotwords.

**John:** Knotwords. Craig, I think you missed… One of my One Cool Things in the past was Redactle. Do you play Redactle?

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve looked at people’s Redactle reports. It just seems like a whole lot.

**John:** It can be a whole lot. It can be really fun. It can be half an hour’s worth of work, which is a little too much for a daily puzzle, but always fun to do. My One Cool Thing this week is the Arts District here in Los Angeles. I was just out last night with friends to see two galleries shows and a dinner downtown. It was great. The Arts District, for people who don’t know Los Angeles, or people who live in Los Angeles who’ve never been down there, it’s Downtown, south of Dodger Stadium, east of what you think of as the main part of Downtown. You’re east of the skyscrapers. Lots of galleries, lots of cool spaces, restaurants. I guess my closest thing I would compare it to would be Tribeca, Tribeca when it was becoming Tribeca. Really encourage people to go down there and see stuff.

I saw exhibits at Night Gallery, Hauser and Wirth. We had cocktails at Death and Company, dinner at Manueal. Just really great stuff down in that area. Los Angeles is so huge you can forget that there are just pockets of the neighborhood that you’ve never seen before. I would encourage people to get out and see more of Los Angeles, but also check out the Arts District next time they’re in that part of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I like the LA Factory Kitchen down there. It’s a good restaurant. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten there.

**John:** I have not. I would say now that almost all the restaurants are back open and a ton of new restaurants have opened up, it’s a really exciting time just to be going out to dinner in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** What a time to be alive.

**John:** Fantastic. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes from this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links with things about writing. We just hit Episode 100 of Inneresting and switched over to Substack, so there’s some good new stuff there you can check out. We have T-shirts, they’re great, and hoodies too. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on how Craig is going to live forever. Craig, so good to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s great to be back.

**John:** Hooray.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, help us out here, because I think this all comes from a listener question that was sent in to us.

**Megana:** Yes. Neil wrote in and asked, “With the longevity movement gaining speed with each new breakthrough, no doubt consequentially in our lifetime, what do you and Craig think about living forever? Is extending life ad infinitum a good thing or is the planet more of a timeshare, and we should eventually move on and make room for the next generations?”

**John:** Craig, how long do you want to live?

**Craig:** I would like to live forever. I feel like the way to live forever is not in this meat suit. I think about this all the time. If you could copy a brain, which theoretically is possible, not with the technology we have now, but let’s say eventually they’re like, “Oh my god, we’ve figured it out. We can totally copy your brain.” If they copied my brain, do I have a split consciousness? Probably not. It would just be two of me with their own consciousness, so in that case I die, so it doesn’t really work, because I’m only this one. Then I have to go to the Futurama, put my brain in a floating jar, which I would be totally fine with.

**John:** I’d be fine with that too. People are down on floating brains in jars.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** I think it’s great, love it. Ethical questions, no. What you’re describing in terms of just digitizing your brain, it’s basically the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. Great, I’m all for it. I’m happy to live forever in a digital version of myself. It would hopefully be a pretty good version of what I can do. I’m great with that. I’m not so scared of the implications of immortality. I come from a family that tends to live a long time. My great-grandma lived to 100 and was coherent all the way through there. I’d like to live to 100 and be fully functional. I want to live long enough to hit that singularity moment where I can just be transferred into just software. That’s good.

**Craig:** It would be nice. Floating brain software, whatever it is, the thing is I just don’t want to live forever as some shriveled old… Inevitably, everybody ends up looking like a prune or a walnut. Then they get confused and then they die. I don’t want to do any of that. I’m going to. Let’s be honest. It’s going to happen. I would totally live forever. I got lots to do. I’m learning all the time. I just think life is interesting. I like what I do. I make things. It’s fun.

**John:** A related conversation though is about retirement. People are always like, “Oh, when are you going to retire?” I’m like, “I don’t intend to retire.” Craig, do you intend to retire?

**Craig:** What’s going to happen is we’re going to get retired.

**John:** That’s really what happens.

**Craig:** At some point people are like, “You’re bad, because you’re out of touch.” Everybody gets out of touch sooner or later. If you don’t get out of touch, now you’re just that creepy old guy that refuses to be out of touch and talks about liking music that he doesn’t be listening to. Everyone’s rolling their eyes and like, “Beat it, old man.” I think what’ll happen is I’ll just eventually beat it, old man. I can see myself drifting into a nice emeritus sort of thing where everybody’s like, “He’s old. We’ll just talk to him about stuff. He can give us advice. Then we’ll go and do stuff.”

**John:** Craig, you’re going to be an amazing character actor when you’re 90. That’s going to be fun.

**Craig:** I’ll be the new Carl Reiner.

**John:** That’s what you’re going to be. Megana, do you want to live forever?

**Megana:** The brain in the jar thing sounds really appealing, because I feel like even currently as writers, our bodies probably get in the way of… As an art form, we’re not really using our bodies. They’re mostly just to get the stuff from our brain onto the page, whereas, I don’t know, a dancer, an actor might have a harder time with that. I already feel like I’m just a brain in this not optimized meat sack.

**John:** Let’s talk about the brain in the jar thing, because an article I read recently, if I can find a link I’ll put it in the show notes, was talking about we think about, oh, we can stick the brain in the jar and we forget that the brain is actually just there to regulate our bodies. A brain without a body is a weird thing. Without its normal inputs it’s going to be interesting to see what we’re like if we don’t have our bodies around us. Yet it’s not hard for us to think about ourselves as being fully digital, because so much of my day I just feel like I’m interacting with people on Twitter, I’m interacting with Megana on Slack. I’m not interacting with a physical person, so interacting with a digital person doesn’t seem that strange to me. The people who work for me who I have not really seen in person, and they’re just a reputation on Zoom, that could all be faked.

**Craig:** John, all the people you’re talking about have a lot of experience working with a digital presence: you. That’s the most robot thing I’ve ever heard you… Megana’s not… She’s an avatar on Slack. Boop.

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** Boop.

**Megana:** I’m constantly wanting to be in the office more. Just so we’re clear on that, I like being in John’s physical presence.

**John:** That’s so nice, and Lambert’s physical presence, an amazing dog you get to hang out with.

**Craig:** Lambert.

**Megana:** That’s true.

**John:** Lambert.

**Craig:** Lambert’s great.

**John:** Lambert’s great. I think I would miss dogs if I were to be a brain in a jar or a digital version. I’d need to have some sort of digital dog to hang out with. What would a vacation be like if you’re a brain in a jar? It does change your nature, because would it just be work all the time?

**Craig:** You’re in VR spaces where you would have a regular body, and you would have a dog that you could play with and feel and touch, because the jar fluid can interact with your brain. Obviously it’s connected somehow to something. I think it sounds great, honestly, as long as it’s not Facebook. If I’m stuck in their stupid thing, then just break the jar and smash my brain. I just can’t.

**John:** That would be the equivalent of just being an old person in a wheelchair who has to watch Fox News all day. Basically, they wheel you up to the TV, and you’re just trapped there to watch Fox TV now. No, thank you.

**Craig:** I’m stuck in a world where there’s just constantly… My third cousin is screaming nonsense at me. I just can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I just won’t, so just kill me.

**John:** What we’re describing is a crucial difference between brain in a jar versus a person in a coma or someone who’s trapped in a body, has a consciousness, but can’t actually communicate. It’s ability to get input and actually do meaningful work and communicate it outward. That’s the thing that we’re making sure we get, as long as inputs and outputs work.

**Craig:** We don’t want locked-in syndrome. If everybody is connected and we’re all… By the way, that may be where we are right now, just to be clear.

**John:** A simulation, by the way.

**Megana:** Oh, gosh.

**Craig:** We are in a simulation, no question about that, but perhaps right now we are brains in jars. Part of the deal of the brain in the jar is you just don’t remember when you weren’t. All the memories are piped in to start with. Then we are in VR space.

**John:** Really that siren you just heard outside was some sort of signal from the simulation, like there’s some disruption and now they’re fixing the disruption?

**Craig:** Or it was just that routine. It just runs every 20 minutes. Send the ambulance.

**John:** For some reason your simulation does a lot of Grand Theft Auto outside your apartment.

**Craig:** I do love Grand Theft Auto.

**John:** So good. Craig, six weeks I’ve not been able to talk to you about Elden Ring. Are you still enjoying Elden Ring? Are you playing Elden Ring anymore?

**Craig:** I turned away. I was in the mid-70s level-wise.

**John:** That’s about where I am.

**Craig:** I was getting to some cool places. Then I just realized this is it, this is all it’s ever going to be. It’s beautiful, and I’ll probably find some more beautiful places, but I still have no idea what the hell I’m really doing any of this for.

**John:** There’s fingers at the Roundtable Hold.

**Craig:** What is that? What’s happening? Why are those ladies constantly looking at my fingers? What is that?

**John:** They just love fingers.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what those trees are about. I don’t know why there are a lot of animated teacups or jars. There are animated jars. I don’t know why.

**John:** They’re brains in jars is really what it is. It felt so good to finally kill that golden knight who’s at the very start, to finally be powerful enough to kill [crosstalk 01:02:34].

**Craig:** I killed that guy too. That was actually probably the moment where I was like, “I think I’m done.” I was like, “I killed that guy. What’s the point?” I’m basically done.

**John:** Living forever is just about playing Elden Ring until you actually solve it, until you actually discover what the meaning of Elden Ring is, and then you die.

**Craig:** What is going on there? It’s so weird. Then I got MLB: The Show and 2022 and I’ve just been playing baseball. That’s what I’ve been doing. There are some good games on the horizon. I’m excited for what’s coming. I enjoyed my time with Elden Ring. It was very satisfying. I got some good kills in there. I was killed in spectacular ways. I’ve seen enough. I’m good.

**John:** Good. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, friends.

**Craig:** See ya.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

Links:

* [The Room – “Oh hi Mark” clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aekfPU0SwNw&t=68s)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 543: 20 Questions with John, Transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-543-20-questions-with-john-transcript)
* [Los Angeles Arts District](https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2019-12-28/four-hours-staying-present-in-the-arts-district): [Hauser + Wirth](https://www.hauserwirth.com/locations/10069-hauser-wirth-los-angeles/), [Night Gallery](https://www.nightgallery.ca/), [Death + Company](https://www.deathandcompany.com/dcdtla/), [Manuela](https://www.manuela-la.com/)
* [Knotwords Game](https://noodlecake.com/games/knotwords/)
* [Upstep Orthotics](https://www.upstep.com/)
* [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)
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**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few bad words from Paul Giamatti. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 549 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

In Episode 547 we touched briefly on the Sideways effect. Basically, movies sometimes have a real-world impact, not just in culture but also politically and economically. We see the Black representation onscreen or depictions of nuclear power. Movies can make things seem cool or uncool or scary. As screenwriters, we want to be aware of the influence our writing can have.

The term Sideways effect comes from the 2004 film Sideways, written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the Rex Pickett. Who better to ask about the Sideways effect than the writers themselves? Luckily, someone else just did, so I don’t have to. Today’s episode comes from the amazing Slate podcast Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. It’s been one of my One Cool Things before, but this recent episode on the sideways effect was so good, I asked Willa if I could run it as a Scriptnotes episode. She said yes and agreed to have a chat afterwards with me about sideways and other cultural mysteries she’s investigated. Stick around after her episode for our conversation. For our Premium Members, Craig and I will chat about what he’s missed these last few weeks that he’s been gone. Enjoy.

**Willa Paskin:** In October 2004, the movie Sideways was released in theaters. It’s about two guys who go on a bachelors week to Wine Country. One of them is a cad who’s about to get married. The other, played by Paul Giamatti, is Miles, a hardcore wine-lover.

****Miles Raymond:**** We’re going to drink a lot of good wine. We’re going to play some golf. We’re going to eat some great food and enjoy the scenery, and we’re going to send you off in style, mon frere.

**Willa:** Sideways is a small, mellow movie, but it got big. It grossed $110 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations. It also upended the wine industry. Famously, it is said to have done this with one line of dialogue. It arrives about a third of the way in as the guy are preparing to meet up with two women.

**Jack Cole:** If they want to drink Merlot, we’re drinking Merlot.

**Miles Raymond:** No, if anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!

**Willa:** At the time this line was first uttered, Merlot was a popular wine people were chugging down by the glass full. Legend has it that after this line, after, “I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot,” Merlot went ahead and tanked.

**Laura Lippman:** It’s like I’m RoboCop and that’s one of my directives now, no Merlot.

**Willa:** Laura Lippman is a crime novelist who saw Sideways when it first came out. Did you notice right away that it just put you off Merlot?

**Laura:** Yeah, right away. Right away. It was like a battle cry. I have literally tried to kind of overcome that, standing in neighborhood liquor stores and looking at what’s for sale. I can’t do it. I bet I would like Merlot. I think I did like Merlot. It’s so weird. It’s like I’m the most susceptible, suggestible person on the planet.

**Willa:** When it comes to Sideways, Merlot, and wine in general, she’s not the only one. I’m Willa Paskin and this is Decoder Ring. In the mid-2000s, the movie Sideways had an impact on the wine industry so notable that it has a name: the Sideways effect. In this episode we’re going to be looking closely at that effect and what it really is. Did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Did a monologue jumpstart demand for a whole other varietal? Did Paul Giamatti’s sad sack character change our relationship to yet another wine, one that was barely mentioned in the film? Today on Decoder Ring, all of these questions and this one. Is it long past time to start drinking some fucking Merlot?

The Sideways effect is not just one thing. There are a number of components to it. I’m going to begin with the best known part of the phenomenon, the one I started with, the theory that Sideways shanked Merlot sales. When Sideways arrived in theaters, Merlot was the trendiest red wine in America, but America had not always had a trendiest wine. The country had been largely indifferent to wine well into the mid 20th century. California whites caught on in the 1970s when one of them won a blind taste test against world-class French wines. Then in the early ‘90s, red wine got a boost when 60 Minutes aired a segment on the so-called French Paradox. The paradox was that French people ate very fatty foods but had much lower rates of heart disease than Americans. The 60 Minutes piece came to a definitive conclusion about what was going on.

**Morley Safer:** The answer to the riddle the explanation of the paradox may lie in this inviting glass.

**Willa:** Sales of red wine spiked, and none benefited more than Merlot, which by the end of the decade would become the most popular red wine in the country.

**Tim Farrell:** Merlot is a good candidate because couple of things.

**Willa:** Tim Farrell is a wine buyer for the wine store Brooklyn Wine Exchange.

**Tim:** This is not actually too simplifying to say. It’s an easy word to pronounce. The other part is that it’s fairly fruit-forward and the tannins aren’t very strong, and the acidities are fairly low, especially when it’s made in California. It’s like a very soft, easy-drinking kind of red wine.

**Willa:** Merlot is most famously grown in Bordeaux, France, largely as a blending grape, but the American boom was centered in California, where production of Merlot quadrupled in the 1990s. Merlot is a relatively easy grape to grow, adaptable to a range of climates and soils, but that doesn’t mean it should be grown everywhere.

**Tim:** Grapes are a funny fruit because the more grape vines has to struggle to ripen, the more flavorful the fruit is.

**Willa:** California’s cool coastal areas are good for Merlot, but during the Merlot boom, it also started being planted in California’s breadbasket, the hot, fertile Central Valley.

**Tim:** That’s where Driscoll’s strawberries come from. If Merlot grows too easy in the irrigated, flat, sunny Central Valley, you’re going to have really bad grapes. That’s where the really bad Merlot grapes were coming from.

**Willa:** The mediocre grapes led to a lot of thin, too sweet Merlot, and even the better stuff was often made to be an affordable, easy sipper, the kind of inoffensive fruit-forward gateway wine offered by the glass and sold in Franzia boxes, all of which made Merlot something of a joke to wine people.

**Rex Pickett:** It was uncool to drink Merlot.

**Willa:** In the 1990s, Rex Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica.

**Rex:** I’ll try to be brief. My life was shit and I made some films and parted company with my ex-wife, whatever. I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store. There were doctors and lawyers and snobs and whatever. It was just generally conceded that if you liked Merlot, that you were either a wine philistine or an idiot.

**Willa:** Rex regularly went up to the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Los Angeles. As Wine Country goes, it’s nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, which are hundreds of miles north, closer to San Francisco. This region in Santa Barbara County was sleepy and underdeveloped, dotted with horse stables, golf courses, and vineyards.

**Rex:** There’s nobody up there. I’d go up midweek. I was broke. I’d go play golf for $25 on a grape course. I’d go wine tasting. It was free.

**Willa:** Rex poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways. The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Rex. He was also a frustrated, divorced writer whose favorite wine was Pinot Noir, and who had the reflexive disdain for Merlot, of a 1990s oenophile. When Rex finished the book, it was rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and About Schmidt.

**Alexander Payne:** I read the book actually on a flight from London to Los Angeles. When I’m reading something that I think could be a movie, I’m just praying, “Oh, please stay good until the end. Don’t come up with some gimmick or guns or violence or something. Keep it a good, sad, funny human story.”

**Willa:** When his plane landed, he called his agent and said he wanted to make Sideways into a movie. Payne is also into wine, and when he co-wrote the screenplay, he knew the no fucking Merlot line was a good one.

**Alexander:** People who knew about wine knew how much crappy Merlot there was. Then I think people who didn’t know about wine and always order Merlot were called out in an affectionate way. It had this kind of snowball effect. It was a good snowballing joke.

**Willa:** It seemed to roll right over Merlot’s reputation. What do you guys make?

**Jeff Bundschu:** We’ve been growing these Bordeaux varietals for as long as I’ve been around.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu is the sixth-generation owner of Gundlach Bundschu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, Merlot.

**Jeff:** A good Merlot is pretty sexy, voluptuous, round, and intense, without the mouth-puckering tannins or austerity of an ageable cabernet.

**Willa:** Jeff agrees that in the 1990s a lot of Merlot on the market just wasn’t very good. When Sideways called this out, his Merlot, the high-quality stuff, got caught up in it.

**Jeff:** You’d have thought Spider-Man himself had swung in and tossed out Merlot.

**Willa:** Scores of newspapers chronicled Merlot’s troubles. Katie Couric, while hosting The Today Show, said she heard she wasn’t supposed to drink it anymore. People started coming into Jeff’s tasting room and saying they just did not drink Merlot. Pretty much every winemaker and seller has a similar anecdote. Steve Cuellar, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them.

**Steve Cuellar:** It was literally just repeated over and over and over, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day. I just figured, okay, let’s try to measure it. What is the effect?

**Willa:** In 2009, he co-authored a paper called The Sideways Effect: A Test for Changes in the Demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir Wines. It looked at wine sales in supermarkets in the four years after Sideways.

**Steve:** The movie was released in October 22, 2004. Prior to that, Merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate. After that, sales really just collapsed. If we do a percentage growth rate, it literally goes from, I think, 13% growth rate before to almost 0 afterwards.

**Willa:** Steve was showing me a line graph as we were talking, and it’s the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out.

**Steve:** When I first saw this, I’m like, holy cow, this is going to be a huge effect. At least I’ll be able to put some numbers on it and all that kind of good stuff.

**Willa:** First, he wanted to check Merlot’s sales against a control, to look at another wine to see what happened to its sales.

**Steve:** We figured, let’s choose something that isn’t mentioned in the movie. Let’s just avoid the red wine and we’ll choose Chardonnay. It’s got large sales. It should be equivalent to Merlot.

**Willa:** In fact, I think of Chardonnay as the Merlot of white wine.

**Steve:** Exactly. It is the big seller.

**Willa:** As big as Merlot was, Chardonnay was bigger. It was and is far and away the most popular wine in America. When Steve looked at the sales numbers for Chardonnay, he found something surprising. He pulled up the graph for me.

**Steve:** When you do that…

**Willa:** It looks the same. The graph of Chardonnay’s sales growth right after Sideways has the same shape as Merlot’s, a steep mountain that just abruptly tables off. After Sideways, in the sample he was looking at, Chardonnay sales had flat-lined too.

**Steve:** Which is just bizarre. This is really the gist of the paper. Yeah, Merlot did crash, but it probably wasn’t the result of the movie Sideways, because Chardonnay, which wasn’t featured anywhere in the movie, good or bad, really experienced the same crash.

**Willa:** Based on these findings, Steve feels strongly that we only think the Sideways effect is real and that there must be another explanation for what happened to Merlot, one that applies to Chardonnay too. In the decade-plus since this paper was published, Steve has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation, and they don’t. There is a sense among wine insiders that Merlot sales were already cooling off, its low quality catching up with it. Nothing can stay trendy forever. There was no major event, no financial crash, no natural disaster, nothing of note to explain such a dramatic change except Sideways. What does Sideways have to do with Chardonnay? That’s not a rhetorical question. I think there’s an answer to it. Before we can get there, I want to turn to the next component of the Sideways effect. Let’s put a pin in Merlot and Chardonnay for now and talk about a wine that Paul Giamatti’s Miles actually likes.

**Miles:** Pinot’s a very thin-skinned grape that doesn’t like constant heat or humidity, very delicate.

**Willa:** If the first theory about Sideways is that it tanked Merlot sales, the second is that it boosted sales of Pinot Noir. Pinot, wine experts tell me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown. Two Pinots from vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different. This distinct expression is part of what geeks wine people out.

**Kathy Joseph:** Those of us in the wine world feel once you love Pinot Noir, you love Pinot Noir, and you explore Pinot Noir. It’s very sensual and it’s exciting and it’s delicious.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. She makes a Sauvignon Blanc that was name-checked in the film, but she also makes a Pinot Noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow.

**Kathy:** Probably more than any grape, Pinot Noir does demand a certain environment for it to excel. It needs a cool climate. It needs good drainage. It needs a place that isn’t too rich. What happens is that it’s all expensive.

**Willa:** All of this had made Pinot a kind of specialty grape in America, a fanatics grape, as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass. Then along came Sideways. See, Pinot Noir is Miles’s favorite wine. He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it’s clear he’s not just describing a grape, he’s also describing himself.

**Miles:** It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. Only if somebody really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Oh, its flavors, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

**Willa:** Upon hearing this ode to Pinot, Americans started buying it in droves.

**Kathy:** Absolutely. Yes, there was an uptick in immediate interest for Pinot Noir.

**Willa:** A Nielsen analysis found sales of Pinot spiked 16% in the months after the movie came out. Wine producers were caught off guard by Pinot’s overnight popularity, and there was a mad dash to plant more of it. In California, production of Pinot Noir has increased 75% in the years since. There was a lag at first, because it takes four to five years for a grapevine to bear usable fruit. There were other difficulties too, starting with the price. Tim Farrell, the wine buyer you heard from earlier, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis in 2006 when a customer ordered a glass of Pinot.

**Tim:** I remember thinking, oh, we do have a Pinot Noir, and it’s $12 a glass. I thought, that’s insane. We have Bud Light for $2.50. Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?

**Willa:** Pinot grown correctly is expensive. It just takes a lot of care. After the movie came out, not only was there more demand for Pinot, there was more demand for Pinot from casual wine drinkers, the kind of folks who want an affordable Pinot. You start to see a version of what happened to Merlot happening to Pinot. Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn’t be and attended to less carefully, and that means less quality product makes it into bottles. Another paper, one from 2021, found that most of the frenzied Pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley, the sunny, fertile, hot, strawberry-growing Central Valley that wasn’t even good for adaptable Merlot.

**Tim:** Then you have a flood of really bad Pinot Noir coming out by about 2008, 2009.

**Willa:** Even good Pinot Noir didn’t necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker was looking for, like the person who ordered a $12 glass of Pinot at Tim Farrell’s sports bar.

**Tim:** They returned it. They said, “Oh, this is watery. I don’t like this at all.” I took it back. I didn’t know anything about wine at the time. The flavor profile and the texture and the body of Pinot Noir is not actually what people were expecting. They were Merlot drinkers, and so they were probably expecting a big, rich, full-bodied, powerful wine, and it’s exact opposite.

**Willa:** Wine producers needed to please these customers that wanted a Pinot that didn’t taste like a Pinot. Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around, because remember, growers hadn’t been expecting Pinot to be the next big thing.

**Tim:** The less scrupulous producers of Pinot Noir that just wanted to cheapen their production and make a more rich, smooth wine for this market that was sending watery glasses of Pinot Noir back at sports bars, was they started adding 25% Syrah to a lot of these wines.

**Willa:** Blending is a common and accepted practice in winemaking. Some of the very best French wines are blends. In America, the standards are a bit looser. You only need 75% of a wine to consist of the grape that’s named on the label. All of that extra Syrah, it made the Pinot go down easier.

**Tim:** They had to soften up and make Pinot Noir super accessible because real, unadulterated Pinot Noir, in addition to being very expensive, is not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted. It even confused the market for what Pinot Noir should actually taste like.

**Willa:** I’m not saying Pinot Noirs all became phony baloney overnight, all got bad or all tasted like Syrah. In the long-term, the interest in Pinot probably did push American palates in a new direction. In the short-term and on the low end of the market, Pinot became a victim of its own success. While this made for a bunch of lousy Pinot, the irony is it made for better Merlot.

**Jeff:** What it did mean there for a minute, there was a ton of really good Merlot that was available for super cheap.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu, the Merlot maker at Gundlach Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** The red blends in the 10 years that came out after Sideways, that became red blends because no one would buy Merlot, were way effing better.

**Willa:** As you may have suspected, I know very little about wine. I’ve learned a bunch from working on this episode, but I can still barely tell when a wine has gone off. When someone asks me what I think about one, I often don’t know. I think the truth is that none of the wine tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could, if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate. I honestly feel a little self-conscious about how little I know. I know this isn’t a universal feeling, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.

**Jeff:** Like you could ask somebody, “Do you like that movie? Do you like that peanut butter? Do you like that toothpaste?” They’re going to say, “I hate that movie. I love that peanut butter. I’m down with that toothpaste.” You ask them about a wine and they’re like, “I’m so sorry that I’m not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn’t taste very good to me.”

**Willa:** Why is just uniquely intimidating. I think that’s at least as important to the Sideways effect as whatever was in the script. It helps explain why a little movie that opened in four theaters could have such a big impact. People want guidance about wine, and we’ll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a sommelier, a wine critic, or a movie character. Miles is a man who can barely affect change in his own life. He’s miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable. Listen to him.

**Miles:** Don’t be shy. Really get your nose right in there, really. A little citrus. Oh, there’s just the faintest soupcon of asparagus. There’s just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.

**Willa:** He is not at all what you picture when you close your eyes and imagine an influencer, and yet he influenced the heck out of us, even though we weren’t using that word then. His high-strung, forceful, informed opinions make him a compelling authority. His strongest views are about Merlot and Pinot Noir, but maybe thinking his influence stops there is underestimating him, the movie he’s in, and how much hand-holding people want about wine. Maybe it’s all bigger. Maybe it’s even big enough to extend to Chardonnay.

We’re going to get back to that Merlot Chardonnay mystery I pinned back there. You remember the economist Steve Cuellar published a paper that showed both Merlot and Chardonnay sales plateaued, in an admittedly small, regionally specific sample, right after Sideways came out in 2004. No one had really been able to make sense of this. Then I mentioned it to Kathy Joseph, the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars. Should I tell you what the economist said?

**Kathy:** Yes, I’m very interested.

**Willa:** Kathy pointed out that in the 1990s there had been a rise in sales of wine by the glass at restaurants, and those glasses were mostly full of Merlot and Chardonnay.

**Kathy:** The reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made. Chardonnay was a little bit sweet. Merlot could be a little bit sweet. They were just like almost a transition wine. They were easy. People didn’t order white wine any more by the glass. They ordered Chardonnay.

**Willa:** Once Kathy flagged this connection for me, I realized she was not the only person who had talked about it. It came up a lot, including with Alexander Payne.

**Alexander:** Those were the two wines ordered by people who didn’t really know much about wine. People who knew wine would start saying, “I’m ABC, anything but Chardonnay.”

**Willa:** Rex Pickett had noted it too.

**Rex:** The waiter would say, “Red or white?” If you said white, it was going to be some really cheap, probably Chardonnay. If it was red, it was going to be Merlot.

**Willa:** Here are these twinned wines. Then Sideways comes along and curses one of them out and ever so slightly shades the other.

**Jack:** I thought you hated Chardonnay.

**Miles:** No, no, no. I like all varietals. I just don’t generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California.

**Willa:** Maybe what happened to Chardonnay is just a minor version of what happened to Merlot. Audiences picked up that Chardonnay was the other uncool wine, and they backed away from it. If that feels a little overdetermined to you, another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting, but it also made it clear there was a whole wide world of wine out there. Walking out of the movie, you could think, I’ve got to stay away from Merlot, I’ve got to drink Pinot Noir. You could also walk out thinking, huh, I should learn some more about wine.

Steve Cuellar’s graphs of Merlot and Chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers cutting back, but the wine market didn’t collapse. We just started drinking something else. This is certainly how the winemakers I spoke with saw it. They thought Sideways encouraged people way more than it shamed them. Jeff Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** I think that what happened in Sideways is Miles, who I can’t believe I know of by first name basis, was like, “This Merlot sucks.” He sort of just gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down instead of standing up for saying, “I don’t care. This isn’t very good.”

**Willa:** Do you really think that people were trusting their own palate or they were just like, “We trust Miles.”

**Jeff:** I see it more as permission, but I guess that’s because I’m an optimist. Everybody is like total sheep, like a permission to hate wine that they don’t like.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph use the exact same word, while being similarly optimistic.

**Kathy:** The movie gave people permission to explore beyond what they already were comfortable and familiar with.

**Willa:** This is based on her experiences in the years after Sideways, years in which the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie was set, became a bustling tourist destination, when the wine market doubled and wine was diversified way beyond Merlot and Chardonnay. It all amounts to a third theory of the Sideways effect, that Sideways encouraged wine drinkers to branch out. As it turns out, there’s a speech in the movie that makes the case not for any one varietal, but for wine in general. It isn’t from Miles. It’s from Maya, the wine connoisseur and romantic interest played by Virginia Madsen.

**Maya Randall:** I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve. If I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

**Willa:** Maya isn’t relaying rules about wine. She’s praising it for always changing. There’s a contrast between her and Miles, and the movie knows it. It’s why they make a good romantic pairing.

**Maya:** It tastes so fucking good.

**Willa:** Miles’s rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance, two ways of appreciating wine and life.
Steve Cuellar’s paper about Merlot and Chardonnay sales only covered the four years following Sideways. Chardonnay sales bounced back. It’s still the most popular wine in America. Merlot production and prices stabilized too, but it’s now often used in America as it’s used in France, as a blending grape. The overall percentage of it, compared to all the grapes crushed in the country, has fallen.

**Jim:** A few years in, our Merlot sales were down and I’m like, “Dad, we got to get out of Merlot. We got to plant something else.” He was like, “Oh, it’s going to come back, Jim. It always come back,” for a decade, two decades. When’s it coming back? When’s it coming back?

**Willa:** This brings us to the final wrinkle in this story, that Miles, the guy that destroyed Merlot’s reputation, doesn’t even hate it.

**Maya:** What gems do you have in your collection?

**Miles:** Oh.

**Willa:** About halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he’s been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine.

**Miles:** I’ve got things I’m saving, definitely. I guess the star would be a 1961 Cheval Blanc.

**Maya:** You’ve got a ’61 Cheval Blanc and it’s just sitting there?

**Miles:** Yes, I do.

**Maya:** Go get it. I’m serious, hurry.

**Willa:** A ’61 Cheval Blanc costs about $4,700. He tells Maya he’d been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary, but is now just waiting for a special occasion.

**Maya:** The day you open a 61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.

**Willa:** In one of the final scenes, Miles finds out his ex-wife is pregnant with her new husband, and he decides to drink that wine. He takes it to a diner, orders a burger and onion rings, and drinks it out of a Styrofoam cup. As he sips it, he lets out an appreciative, “Hm.” Even in these degraded circumstances, the wine shines through.

This shining wine, this Cheval Blanc, as Alexander Payne knew, is made mostly out of Merlot. Some viewers spotted this contradiction instantly. You can read comment threads about how this makes Miles an idiot and a hypocrite. The meaning seems plainer to me. Miles really loves wine. He really knows wine. He doesn’t hate Merlot, one of wine’s essential, noble grapes. He just hates the bad version of it. This love hate thing is right at the heart of why this little movie had such unpredictable and outsized effects. It tapped into the dualities that exist in most of us, people who hate being uncool, but who also love to try new things. We’re sheeple and we don’t want to be told what to do. We’re easily led and we’re curious. We’re Miles and we’re Maya.

When I spoke to Laura Lippman, who rejected Merlot like RoboCop at the beginning of this episode, I told her about the twists and turns of this story and my sense that Miles himself would now have it in for some other trendy wine. The next time we talked, a few weeks later, she’d just gone to the wine store.

**Laura:** There was something going on where I was like, “I should get a really good bottle of red wine.” I was like, “What if I bought Merlot?”

**Willa:** She did it. She took the bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass.

**Laura:** I thought it was terrific, actually. I was like, “I will do this again. I will drink Merlot again.”

**John:** I am thrilled to welcome Willa Paskin, who is the host of Decoder Ring podcast and Slate’s TV critic. Willa, congrats on another great episode of your show.
**Willa:** Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, John.

**John:** Recently we’ve been doing episodes on nuclear energy and climate change, looking at how stories we tell have an impact. The idea of the Sideways effect has come up multiple times. It was just amazing kismet that your episode this last week was on the Sideways effect. How did it come to be? How did you decide to do it for an episode for your show?

**Willa:** At the beginning of every season, I scratch around for ideas. I think I had asked on Twitter if anybody had any thoughts. It had come up. I had looked into it really perfunctorily. It seemed like the answer was really obvious. It seemed like everyone was like, “Yeah, it just tanked Merlot sales,” whatever. I was like, “That’s not interesting enough.” Then, luckily, a couple of weeks later, this other tweet started going around that was a graph of what had happened to Merlot after Sideways essentially. We just started talking about it in Slate’s internal messaging system. There was a wine guy on staff. He’s Jordan Weissmann. He writes about money and economics.

**John:** I know Jordan.

**Willa:** He’s entwined. We just started side chatting. He was my wine guy basically. He has a wine guy. His wine guy, who’s a wine seller in Brooklyn, had basically talked to him a lot about Sideways. It just suddenly became very clear, just from this brief chat on Slack, that oh no, there was enough there for it to be interesting. Had it really affected Merlot? Had maybe it actually affected Pinot? Then I started talking to people, and it turned into this nice little delectable rabbit hole, which is always super fun. I ended up, in the episode, speaking to an economist who had done a study about it.

One of the things that’s interesting and funny about something like the Sideways effect is we all know what it is and everyone talks about it, but of course, it’s not actually hard science or news, and so there have not actually been… Most people who are economists or who study stuff for a living have not actually been like, “Definitely, I need to look into the Sideways effect.” There actually haven’t been that many real papers about it. When I did speak to one of the guys who had done one of the papers about it, it ended up taking me places I was not expecting.

**John:** In the episode you frame three questions, which is did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Where do you stand, Willa? How strong do you think the Sideways effect was for what happened to Merlot?

**Willa:** I think the consensus about Merlot is twofold. One is that it did depress both Merlot sales and Merlot plantings. There was another study that just came out very recently, actually, about the long-term effect of it, but not dramatically. It affected it some. Wine, as an agricultural product, it’s interesting in the sense that it takes years to plant a grapevine and then for it to make grapes that are good enough. You just can’t act on information as quickly as you can on like, everybody wants a strawberry or everybody wants a pair of jeans. You have to wait. While you’re waiting, you’re not making any money. No one was ripping Merlot out, basically, because that’s just-

**John:** That’s suicide. It got blended into other wines, as you talked about.

**Willa:** Over time, it did not get replanted at the rate that it had. It does seem that Pinot really did get planted at a huge rate. That’s the first thing. I would say the second thing is much, much fuzzier. Just reputationally, absolutely, it really, really hurt Merlot. That doesn’t mean that it hurt it for everybody. That doesn’t mean that all consumers were suddenly paying attention to this movie. Madmen doesn’t have to be watched by that many people to have a really big footprint or to feel like it has a really big footprint. I think something like that is very similar.

**John:** I always think about Twitter, because not very many Americans are actually on Twitter, but Twitter has a huge impact on the national conversation. People didn’t need to necessarily see the movie to know that, oh, we’re not supposed to be drinking Merlot. It just had a stink to it because of the smart people who saw the movie said, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” It had an outsized impact.

**Willa:** I think similarly to Twitter, there’s tons of people that have no idea what’s happening on Twitter, are never affected by it all, but the people that are paid attention to by the media basically did.

**John:** It was a meme, basically. Don’t drink Merlot is a meme. It just got spread in a pre-internetty kind of time.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to… The Travis Lybbert paper that you mentioned is behind a paywall, but there’s another, Journal of Wine Economics, that shows the graph of the two things. You really see how Pinot Noir just really took off. You can also see that the prices fell for Merlot, which I think is also useful to see that supply and demand… There just wasn’t demand, and so the prices for Merlot fell.

**Willa:** I would say one of the things that was interesting from talking to wine people about it is this isn’t settled. I think if they looked into these papers, it would be, but it was not. Something happened and everyone has a ton of anecdotes, but a lot of the serious people were like, “It’s not clear that that’s really true,” which I was surprised by. I was like, “Oh, isn’t it obviously true?”

**John:** These can all be future episodes of Decoder Ring down the road if you want to. Around the office we were talking about other examples of things that are like the Sideways effect, where movies had had a weird impact in the real world. I wanted to bounce them off of you and see what your instinct is for these.

**Willa:** Is your first one Clark Gable and the undershirts?

**John:** Hey, it was my third one, but yes, let’s talk about Clark Gable and the undershirt, because it happened one night. He takes off his shirt, and he was not wearing an undershirt. Apparently, men realized, oh, I don’t have to wear an undershirt underneath a dress shirt. Snopes says it’s unclear whether that’s actually a real thing or not. What’s your ruling on Clark Gable and the undershirt?

**Willa:** I would love to believe that is true. How can we have any idea? It would be hard to follow that, track that information at the time.

**John:** If you were to do an episode on that, you’d probably need to talk to fashion historians and really figure out where we were at at that time and was the undershirt going away at that point.

**Willa:** If I was doing that, there’s a couple things. There’s immediately, I think, a number of things. One is I start to think about hats. It’s similar to-

**John:** What happened to hats?

**Willa:** What happened to hats? In a way that it’s like, you were going to do a couple stories from one episode. It’s like, what happened to hats, what happened to undershirts. I could imagine undershirts being the open. Then also undershirts, which we’re not allowed to call wife-beaters anymore, but what is the semiotics of the undershirt. I think there’s probably a bunch there.

**John:** It gets complicated.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Two other things that you actually can measure. Super Size Me. We had the documentary Super Size Me. Six weeks after the movie came out, McDonald’s dropped the term super size me from everything. They stopped using the term all together. That’s an impact.

**Willa:** Can I tell you my cocktail party chatter about Super Size Me?

**John:** I want to hear this.

**Willa:** This is truly basically the only thing I remember from Super Size Me. I remember the takeaway was McDonald’s is really bad for you. There’s in passing a graphic about how one bagel is equal to eight slices of bread. It’s a picture of the bagel. It’s a drawing. Then it equals eight slices in bread. I believe in carbs. I don’t have a problem with carbs. It has haunted me. It didn’t ruin McDonald’s. It just really gave me pause about bagels forever. That was my personal impact [inaudible 00:40:40].

**John:** That was your Super Size Me. Blackfish, the documentary about SeaWorld, the stock in SeaWorld fell 50%. That’s a pretty direct cause and effect there. I want to talk about the name Madison. What is your perception of where the name Madison came from?

**Willa:** Oh my god, I have no idea. I do just perceive it as being one of those on the top 20 girls’ names now.

**John:** It came from Splash.

**Willa:** Did it?

**John:** In the movie Splash, Tom Hanks is with Darryl Hannah. “What’s your name?” She looks at a sign for Madison Avenue, and she says, “Madison.” He says, “That’s not a name.” It wasn’t a name. It was the 216th most popular name for girls in 1990, but then it became 29th, and by 2000 it became number 3. It was not a name being used.

**Willa:** It does fit in with a ton of other name trends, which is the last name for first name trend, like Hudson. There’s a lot of names that sound like that, Lawson. It’s snugly right in there, and then also it’s upscale.

**John:** It does fit in with that trend. My very first TV show, there were these twins, a boy and girl twins. I named them Mason and Finley.

**Willa:** You nailed it.

**John:** I’d never seen anyone in the real world named Mason and Finley. I called that trend. They are now popular names.

**Willa:** I’m really impressed. That reminds in Baby Mama, the kids are named Banjo and… They didn’t call it, but they just made fun of it nicely. Those are perfect. You did it.

**John:** Finley and Mason. We also talk a lot about representation and how depictions of people on screen matter in terms of how people interact with people. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Sidney Poitier, hugely important, probably the face of a Black man on screen was helpful. Philadelphia, for just Tom Hanks playing a person with AIDS was important. We can have our faults with either of those movies, but they were important in their times. It’s always hard to remember what it was like before that movie came out.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Jaws and perceptions of sharks, perceptions of shark safety. We can’t go back to a time pre-Jaws.

**Willa:** No, we definitely can’t.

**John:** People weren’t worried about sharks. Now my daughter was scared to be in the pool because of sharks.

**Willa:** Sometimes when I’m just swimming out, I hear the song in my heart. You feel it. It’s coming for you. I think I talked about this in the episode pretty directly. A thing about Sideways that really tickled me and that I thought was really fun about this episode was we don’t imagine that someone like Miles would have an impact upon us. He just is not a poster child for that. That’s just not how things work. Sometimes it’s who you least expect. I like that. I like that it’s unpredictable in that way, because if it was just up to people who make decisions based on what you think is going to happen or what’s happened before, you’d never cast… You’d make Miles be totally different. You’d sand off his edges and you’d make him someone else.

**John:** We often talk on this podcast, what is the nature of a protagonist, what is a hero, what is a hero going through. Also, Miles feels like a sidekick character to somebody else, and yet he’s centered in this movie. He’s like a Shrek at the very center of this movie, who is grumpy and angry, and we learn to love him because he’s just center frame the whole time. One of the things that I really liked about your episode is that you bring up Maya, who is his antagonist, who’s this person who’s challenging all his beliefs and actually genuinely loves wine in a way that’s more approachable than maybe he does. She’s not strident. She’s embracing of like, let’s celebrate wine, rather than pit them against each other.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Which is fun. I want to talk just a moment about some of your other episodes.

**Willa:** Please.

**John:** It’s been a One Cool Thing repeatedly on the show for me. You have a two-part episode on the Jane Fonda workout, which was a really fascinating deep dive in terms of it’s so strongly associated with her and yet she’s really taking this work that someone else has done and repackaging it. You broker a conversation between the two women.

**Willa:** That’s one of my top two episodes we ever did. It was totally not what I was expecting to happen. I basically had decided that the Jane Fonda workout itself was fascinating and that Jane Fonda’s story is fascinating, because it is. When I started looking into it, the woman who actually created the workout is named Leni Cazden. Jane Fonda had cited her in a couple places and in her biography, but also she’d thanked her at some awards show. She was findable, essentially. It wasn’t a secret. Then a lot of things just fell into place that I didn’t have anything to do with it. My timing just happened to be really good. I got to speak to both of them and then got to follow up with Leni. I just felt this delicious psychological long-term relationship just fell into my lap. That doesn’t happen that often. That was super fun. Then we basically did the episode that I had been imagining second. Then we did this other fun one that I hadn’t been expecting first.

**John:** A lot of them are just one-offs that are just great and fun. The history of Gillette razors, let’s go to five blades, then the razor wars was just weird and how we got into that and the history of razors. It feels like there’s some, not necessarily a movie, but there’s some version of that absurd way we got to it. It feels like a Soderbergh movie, where it’s just like how we got to five blades eventually.

**Willa:** Some corporate espionage. The thing that I always want is there to be an actual idea, that’s not just the idea that the show purports to be about. It’s not just the topic. With that one, with the five blades one, the big idea was just like, oh my god, capitalism is so silly. Why do we keep doing this? It’s cool, a single-blade razor actually works pretty well. It lent itself to that. I usually find those things as I’m looking into them, but that one was very clean in that way.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the making of the show, because unlike Scriptnotes, which is exactly what we’re doing, which is just a conversation between two people, and there’s an outline I’m looking at, you are fully scripting the whole thing. It’s starting with research, and then you’re doing your interviews. You’re figuring out what parts of those interviews you can use. Then you’re having to write every word you’re saying to get that right and make it all fit. What is the process for you? You’re figuring out your ideas for the season, but what are you actually doing on a daily basis to get this stuff written?

**Willa:** The process is, I’m like, okay, what sounds like a good episode? As I said earlier, I start to dig around about a subject, just Google around about it. The ones that are right, they feel like, you know when there’s things hollow, like there’s a trick door or something, it’s going to spring back at you? It actually feels that way. You’re like, “Oh, this has a little give. There’s stuff here that I wasn’t expecting.” Once it starts to feel that way, there’s just… I just have to have one idea about it or just a sense that there’s a layer.

Then I just start to report. I do a lot of research. I’m also having a lot of conversations as I’m doing it. It’s not like a one and then two. They’re together. Then ideally, I would do all the reporting. I now report a couple of episodes at once, just because it’s just a better use of time. Then I essentially sit with all the stuff that I have, all the actualities, all the research, all the audio, all the interviews, and I write from the beginning. I listen back to the tapes and stuff, to the tracks. I’m trying to get somewhere, usually. I’m trying to make a point or explain some history.

It feels really written. It feels sculpturally written in a different way. It’s pretty that. Then I just spend a bunch of time writing it, however long it takes. It always takes longer. It’s the part that still hurts, as writing anything does. Ideally, that doesn’t take more than two weeks, but it’s been to. In some ways, it’s hard to track it. Then it still takes a pretty long time, because basically it’s-

**John:** It’s all the post process. You had this plan going into it. Then you’re listening to this thing. These episodes are scored. They have ins and outs. You have to figure out breaks.

**Willa:** A hundred percent. It’s all those things, but it’s not even that. It’s almost like when you turn in a first draft to an editor, they change it. They tell you all these notes. They give you all these thoughts. Weirdly, putting it on tape is the same thing. Suddenly, you just hear all these things that are wrong with it. You hear all the places it’s paced wrong. You hear the information that’s in the wrong order. You hear the beats that aren’t quite working right. Because a show is trying to build and often is about ideas…

Just with the Sideways episode, for example, there was a third sections that’s about… It’s after Pinot. It’s after the Merlot section. It’s after the Pinot section and trying to resolve what happened with Chardonnay. I knew where it was going. I knew what the end was. All that stuff was written. There was something about the pacing that was making that pay… It just wasn’t working. On paper, it was working fine, but it’s not working fine when you actually hear it. That takes a long time. I think that takes longer than it probably should. I think it takes longer than other people’s process. There’s a lot of iterations basically. The music comes in later. The breaks are written in. It’s a lot about making sure the arc works. I have found that that is not… It’s supposed to be written to be heard. When you’re just writing it, it’s not in the form it’s supposed to be at. Something really changes there.

**John:** The closest I’ve done to this is I did a podcast called Launch, which was a six-episode series about the creation and printing and release of my book series. It was great, but it was such a different experience. I was not prepared for how much time it was going to take and also just what a different workflow it was. We hadn’t transcribed everything, all the interviews, but then we missed out on stuff. Are you transcribing everything you do from all these people or are you just taking these are the bits we need?

**Willa:** This is a thing that I don’t know what would’ve happened in the past, but we use basically an automated transcription program. A computer does it. You get them back fast. There’s use cases that I don’t have, where you would need it to be really precise. It’s pretty good actually. Because I’m listening back to it no matter what, the transcript lies, you still have to hear. It sounds like it’s great, but then you listen in, they’re talking in a monotone. You still have to listen back to it. We do transcribe everybody, but that’s because it’s not what it was.

**John:** Once you’re writing it, is this in Google Docs? What program are you using when you’re writing?

**Willa:** I was a faithful Microsoft Worder for all my writings, and I still am. Google Docs, it’s just if other people have to get into it, which obviously the producer and editors do at some point. Then also, just when the drafts were just changing so much, after you’re going through, we basically listen and we make changes and then retrack. It just became so much easier to just have it all just in this one place. You just need the link, not to email the document every time it changes.

**John:** That’s brutal. The episode we listened to, how many hours of work on your side was that?

**Willa:** I couldn’t…

**John:** Is it three weeks?

**Willa:** I work really hard.

**John:** It was a ton of work.

**Willa:** That one I will say, it was a lot of work, but in a different way. The writing of that one was the smoothest, cleanest writing experience I’ve had in a long time. I think it took me, not counting the day that I just went back through all the audio that I had… I also didn’t over-report that story, so that helps a lot. I wrote that piece in four days, which never happens. Then I got stuck with it at different stages once it was whatever. It’s almost like I’m almost sad it happened. I’ll be like, “I can do it in four days.”

**John:** [inaudible 00:52:42] “Maybe I can do it in three days.”

**Willa:** It hasn’t happened in a long time that I’d done it that fast, and it’s not going to happen again. It was nice. That one was just very structurally, very clear in my mind as I was doing it. That’s not always the case.

**John:** Willa, so many of your episodes are just incredible fodder for our segment How Would This Be A Movie. In a future How Would This Be A Movie, would you mind coming back and talking us through some of these things?

**Willa:** I would love to. Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Willa, thank you so much.

**Willa:** Thank you.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 what Craig’s been up to. Now, let’s roll the credits for the original episode of Decoder Ring.

**Willa:** This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is senior supervising producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our technical director. Thank you to Jim Taylor, Jordan Weissmann, Peta Work [ph], Lo and Lou, Josh Levine and Travis Lybbert. The 2021 paper Travis co-authored called A Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes also corroborates the Sideways effect, and we’ll link to it on our show page.

If you’re a fan of Decoder Ring, please sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to this show without any ads, and they’re supporting the work we do to make Decoder Ring. Members will also get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of the season. Please go to slate.com/decoderplus to sign up now. I really appreciate your support. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig is back. Craig has been gone for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now Megana, last week I asked you, “Hey, is anybody wondering where Craig’s been?” You are the person who’s responsible for the ask@johnaugust email account. I was wondering whether people were wondering where Craig has been.

**Megana:** Yes. We had one person who wrote in, curious about where Craig has been.

**Craig:** One person was wondering where I was.

**John:** By the time this Bonus Segment is out, I guess the news will be out. Craig, you were in space. You were the first screenwriter to fly on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceship. I guess my real first question is, what was it like to leave the bounds of Earth? What was that experience like? They always say to send a poet, but a screenwriter is the person to send.

**Craig:** Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell. Anybody? Anyone?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s from.

**Craig:** That’s Elton John’s Rocket Man. It’s a popular song.

**John:** It’s a popular song. I’ve heard it once or twice.

**Craig:** 1970-something. God, this is just one kind of sadness upon another. One person cared, and neither one of you know Rocket Man. I think it’s going to be a long, long time until touchdown brings me around again-

**John:** That I do recognize.

**Craig:** I’m not the man they think I am at home.

**John:** You were not on Mars. You were instead in night shoots. You were in night shoots for your TV show, which is just a lot. Your schedule, which was difficult, became impossible.

**Craig:** I’ve been doing pretty well, I think, all things considered, by when you go into three weeks of nights, you’re no longer on the schedule that any other normal human being is on. It’s amazing actually how fast you can get used to it. Much easier to get out of it than to get into it. I would say that much at the very least.

**John:** While you were gone, you missed some episodes. I don’t think you had a chance to listen to the episodes. I thought we’d review what we learned and get your opinions on some things. The first episode, which I really missed you for, was on nuclear issues. We had two experts on to talk about nuclear war, nuclear arms, nuclear energy. You obviously have a background in this stuff. We were looking at what the current landscape was, and of course with the war in Ukraine, the growing escalation of possibilities of nuclear war. It was not a fun episode. I wouldn’t say it was joyful.

**Craig:** No, never joyful to talk about things like nuclear weapons. I don’t really know what the point is of talking about the possibilities. Either they will or will not occur, and if they occur, we’re all dead. That’s basically the deal.

**John:** I would say going into it, I was of the mindset that because of the reduction in number of nuclear arms that are out there in the world, nuclear war wouldn’t be as bad as what we grew up expecting. It’s still terrible.

**Craig:** Oh lord, yeah. The arms race that occurred, I’m sure you guys covered this, largely in the ‘80s, between the Soviet Union and the United States, led to a situation where both nations had this absurd surplus of nuclear warheads. We don’t need that many. We know that a single large nuclear weapon can destroy most of a city. There are only so many cities. Once you start lobbing them, the destruction that occurs is dramatic not only to the people that live there. Obviously it’s fatal. Then you have long-lasting effects around it. Economies are shredded. The environment is destroyed. It’s almost impossible to imagine a situation where one nuclear weapon is intentionally fired and set off and is not followed by a retaliatory strike. Essentially, nuclear weapons are unusable or usable all at once. It’s actually amazing that we have these here and have had them for our entire lives and they haven’t been used in our lifetime.

**John:** Let’s keep it that way.

**Craig:** That would be nice. Unfortunately, we are not in charge.

**John:** Craig, are you familiar with the story of Stanislav Petrov?

**Craig:** Was he the guy who said, “I’m not going to fire that nuclear weapon.” The Soviet said, “Fire nuclear weapon,” because they had misunderstood a test, and he was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

**John:** Yep, it’s that guy. That was brought up as one of the potential stories that has not really been very well dramatically told. One of the things I brought up is that I think it’s sometimes really challenging to tell a story about a thing that didn’t happen. The guy who stands in the way of a bad thing happening is a little less dramatic than the guy who does the thing.

**Craig:** There’s one movie that I think does that very well is Crimson Tide, 1994’s Crimson Tide, which I think probably drew quite a bit from the Petrov incident and is very much based on that idea that a submarine receives orders to fire a nuclear weapon and then there’s another message coming in, but the radio’s damaged. They don’t get the rest of it. It might say, “Wait, actually don’t,” but they don’t know. There is essentially a debate and mutiny over whether or not they should fire those nuclear weapons. They made it very exciting. A fine Tony Scott film.

**John:** Agreed. Other episodes you missed. Episode 546 was Limited Series. We had Liz Meriwether on the show, finally…

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** …and Liz Hannah. They both recently had limited series out there. We had a talk about what that was like. You of course did a limited series for Chernobyl. One of the things I think was so key from their descriptions of why tell this story now was that feeling that in a limited series or a dramatic series versus a documentary series, you can tell that central character’s internal POV, that you just couldn’t if it’s strict documentary. They had a chance to really explore what was inside the character, rather than what just the facts were.

**Craig:** The difference between a limited… Any kind of fictionalization, doesn’t matter whether it’s a limited series or an ongoing series or a single movie, but any dramatization affords you a wildly different palette than you would have as a documentarian.

**John:** Lastly, the episode that we are going to be putting this Bonus Segment on, was about the Sideways effect. I think we’ve talked about the Sideways effect just between you and me, or maybe on the air as well. Of course, that’s the impact of the film Sideways on Merlot and Pinot Noir in America and around the world and how one character’s rant, or he rants twice, can have a measurable impact on popular culture and economics. We talked with Willa Paskin about that.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I remember seeing Sideways. I remember that happening. I didn’t know anything about wine then. I barely know anything about wine now. I know the kinds of wines I like. Interestingly, I don’t like Pinot Noir.

**John:** I’m not a fan.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, John. I like a huge, big, red, stupid wine. I like a dumb, big Cabernet. That’s what I like.

**John:** That’s what I say too. Whenever somebody’s coming over, “What kind of things you like?” I just say, “I like a big, dumb red.” I’m not apologizing for that. It’s just actually what my taste is.

**Craig:** I like to be hit in the face with a Cabernet bat. That’s me. That’s just what I like. Am I a cretin? Probably. I don’t care. I don’t like Pinot Noir. It’s thin. It’s like it’s not really there to me. Merlot, it’s not offensive to me. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. Actually, there are some fantastic wines that use Merlot as part of their blend.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** There are some great blended red wines out there. Sideways, I don’t know. By the way, I love that movie. It’s amazing. Why was it so obsessed with Pinot Noir? I don’t know.

**John:** Basically, Willa’s argument is that Pinot Noir was really just meant to be a stand-in for the Miles character himself, and that he’s difficult, but there’s actually something good underneath the surface, and you have to really come to appreciate what it’s trying to do and take it as what it actually is. He feels like he is a Pinot Noir that people are not appreciating properly.

**Craig:** Thus an entire industry was disrupted.

**John:** It was. Now, part of the reason we got into the Sideways effect is on Episode 547 we had Quinn… You know Quinn Emmett.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The other folks behind Good Energy were coming on to talk about how we talk about climate change in our films and TVs and how we can put messages out there that have an impact. We talk about how sometimes things really do have an impact, but in terms of representation, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or other films along the way have that impact in terms of showing a different way of people interacting, dramatizing situations that people may not have thought of, and certainly for LGBT representation. There’s important films along the way like Philadelphia that get people to address their prejudices.

**Craig:** I don’t know how good of a tool movies are going to be for climate change, because the thing is most people recognize that it exists, most people are concerned about it, and most people, meaning almost everyone, feels that they have no direct impact upon it, and they’re right. It’s going to take large governmental action and sweeping changes globally to prevent this situation from getting worse. I think that’s not going to happen. I think the situation will get worse. I don’t know what it is. With something like climate change, where we can see it’s there and we’re just not sure how to deal with it, it very quickly can turn into lecturing or it can be parody or satirical. We can make fun of people for being stupid and ignoring climate change.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how you’re going to do, because the problem is you don’t see the end result. Philadelphia, you see a man change. You see the way he thinks about another human being change. You see how that human being’s death changes him so that theoretically, moving forward, he will be a better person. We can identify with him because he’s Denzel Washington and he’s a great actor. That’s impossible to do with climate change, because they’re not going to see it happen.

**John:** I would debate the premise that it’s impossible for it to be done with climate change. I think it’s a question of what are you trying to do. Are you trying to make a movie that is specifically about climate change or are you trying to normalize things that you wish people would normalize in their real lives? An example would be, if you have characters who are going onto the roof of their building, are there solar panels on that roof, and normalizing that expectation. Are you seeing people do small things like take public transportation rather than be in a car? Those are some small steps. Then there are also… We’ll put a link in the show notes again to the Good Energy playbook.

There are things that don’t feel like climate stories, but of course really are climate stories. Anything about disasters have a climate element to it. One of the points they try to make is that in anything we’re doing in film or television, if you’re not addressing climate change, you’re making science fiction, because a reality of the world is climate change. To not address it is science fiction.

**Craig:** Sure, unless you’re telling a story that really doesn’t have anything to do with outside. Even if it does have something to do with outside on any given day, you’re not going to be experiencing this specific aspect of climate change. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I love Quinn, and I get what he’s doing, and I appreciate how devoted he is to this. To me, honestly, the thing that we could do, the thing that I could do, I try to do this, is talk all the time about how positive nuclear energy is.

I feel like I have a somewhat privileged position in that regard because I made a show about a nuclear disaster. I’m saying nuclear energy is a good thing. In fact, if the United States invested heavier in nuclear energy, and I know that Quinn and I agree on this, that would matter more than anything else. That would matter more than solar panels. That would matter more than wind turbines. Just putting us back on a nuclear grid would change everything. I try and talk about that. It’s hard to put that into… Maybe I’ll have a character yammer about it in a show. I can do that, I suppose.

**John:** Talk about your show, because your show’s going to have some connection to climate change, just by necessity. There’s fewer people on this planet.

**Craig:** Climate change stops. Once we stop driving cars and pumping coal carbon into the air and burning fossil fuels like oil and gas, then climate change essentially gets reversed. I think it’s fair to say, without giving too much away, that climate change is not irrelevant to what happens. That’s as far as I’ll go.

**John:** That’s as far as you’ll go. Craig, it is wonderful to have you back on the show. Next week we’ll have you back for a full episode. Anyway, congratulations on surviving your night shoots.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m looking forward to having you back on the show and back in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** I’m almost home.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Decoder Ring](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring) and the [Sideways Effect Episode](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2022/05/sideways-the-movie-had-lasting-effects-on-the-wine-industry-and-casual-wine-drinkers)
* [Sideways Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/)
* Willa Paskin [on Slate](https://slate.com/author/willa-paskin) and [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/willapaskin)
* [A “Sideways” Supply Response in California Winegrapes](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/sideways-supply-response-in-california-winegrapes/FE14CECD927047BD0582207D77F1B09E) by Travis Lybbert for the Journal of Wine Economics
* [Snopes on Clark Gable and Undershirts](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-shirt-off-his-back/) and [Madison Name from the Movie Splash](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bp/splash-joke-lead-madison-baby-name-boom-190720175.html)
* [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 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/549standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-nuclear-episode).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 545 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll be discussing nuclear energy, nuclear safety, and nuclear war, both the realities and how these issues are portrayed in Hollywood. Obviously, Craig Mazin would seem to be a great person to dive into these topics, since he made a show called Chernobyl, but he is off making his new show this week. Luckily, we have two bona fide experts joining us today.

Joan Rohlfing is President and COO of Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit, nonpartisan security organization focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity. NTI also produced the docu-drama Last Best Chance that premiered on HBO. She’s held senior positions in the US Department of Energy and worked as an advisor to the US Ambassador to India in the wake of nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. Earlier in her career she oversaw nuclear weapons policy and acquisition programs for the Department of Defense and the Armed Services Committee at the US House of Representatives. Joan, thank you so much for being with us.

**Joan Rohlfing:** John, thank you so much for the invitation.

**John:** Now, my first question for you, Joan, is one of the questions that always comes up as we’re trying to pitch projects in Hollywood, is why now? What is it about this particular moment that makes this story relevant to be told on a big screen or on a small screen? Can you tell us why in April 2022 we should be paying attention to nuclear issues?

**Joan:** I think we’re at a moment where the danger is extremely high. In fact, I would argue it’s one of the highest points in the history of the nuclear era, rivaled perhaps only by the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. A lot of people who think nuclear weapons went away at the end of the Cold War are now realizing with this Ukraine crisis that nuclear weapons are still around. The nuclear threat is real. We have seen a major nuclear power, Russia, do nuclear saber-rattling and make both implicit and I would say rather explicit threats of nuclear use. We’ve seen conflict around nuclear reactor facilities in Ukraine. This is a moment where we are feeling these dangers palpably. Many people are frightened. What I hope we can talk about today is not only what’s frightening about the situation, but what can we do to help prevent a nuclear catastrophe from happening.

**John:** Great. We can talk about this as our responsibilities as citizens but also as storytellers and making sure we’re telling the stories that can get people thinking about this. Often on the show we’re doing a segment called How Would This Be A Movie, where Craig and I discuss a starting point of a story that comes up in the news. I want to introduce our second guest for that news angle.

David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to the Washington Post. He’s worked as a diplomatic correspondent and the newspaper’s bureau chief in Jerusalem and Moscow, and also assistant managing editor for foreign news. He’s the author of several books, including The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. David, welcome to the show.

**David E. Hoffman:** Thanks for having me.

**John:** Now, you’ve covered these stories and probably assigned them. You’ve reported them yourself but also assigned them out to other writers. I’m curious what you think. Are these stories that are being under-reported or should be higher in the attention in the news media for us to be looking at in nuclear issues or nuclear safety?

**David:** We have a war going on, so I’d like to address nuclear weapons. I don’t know if people noticed, but just the other week, a missile fired by Russia, a cruise missile, landed within 15 kilometers of the border with Poland, a NATO nation. Had it hit inside Poland, the United States and all of NATO allies would’ve been committed to defend Poland. Meanwhile, a week or two after that, helicopters from Ukraine crossed the border into Russia and destroyed an oil depot in a place called Belgorod. When I see missiles and helicopters crossing this kind of border between East and West in the middle of a war, I am reminded that all the nuclear missiles, the intercontinental ballistic missiles of Russia and the United States are on launch-ready alert today.

People think that the Cold War’s over and we got rid of all of the hair trigger alert stuff, but those missiles, in the case of the United States, land-based missiles and submarine-based missiles, are ready to launch within minutes of the President of the United States giving an authorized order. In the case of land-based missiles, maybe 10 minutes. In the case of submarines, maybe 12 minutes.

We have this system, and I think the Russians still have it too, because during the Cold War we had a standoff. We had a cocked pistols standoff. It was called mutual assured destruction. It’s still there. It’s a recipe for mistake, for disaster, for catastrophe. We’ve never been able to remedy it. People have tried. Presidents have tried. They keep promising, we’ll set up a joint early warning, we’ll have a hotline. All of those efforts basically failed. At a time when both sides are really facing off in Ukraine, the idea that we still have the hair trigger alert, you don’t read about it in the headlines, but that’s what really worries me.

**John:** Let’s set the table for what we want to talk about on this episode. It sounds like when you talk about the escalating tensions between two nuclear powers, which seems like an old idea, it seems like the Russians were always our enemies in old movies or old TV shows and they disappeared off of that, but the conflict is hot now.

You talked about nuclear weapons, the possibilities of nuclear war, but I also want to talk about nuclear energy and safety, which those two things overlap, to a degree, because even just this past week we’re seeing stories as Russia pulled out of the Chernobyl region, the Russian soldiers, they were doing really dangerous things in that space. When you have military people interacting with nuclear areas, that’s a concern as well. We’ll try to have a conversation about the realities and the Hollywood portrayals of these things and what we need to do in terms of thinking about these portrayals in the next months and the next years going forward about nuclear issues. ‘’

Maybe let’s start with nuclear weapons and nuclear war, which is just an incredibly disappointing and frustrating thing to start with. Joan, can you give us a sense of how many nuclear weapons are in the world right now? Do we have a count? Do we have a sense of how many there are out there?

**Joan:** There are estimated to be some 13-15,000 nuclear weapons in the world, which is an excessive number of weapons when you think about the power of each individual weapon. A modern nuclear weapon is roughly 20 times the firepower of the nuclear weapons used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That having been said, there is a positive message in here, which is that the number of weapons in the world today is just a fraction of how many we had several decades ago. The estimate is that at the high point there about 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, the majority of those held by the United States and Russia. That’s still true today. The US and Russia together have about 90% of the remaining nuclear weapons in the world. Progress has been made to bring those numbers down, but the dangers are still there, greater than ever, a lot of complexity in the system, increasing the risk of use, and more players, and some of them have growing arsenals, so a dangerous moment.

**John:** I want to talk about the players, but first let’s focus on that story of dropping from 70,000 nuclear weapons down to 13-15,000. What happened? I wasn’t aware that it had dropped so much. What changed? What were the policies? What were the programs that actually got us down that low?

**Joan:** The short answer is arms control. During the Cold War and at the height of the Cold War, the US and Russia, at the time Soviet Union, both understood that we had a mutual interest, an existential common interest in trying to limit the dangers of nuclear weapons and prevent a nuclear exchange. Even though we were adversaries and had competing systems, we worked hard and diligently to reduce numbers to put limits around our arsenals and to do that in a way that was verifiable and relatively transparent. The verification provisions that we negotiated allowed a high degree of intrusiveness and inspections and regular reporting on our arsenals. It was quite extraordinary.

Unfortunately, many of the agreements we put in place, both around nuclear weapons and limitations around our conventional stockpiles, those agreements have come apart, fallen apart. Both the US and Russia have walked away from quite a few of those agreements. It leaves us in a much more dangerous place today.

**John:** David, can you give us some sense from the Russian perspective in terms of the number of weapons that are out there in the world and the reduction, but they still have a force there. What’s your reporting, what’s your experience like with the Russian side of this?

**David:** The real reason that we are at a lower level today, as Joan said, with these negotiations… You have to understand that behind this is a story of people and a story of political will. The reason we are where we are today are two men, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. For separate reasons, they both came to the conclusion that the world was headed to an abyss, and they wanted to do something about it. When they finally had a chance to do something about it in the late 1980s, it had a big impact. When we talk often about the warheads and the numbers and the treaties and the verification, people just shouldn’t forget, these are always stories of human will and willpower.

I covered Reagan for a long time. It wasn’t until 1986 on a cold evening in Reykjavik that I realized, six years into his presidency, seven years after I started covering him, that he was a nuclear abolitionist. I think Gorbachev too kept his desires secret, because he was rising and became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He couldn’t have announced right away what his intentions were. He did some extraordinarily courageous things that were not about building. You won’t get any statues in Russia or the former Soviet Union for what he did, because a lot of what he did was to prevent things from happening. Gorbachev prevented an arms race in space, personally. When the Soviet guys, the rocket men, brought him plans to match Reagan’s Star Wars and to have a nuclear arms race in space, Gorbachev put those plans in his bottom drawer and never said another word, and it didn’t happen.

Fast-forward to today, we’re 30 years beyond the end of the Soviet Union. We had a period in Russia, about 10 years, from 1991 to 2001, of a democratic market free period. It was the longest period of freedom in 1,000 years of Russian history. It was pretty chaotic and raucous. I lived there. During that time, Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton also decided that they didn’t need as many nuclear weapons. Things continued on a pretty good trajectory toward cooperation and reducing the risks. When Putin came in in 2000, handpicked by Yeltsin, he also was very, very cautious and didn’t really reveal his hand. As the time went by, in 2007 he gave a very hawkish speech, in 2011 he was faced with huge protests in Moscow, 2012. Putin gradually decided to reassert Russia’s aggressive posture toward the rest of the world. In my book in 2009 I wrote that Russia could sometimes be prickly but was not necessarily the enemy of the United States. Things have changed.

What we see now with this war in Ukraine, this war of aggression, a war without a cause, Russia has become a very, very determined adversary, and Putin is using nuclear weapons as a signal. He’s threatening them. He’s making all kinds of statements that are very worrisome. I’m not sure how he thinks about the consequences of actually using a nuclear weapon in combat, which hasn’t been used since Hiroshima. I’m very worried that this kind of bravado and theatrical signaling is going to create confusion and uncertainty. He’s been doing it. He started doing it very early in this conflict.

**John:** I want to highlight a thing you said there, because you talked about how the story of our nuclear arsenals being depleted and the decisions to back away from these things and Gorbachev or Reagan deciding they did not want to have an arms race in space, those are compelling ideas or compelling stories. It’s very hard to tell stories about things that didn’t happen. It’s hard to write about the space race that never was. We can do alternate scenarios for things like if there had been this race in space, but it’s hard for us to create popular entertainment that talks about things that did not happen. One thing we do talk about a lot though is the idea of things that could have happened or could be out there. We talk about nuclear disarmament and all these warheads being taken down.

Joan, can you tell us what actually happens when a nuclear weapon is taken offline? Is there any danger that those weapons are going to get loose, that that material is going to be out there, that warhead is going to be falling in the hands of somebody who should not have it?

**Joan:** When a weapon is dismantled, and I’ll talk about the US system, it’s broken down into its constituent components. You have metals and electronics. I would say the most important part of a nuclear weapon is the nuclear fuel, the fissile material that can produce a chain reaction and a great release of energy when the bomb is detonated. That’s a combination typically of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Those materials are really important to safeguard. When they’re withdrawn from a weapon, they need to be stored in a very high-security facility. Obviously, the material coming out of weapons needs to be secured properly.

Even aside from weapons, there are pretty significant global stockpiles of these materials. Around the world, a big part of our global effort has been ensuring that those materials are secured to the highest possible standards so that they cannot be stolen by terrorist organizations to be put together again in a weapon form and detonated in a city around the world.

**John:** As recently as a year ago, when the word nuclear was brought up in terms of weapons, the concern was proliferation. The concern was that other nations around the world would have their own nuclear weapons. They were concerned about Iran. They were concerned about North Korea. Where are we at now with proliferation? Do we know how many nations have nuclear weapons? You say that 90% are probably still controlled by the US and Russia, but where are the rest of those weapons?

**Joan:** There are nine nuclear weapons states today. We continue to worry that other states may join the ranks in terms of the nine. In addition to the United States in Russia, you have the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and although Israel does not publicly acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons, it is believed to have nuclear weapons. Those comprise the current nuclear weapon states, as all of us who read the news understand. We’re very worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons. They already know how to make the fissile material. We’ve heard states say, for example, Saudi Arabia, that if Iran becomes nuclear, they will also acquire nuclear weapons. We could imagine a cascade within the Middle East.

We have to worry about other countries in the future as well. There are other states that have the capacity to build nuclear weapons, they have the scientific know-how to build nuclear weapons. Some of them already have the capabilities to make the materials. What we do have are treaties that provide a pretty good set of brakes to further proliferation, but the political will to maintain those treaties needs to be maintained. That’s really essential. There are stories of hope though. Let me just offer that–

**John:** Please.

**Joan:** While there’s all this material in the world, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, we’re doing a better job of trying to quantify where it is, the quantities that exist around the world. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was an agreement struck for many of the weapons that were being dismantled in Russia in particular to take some of the highly enriched uranium out of those weapons and convert it into a non-weapons usable form, a lower form of enrichment, which was sold to the United States to be used and burned in our power plants, so producing energy, a wonderful Swords to Plowshares story that was called the Megatons to Megawatts Program. We know how to do a lot of things that dramatically reduce the risk.

I also wanted to just pick up on David’s comment earlier about how important people are to the process of disarmament. He mentioned Reagan and Gorbachev and Putin giving very different examples of behavior. I would say the public at large plays an important role here. Public pressure played a role in President Reagan’s understanding. There was political pressure created around nuclear weapons. There was a palpable understanding of the nuclear threat at that time. We’re coming up on a 40-year anniversary in a couple of months of one of the largest anti-nuclear protests ever, certainly in the United States. About a million people gathered in Central Park to protest nuclear weapons. It’s hard to imagine today that kind of gathering, because nuclear weapons have so fallen off of the public’s radar screen.

I would say one of the very large storylines about nuclear weapons is frankly how undemocratic they are. When you look at the small number of states in the world that have weapons, vast majority of states have signed a treaty to never develop nuclear weapons in exchange for extracting a promise from the nuclear weapon states that they would eventually give up their nuclear weapons. That’s a 50-year-old treaty that’s under a lot of pressure right now.

The other way in which it’s undemocratic is we see the authority to use these weapons vested in a very small numbers of hands around the world. I’m really struck by, with the current crisis in Ukraine, the power of a single individual, in this case Putin, to use his nuclear weapons as a shield for absolutely egregious, illegal, aggressive, destructive behavior. If that’s not undemocratic, I don’t know what is.

**John:** David, I want to keep talking about the people involved in these stories, because I think as we’re looking forward to how we tell stories in this space, we adapt characters we can focus on. We say Gorbachev and Reagan, but who are the characters we might be looking at now who are going to be involved in this situation? Can you give us a sense of what a journalist working in this space would be doing and how they would be able to report on this when so much stuff would have to be top secret? Do you have a sense of what the roles of people working inside the government, the US government, or through other agencies would be doing to try to stop proliferation to intervene and keep a nuclear war from breaking out? Who are some of the people that you think are interesting for us to be following in this situation, the kinds of people?

**David:** John, before I answer that, I just want to go back to something about Gorbachev. I don’t think that it’s easy to just say nothing happened. I think that Gorbachev’s story is immensely important and is a hell of a drama. How does a guy rise in a dictatorship? How does he become the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, keeping his ambitions to himself about wanting to end the Cold War and the arms race? It was an amazing struggle. He really saw the horrible weaknesses of the system and thought, I have to change it. He said, “We can’t go on living like this.” I haven’t seen that yet brought, that bravery and courage inside, not an open society, but a closed one. I haven’t seen anybody do that yet. I think it’s pretty amazing.

I would point out to you that there is a way to make stories out of things that don’t happen. Take just a look at Project Sapphire, which was this incredible effort by the United States to airlift a large amount of highly enriched uranium out of Kazakhstan. Uranium could’ve laid around there. The Iranians were sniffing around. They were hoping maybe to get that fissile material to build a bomb. Very, very bright and small group of Americans figured it out, flew some C-5As into there, loaded that stuff onto the planes, and they flew the longest flight in the history of a C-5A carrying highly enriched uranium back to the United States, so that it couldn’t be grabbed by Iran. I think that that storyline, Project Sapphire, that amazing secret operation, yeah, something didn’t happen. The Iranians didn’t get it, but it still was pretty amazing.

In all the cases of arms racing, it’s to me just as incredible to see an arms race in reverse or going downhill, people trying to stop this braking locomotive as it is to see the actual threat of things getting worse. I think we’re actually in a situation like that now. We see now the Chinese are very actively building silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit the United States or anyplace else in the world, hundreds of these silos. What are they thinking? They had 100 or 200 missiles. Now they seem to be aiming for more than 300. They had a system before where they did not use the hair trigger alert of the United States and Russia and now they’re edging more toward putting missiles on alert. What are we thinking?

If we now have three of our powers all racing to build a hypersonic glide vehicle that can evade the fences and be maneuverable at very low altitudes at high speeds, carrying a nuclear warhead, I don’t think we should take for granted the idea that all arms racing going forward is great. We ought to think about how to we break these things, how do we reverse the course. As drama too, I think actually being up against the machine is a pretty good narrative arc.

**John:** Let’s talk about then who the characters are, who would be up against this machine, and who would be breaking the progress of us going towards more nuclear conflict. Talk to me about a journalist who was investigating this. How challenging is it to report in this space?

**David:** It’s actually amazingly become easier. Certainly when I was the White House correspondent in the 1980s covering Reagan, almost everything was secret. We had to do a lot of what we called access journalism, meaning building up sources and getting people to leak stuff to us.

Now flash forward to today. This thing, for example, that I just mentioned about the Chinese building these silos, how did that become public? Two different, very smart experts in two separate organizations, not working for the government, use commercially available satellite imagery to discover these missile fields being built in China. They wrote reports and made it public. Open-source intelligence has become a very powerful tool in spawning dangers and warning us of trends. That kind of tool didn’t exist in the Cold War, but even people using their phones to spot military equipment rolling through Ukraine, the use of satellites is really advanced to the point where essentially people not in government can deploy intrusive measures of satellite photography to see what’s going on on the ground and alert us to what’s really happening.

**Joan:** John, can I build on that? David is absolutely right in highlighting people on the outside of the system. You were asking earlier about who are the people inside of the government who are going to save us from unclear wear, and a caveat here, I have the highest respect for colleagues in the government. I spend a good part of my career in the government. These are good people doing very hard jobs.

That being said, one of the reasons we have this spring-loaded, incredibly dangerous system in place, the one David was describing, with large numbers of forces on high alert, that there are many ways in which the system can fail and we could end up in a nuclear war, and worse yet, blundering into a nuclear war accidentally that nobody intended. There’s a really important question that we should all be asking ourselves, which is, why is it, after 75-plus years since the advent of nuclear weapons and some 60-plus years since we developed this operating system called nuclear deterrence. Three years since the end of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, why do we still have this really dangerous system in place? What is holding it in place? I think we need to look at the bureaucratic inertia and the vested interests, both financial and political, and power interests vested in the existing system.

I think there’s a really interesting story that can be told about people on the outside who are trying to disrupt those vested interests in order to enable the system to adapt to meet today’s threats and keep us safe from nuclear use, from a nuclear catastrophe. There are definitely stories about the people doing work to expose nuclear proliferation in other parts the world. There are people who are trying to build public pressure to bring about a different result. There are also brave voices who are working inside of the system, who are trying to push the change agenda. I think there are historical examples of that too, where people stood up and defied authority to prevent a launch from happening. The

he Soviet Union at the time, there are two Russian officers who are described as saviors of mankind during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a really interesting story about a guy named Vasili Arkhipov, who was on a Soviet submarine around Cuba and basically stood in the way of a launch order by the captain of the ship. By the way, that was turned into a movie that flipped roles called Crimson Tide.

**John:** I was going to ask if that was Crimson Tide.

**Joan:** Yeah, that was Crimson Tide, only Crimson Tide was obviously abut an American crew, same story. Another Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, who prevented launch essentially when Russians had some faulty early warnings suggesting there were incoming US missiles. He was able to recognize that that was a mistake, an error of the system, and basically prevented that information from getting relayed up the chain where someone would take action on it. There are fascinating internal stories, but I think we should also be looking at stories in and around the system, at people willing to challenge it.

**John:** You brought up Crimson Tide. I want to do a quick segment on our portrayals of nuclear war in our movies and what’s realistic and what has changed in 2022 versus these movies from the ’80s and ’90s. I definitely grew up on the Day After Tomorrow, Terminator 2. We had this vision of oblivion basically in the event of a nuclear war. Joan, what would the reality of a nuclear war between the US and Russia look like now? Is it world-ending? What happens?

**Joan:** I’m sorry to report, it hasn’t changed since the time you and I were growing up. It would be absolutely catastrophic. If there was an exchange of weapons at any kind of scale, given the size of our arsenals, where we each have more than 1,000 incredibly powerful nuclear weapons deployed, it would be catastrophic not just for our countries, but for the globe, because we know that there are secondary effects.

For example, the potential for something called nuclear winter. All of the soot that would be lofted up into the atmosphere would create a darkening of the skies for a projected period of time. Some people have estimated up to a decade. It would affect agriculture and the ability to grow crops. It would cool the climate. We would expect to see mass starvation as a result of that prolonged global cooling.

One thing we don’t fully understand, because nobody has yet done the research to really study the impacts on critical infrastructures, power infrastructures, banking, health infrastructures, how would all those things… For example, if we lost power, and you might imagine that if there’s a major attack that we would lose power and then all of the systems that require power for their operation would cascade to failure. How can we imagine that we have any kind of governmental integrity in the face of that, where people are starving, where there’s no power, there’s no heat, there’s no water?

Not to sound too dire, but I actually think nuclear war is as bad as it’s ever been depicted in the worst of films from decades ago. What we’re missing, I would say though, in the filmmaking, that I think is really important, is a film that can give people some understanding that it doesn’t have to be this way. Many people are just despairing because they understand and are very frightened by nuclear threats, but they don’t see a way out. It would be great if we could begin to portray a world where we’ve somehow crossed the Rubicon to a safer set of practices for controlling nuclear technology that does not threaten the future of humanity.

**John:** David, in the reporting on Ukraine, I’ve seen the term tactical nuke brought up a lot. Can you talk to us about the idea of a tactical nuke and the difference from what we think about with nuclear weapons, intercontinental weapons?

**David:** An intercontinental ballistic missile flies across the oceans in 30 minutes. It’s a big rock. It goes into outer space, so there’s no air resistance. It can move 20 times the speed of sound and hit the target on the other side of the world in literally half an hour. Those were the weapons that terrified us in the Cold War. Also, the Cold War was partly a standoff in Europe. In Europe, both sides created smaller essentially battlefield nuclear weapons. We’re not talking about flying through space but flying through the atmosphere. There were even nuclear weapons that could be launched in an artillery piece, although it was called the Davy Crockett. It was a large recoiling rifle that would just shoot the nuclear bomb maybe a mile or two. It had a nickname. It was called an IQ test in a tube, because the chances that the soldiers that fired that thing would experience the blow-back of blast and radiation were pretty great.

It was never used, but the idea being that if the Soviet Bloc invaded NATO with a huge conventional advantage, which they had, the West would have to resort maybe to nuclear weapons to hold it off. It was a doctrine called flexible response. This kind of potential conflict caused both sides to create small nuclear weapons, bombs, artillery pieces, and so, for the European theater. When the Cold War ended, the United States withdrew a bunch of those tactical nuclear weapons. We left 100 in 5 bases in Europe. The Soviet Union and then Russia took its weapons, which were far greater in number, there are about 2,000 of them, and moved them to warehouses inside Russia where they are today. The concern about these weapons is that in some ways because they don’t involve that globe-spanning, terrifying ICBM, that it might be easier to use them on a battlefield or that they might tempt an angry leader who has been backed into a corner, with no recourse to use them.

Also, there’s been progress, if you could call it that, there’s been change in the way these nuclear weapons are engineered. The Russians and the United States have now created smaller nuclear weapons that are smaller in terms of yield. In other words the actual explosion is smaller, so that there are small weapons that would take out half an airfield with a nuclear bomb. The concern about this is that, is there really a way to do anything in a nuclear weapons explosion that’s small? How long could you expect the battle to go on if one side used even the smallest nuclear weapon? I think the ladder of escalation is just absolutely horribly rapid, and that there’s no time to think about the size. For that matter, if you’re on the receiving end of one of those two, for example, one side or the other started to roll tactical nuclear weapons into an active battlefield, do you think the other side would think, oh, no problem, they’re just little small tactical weapons? Of course not.

Unfortunately, the United States has also given in a little bit to this. The Trump administration built a lower-yield nuclear warhead, trying to match something that Russia had done. It’s arms arcing. I think it’s dangerous. Even more dangerous, there’s talk now about putting this lower-yield warhead on a cruise missile which flies under radar, which can be used for surprise attack, a naval cruise missile could be put on a boat somewhere, and just like those cruise missiles that hit Lviv in Ukraine a couple weeks ago, just 15 kilometers from the Polish border, you could put a nuclear warhead on one of those. I think we’re entering territory that is dangerous and worrisome. When it comes to nuclear warheads, they’re small, they’re big, they’re all very, very dangerous.

**John:** Now Joan, up until this Ukraine confrontation, we had wars between major powers. Instead, last 15, 20 years have all been about the concern of terrorists. One of the things that kept coming up was the idea of a dirty bomb. You don’t need actually a bomb that explodes in a nuclear way, but a bomb that has nuclear material in it that could be incredibly dangerous and poisonous to people around it. Where are we at now with dirty bombs? I don’t see that being reported in the news anymore. Have we just forgotten about it? Was it not really a huge worry? Tell us about dirty bombs.

**Joan:** It was and is a worry. Let me explain that when we talk about nuclear terrorism, there are two kinds of nuclear terrorism, at least two kinds, and I think we just discovered a third kind with the threats to the nuclear reactor facilities. There is a so-called dirty bomb. You’re right. You described it accurately. It’s basically conventional explosive wrapped around radioactive material. It does not produce a nuclear yield. There’s no mushroom cloud. There’s just a distribution of radioactive material. Depending on what kind of radioactive material one uses, it can have a pretty enormous economic impact if you were to detonate one in the heart of a city somewhere. It’s unlikely to kill any more people than the conventional explosive itself could, but it could render multi-square-block area uninhabitable due to the radiation for an extremely long period of time. It’d be very expensive to clean up and remediate.

We also still worry about nuclear terrorism using a real nuclear bomb, one that does produce nuclear yield, even if it’s a smaller yield, as opposed to highly sophisticated bomb from a major power. It could still devastate instead of a several-square-block area, an entire city. We have a model of what that looks like in looking at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because I think it’s possible for a well-resourced terrorist group, and we know terrorist groups have said they’re trying to acquire nuclear capability, if they get the nuclear materials, the plutonium or highly enriched uranium, if they steal them, acquire them illicitly somehow, you have to worry about them putting together a crude nuclear device.

Nuclear terrorism is still very real. It’s something we’re going to have to worry about indefinitely. This is not a threat that we say, okay, we’re done, it’s gone away. It requires us to put in place and maintain indefinitely a really strong system of nuclear security around the facilities that have the capacity to make that material or that store that material. That’s true of any kind of radiation device that a dirty bomb could be crafted of as well.

**John:** Joan, you brought up the concern about terrorism around nuclear facilities. Obviously, this last week we saw that as Russians pulled out of the Chernobyl region, Russians were not being careful in that place. They were digging trenches and doing things they should not have been doing. It raised a concern about how vulnerable are nuclear power plants and to what degree do we need to be worrying about them in times of wars and also not in times of war, because so often we see nuclear power in our film and TV. We’re seeing Chernobyl. We’re seeing Silkwood. We’re seeing stories of things going horribly wrong.

Maybe we can segue into talking about what is the state of nuclear energy right now around the world, because I know I used to live in France, and France largely uses nuclear power and seems to do so quite successfully, yet in the rest of the world we’re trying to get rid of nuclear power plants. What is the state right now of nuclear energy around the world?

**Joan:** Nuclear energy around the world on balance is growing. It’s considered to be a key component in combatting climate change because it’s carbon-free energy. You rightly mentioned some states have decided to get out of that business. Japan obviously retrenched pretty significantly in terms of its draw on nuclear power. China is significantly growing its nuclear power. France many decades ago took a decision that it doesn’t have a lot of indigenous assets for energy production, and so they decided to embark pretty significantly. About 70% of their electricity comes from nuclear power. We do have these examples with Chernobyl, a pretty catastrophic disaster. That was really a safety incident. The world learned a lot about how to build reactors that are much, much safer. The kind of accident that happened at Chernobyl could not happen today. A lot of structures have been put in place.

What we’re seeing in real time, however, is a new set of challenges. We’re in uncharted territory here. It’s the first time we’ve ever experienced nuclear power plants in a conflict zone. That’s presenting some real challenges. We don’t yet globally have norms in place, certainly not norms that the combatant Russia is willing to live by in terms of not physically assaulting the facilities, making sure that the operators can operate the facility unimpeded, that continuous power supply which is critical for maintaining the cooling system for the reactor itself, as well as for the spent fuel ponds where used nuclear fuel is stored and needs to be kept cool so that it won’t burn and create a radioactive fire.

I just want to give credit to, and this would be an interesting story, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the UN watchdog responsible for overseeing the peaceful applications of nuclear power. He went to Ukraine the week before last, in order to try and negotiate some norms around those facilities, a set of basic common sense, what Russian troops should and should not be doing around nuclear power plants.

I would argue that all of Europe, including Russia, has an interest in preventing a catastrophic accident at a nuclear power plant. As I imagine, there has got to be a breakdown in the command system, because it’s completely irrational, the behaviors we’ve been seeing around the power plants. I think the jury is still out on the extent to which Russian troops themselves may have been irradiated at significant levels while they were occupying the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. We heard reports of soldiers with radiation sickness, acute radiation sickness, potentially even one death. Let’s see what we learn in coming days and weeks about that.

**John:** David, as we wrap up here, the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s invasion also has a nuclear energy component to it as well, because of course Germany is relying on energy from Russia, and at the same time Germany is closing down its own nuclear reactors, its own nuclear power plants. How do you see the story of nuclear energy being affected by the crisis of energy policy we’re going to be having over the next couple of years?

**David:** I’m not an expert on this, John, but I think you can just do the simple math that if Europe has to wean itself off of Russian oil and gas, it’s going to need substitutions. The transition to sustainable energy takes time. People are looking very hard at how quickly to get to sustainable energy, but it’s not going to happen, so nuclear’s going to have to fill part of that gap.

**John:** Joan, because you’re an expert here, I can ask you, is nuclear fusion always 10 years away? I would love nuclear fusion. Can you get it to us a little sooner?

**Joan:** I’m not an expert on nuclear fusion. I’m an expert on nuclear weapons, less so power. With that having been said, so with that caveat, I do know a number of people who are engaged with the fusion community and they believe we’re getting much closer and that there’s a shot at it in the relatively near future. No, it is not always going to be 10 years away. That is the good news.

**John:** That’s great. I want to thank both of you for both the information, but also helping us highlight some stories along the way. Some things I wrote down here, Project Sapphire feels like it’s an obvious choice for an adaptation. A Gorbachev biopic or a Gorbachev miniseries that’s focusing on that moment or how he rises as a hero within the system to challenge the bureaucracy and challenge the expectations of what Russia should be doing next. Vasili Alapov, what’s the name of the–

**Joan:** Archipov.

**John:** Archipov. That’s the one that’s not the Crimson Tide situation, but a different–

**Joan:** He is the Crimson Tide.

**John:** He’s Crimson Tide.

**Joan:** The other gentleman is Stanislav Petrov.

**David:** You can read about Petrov in The Dead Hand. It’s the opening of the book.

**John:** Fantastic. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your book so we can see that. The other thing you were really emphasizing, both of you, is that the stories that we tell about this, we think about them as centering on the people in power and the decisions they’re making, but so often it’s the people who are doing the investigation, doing the reporting, doing the activism to stop bad things from happening or to move us to a better place may be the more interesting stories for us to be following. As we look to try to tell stories in nuclear space over the next couple years, we don’t have to just focus on the people who are sitting in positions of power. It’s often the people who are not in power who are the most interesting to follow.

**David:** Go find Jeffrey Lewis and Hans Kristensen, two guys in non-governmental organizations who exposed these Chinese missile fields. That’d be a great example.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Joan:** Agree with that. Go take a look at Beatrice Fihn, who won the Nobel Prize for helping to bring about the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons through her work with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

**John:** I love it. This is the time in the show where we do a One Cool Thing where we make some recommendation for our listeners about something they need to check out. Do either of you have a recommendation for something you would like them to be looking at?

**Joan:** Thanks for the questions. Atomic Veterans. There’s a filmmaker who’s done some interesting, very short videos with Atomic Veterans. Last name is Knibbe. He’s a Dutch filmmaker. A lot of people don’t realize this, but we tested nuclear weapons on thousands and thousands of human subjects who were soldiers right after the second World War ended. This gentleman, Morgan Knibbe has been really actively trying to interview the remaining survivors who were subjects of those tests, both in Great Britain and the United States. Some of the documentary work is just riveting. When you listen to these now-old men talk about these experiences, they are so vivid. It gives you a sense of the power of these weapons.

**John:** Fantastic. David, do you have a recommendation for our listeners?

**David:** John, I mentioned the story potential of one man up against the system. I’ve got a new book out in eight weeks. The title is Give Me Liberty. It’s about one man up against a dictatorship. He paid with his life for it. My suggestion is totally self-serving. Take a look at my new book, Give Me Liberty. It’s about a dissident in Cuba who fought Fidel Castro, fought him with no weapons, just pen and paper and an old wheezing Xerox machine. He got 35,000 Cubans to stand behind him and sign a petition for democracy against Castro’s dictatorship.

**John:** That sounds great. My One Cool Thing is, just to stick on the nuclear theme, is a couple years ago I got the chance to visit Hiroshima, which I’d always seen portrayed as being this bombed-out wreckage of a place. Then you go to visit Hiroshima, it’s actually beautiful. I was there over spring break. Cherry blossoms everywhere. It is remarkable combination of a vibrant city that has at its center this park that really shows what happened in the bombing. The museum behind it is fantastic. It both lets you not forget how horrifying the results are of a nuclear attack, but also it gives hope for the ability to rebuild after it. If you’re in Japan anyway and you’re wondering, “Should we go to Hiroshima? Is it going to be depressing?” It’s not going to be depressing. It’s going to be inspiring. I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to go visit Hiroshima.

David and Joan, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I want to thank Hollywood Health and Society for putting this today. This is our third collaboration. You can go back and listen to Episode 412 on addiction and mental health and Episode 440 on incarceration.

Scriptnotes is produced, as always, by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Joan and David, are you on Twitter? Are you reachable by social medias or not?

**Joan:** @joanrohlfing.

**John:** Fantastic.

**David:** I’m @thedeadhandbook.

**John:** That’s great. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find links to thinks we talked about. You’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 Megana and I are about to record about behind the scenes of the last two weeks, am I getting COVID or getting over COVID. I’m fine. Everything turned out fine. Joan and David, thank you so much for joining us. It’s absolutely a pleasure to get to talk with some experts on these subjects. Thank you so much for being with us.

**David:** Thanks.

**Joan:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, I’m back talking with you. I’m no longer prerecorded. This is back happening live. We just finished recording the nuclear episode, which was not fun, but enlightening, and hopefully helpful.

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, terrifying.

**John:** I liked that they had specific examples of like, these are stories that have not been told that someone could tell. That’s great. We always like How Would This Be A Movies, How Would This Be A Series, and it looks like there’s some really good options there.

**Megana:** Yeah, super useful to hear from the expert side of things versus just the writer interpreting that information.

**John:** While I was gone, I got to listen to you and Craig talk about 20 questions in the longest episode of Scriptnotes I think that’s ever been recorded. It was so long. I’m not actually finished with it. I haven’t gotten to the Bonus Segment where you and Craig discuss and solve all generational issues. I’m looking forward to that. I have it saved for me.

**Megana:** Oh gosh, I think the Bonus Segment itself is 30 minutes and the raw audio of what we recorded is 2 and a half hours.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Megana:** I know. I got in a lot of trouble with Bo for that.

**John:** Bo of course is the person who controls Craig’s calendar and schedule, and so therefore you took two and a half hours out of his HBO show to talk about Scriptnotes stuff.

**Megana:** Oh god, now HBO’s going to hate me too.

**John:** You’re on the do not hire list for HBO. Absolutely do not hire her.

**Megana:** When I approached Bo, I was like, “Oh, I need less than an hour. This is going to be so quick.”

**John:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** Then in passing, because her birthday was the next week, I was talking to her on her birthday, and I was like, “Yeah, I have to cut 45 minutes out of this 2-and-a-half-hour episode.” She was like, “What are you talking about? You told me that that was going to be 45 minutes max.” I was like, “Oh, god.”

**John:** One of the things I’m always struck by when I hear Craig talking if I’m not part of the conversation is that Craig really does talk in complete sentences. I’m looking forward to the transcripts for it, because I feel like you could actually just take his answers to things and it would feel like he just wrote them. He actually speaks very much the way other people write.

**Megana:** I think that that’s true. He has really fully formed thoughts right out of the gate, and it’s so impressive.

**John:** Yeah, because he didn’t prepare at all.

**Megana:** Absolutely not.

**John:** He had no sense of what those questions were before you asked those questions.

**Megana:** I didn’t even think he knew that you weren’t going to be there. He just entered the Zoom in his —

**John:** He thinks he’s on this episode. He has no idea that we recorded an episode about nuclear stuff. One of the things that we talked about in the episode was this guy who was talking about whether to drop out of film school. He was having some success. He was like, “Should I stick around for the next two years of film school or should I not?” It was interesting hearing you and Craig have different opinions on this. Even before you said sunk cost fallacy, I was shouting to no one, “Sunk cost fallacy!” because that’s what it really felt like to me is that you’ve gone through this much of your higher education, why would you stop and leave it unfinished there. I totally understand the notion of finishing a thing. Yet I was on Team Craig where I would say, at least for now I think it’s time to step away and pursue this writing career that looks like it’s kind of started.

**Megana:** I’m surprised to hear you say that. I wonder if finishing this degree is going to be helpful to Please Help Me Drop Out of Film School make connections and have some sort of credibility. I don’t really know. Once people are passing your script around, nobody’s looking at your transcript or your resume. It’s a relationship-based industry where they’re like, “I vouch for this guy,” and because your friend vouches for this person, you’re going to read that script. In order to make those connections and get people to take you seriously, I wonder if having the completed degree helps.

**John:** I don’t honestly think it does much, because that person who has a finished film degree, certainly what I learned in the Stark Program at USC was tremendously valuable. The actual degree I got has not been valuable, because no one’s ever asked to see it. I would have those same relationships with my classmates if I’d finished or not finished, to some degree, not entirely. Going through an extra two years with those classmates would’ve been great and I would’ve definitely learned some things, but I don’t think the actual degree is useful in a way that a lottery is necessarily useful in an architecture degree, where you have to actually prove that you know how to do this thing. No employer is ever going to ask for that degree.

I think there’s a pride aspect of it though too is that the pride in finishing a thing can feel great. Making your parents proud, that they can see, “Oh, my son got this degree,” would be great. The compromised solution that you and Craig arrived at is maybe take a gap, take some time off, and be able to go back to it, if that’s possible. That makes sense to me.

**Megana:** We had some interesting follow-up that an added cost to taking time off and going back is that you do lose the momentum, you lose the routine, you lose living close to a college campus. I thought that that was an interesting thing to also take into mind, into that equation. I had another question I wanted to ask you.

**John:** Please.

**Megana:** Someone wrote in and asked, this big win that Please Convince Me To Drop Out of Film School was hanging their hat on was that when the script was sent to Paramount, Paramount had said that they wanted to recommend it to their team. What does that feedback mean to you? I didn’t think that that was necessarily as big of a win as this listener seemed to think it was, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

**John:** It sounds like he got good coverage or got a recommend from somebody at Paramount, which is great. It’s not nothing, but it’s not a lot. It’s not going to be a guaranteed next step. I think the most you can hope out of that is that they’re going to want to take a meeting with you, which is again another good step, but isn’t a guarantee of any success. Still, take those little wins when they come. It is good news. It’s encouraging that people are reading stuff that you’re writing and liking it to the degree they want other people around them to like it. The folks who have been in your job before you, who have all gone to have writing careers, a common thread I’ve noticed is when their stuff gets passed around without them knowing it’s getting passed around, that’s when things are starting to sizzle and that things are getting started there. Please Convince Me doesn’t sound like he’s quite there yet, but maybe he’s going to get there. Be happy for what you have there.

**Megana:** My other worry is that he’s getting all of this information from this director who has a vested interest in selling a certain narrative to the writer versus an agent who you would expect to act in your best interest or something.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. The gatekeeper function there of that director is worth noting. I would also say that if this guy does decide to drop out of film school, it shouldn’t mean that he should stop all networking and all other ways of meeting people. This might be a good opportunity then to take that improv class, join that other group, find some other writers, get in a couple different writing groups. Just make sure that you are still actively doing all the other things if film school is not where you’re spending most of your time and your money, so making sure you’re still out there doing the other kinds of things that help you learn about the job you’re trying to do.

**Megana:** If you, John August, were what, 21, just graduated from Drake, what would your next steps be in the industry?

**John:** I would’ve moved to Los Angeles, just because that’s where the center of things is. LA’s a city I always want to live in. It’s much easier to move when you’re 21 than it is when you’re 25 or when you’re 29. I would’ve moved here. I probably still would’ve applied to film school, because I just didn’t know anything coming into this business. Again, 21-year-old me now with the internet would be much better connected. I would listen to all of Scriptnotes. I would’ve had a better sense of what Craig and whoever the equivalent of me would be, the alternate reality John.

**Megana:** Alternate reality, yeah.

**John:** I would’ve moved here. I would’ve gotten started. I would’ve taken the improv classes. I would’ve taken some writing classes just to be with other writers. I would’ve been doing all those things and getting a job that was interesting but not so overwhelmingly active that I still would have time to write. I think that’s what that theoretical John August would be doing.

The idea of coming out of undergrad is particularly relevant, because I was just on a college tour. As you know, Mike and Amy and I went to do a college tour of the East Coast. We got to see college towns. We started in Montreal, went to Boston. Then the plan was to go on to see Ann Arbor and Chicago and other places. Of course, as you know, I promptly got COVID, whole family got COVID, and so we ended up spending nine days in a hotel room in Boston getting over COVID, which sucked, but was not deadly, was not dangerous, because vaccines, thank god. It all sorted out okay, but definitely got me thinking about Boston as a college town. You went to college there. Man, what a great place to go to school.

**Megana:** I know. It’s the perfect place to live when you are that age and going to college and you’re just surrounded by all of these other young people or academics. It’s just a really invigorating, thrilling place to be.

**John:** While we’re in our quarantining, we watched The Social Network, which is a movie I generally love, which is also, of course, set in Boston. It was weird to see that movie now and watch it with my daughter watching it and her eyes on how she perceives Facebook, how she perceives these characters. She said afterwards, “I’ve never been so non-consensually mansplained to by a movie.”

**Megana:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Then I wanted to talk to her about the history of Aaron Sorkin. She’s like, “No, you’re mansplaining right now.” There was no stopping it. As a man, you cannot say anything, because it will actually be mansplaining to explain why he has a history of mansplaining in his films and TV shows.

**Megana:** Oh my god, as someone who was a teenage daughter at some point, I know that it was very difficult for my parents during that period, but it seems particularly difficult to raise a Gen Z teenage daughter. Oh my gosh. I would just be canceled all of the time.

**John:** We’re always on eggshells. That’s what we’re going to do. Megana, thank you for holding down the fort while I was gone.

**Megana:** Of course. Glad to have you back.

**John:** Just for our listeners, should know going forward, Craig’s availability is really tight because of the show he’s shooting right now, so we’re not sure which episodes he’s going to be with us for the next couple weeks, but we’ll still have Scriptnotes and we’ll find a way to make it enjoyable and entertaining and do some different things while we figure this all out. Thanks.

**Megana:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Joan Rohlfing and the Nuclear Threat Initiative](https://www.nti.org/about/people/joan-rohlfing/) and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JoanRohlfing)
* [David E. Hoffman](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/david-e-hoffman/) and his [books, including Pulitzer winner The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/81268/the-dead-hand-by-david–e-hoffman/)
* [Dall-E-2](https://openai.com/dall-e-2/)
* [MidJourney](https://www.readthepresentage.com/p/midjourney-ai-art-tool?s=r)
* [Atomic Veterans](https://www.naav.com/)
* Book [Give Me Liberty by David E. Hoffman](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Give-Me-Liberty/David-E-Hoffman/9781982191191)
* [Reykjavík summit of 1986 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Reykjavik-summit-of-1986)
* [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 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/545standard.mp3).