Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 546 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking at the genre/form of limited series based on actual events with two of the writer/creators behind recent critically acclaimed shows.

Elizabeth Meriwether is the creator and showrunner of the limited series The Dropout. She began her career as a playwright in New York before transitioning to television where she created seven seasons of the amazing hit comedy New Girl. Her other credits include No Strings Attached, Bless This Mess, and Single Parents. Elizabeth Meriwether, Liz Meriwether, it is a damn pleasure to finally have you on the show after 546 episodes. I can’t believe it took this long. Hi.

Elizabeth Meriwether: Hi. That was a great interaction. Hello.

John: Thank you. You’re a little bit sick as we’re talking to you. Thank you very much for being with us. I’m sorry. It sucks being sick.

Meriwether: Much like Elizabeth Holmes, my voice is a little deeper, which is exciting.

John: Absolutely, but not a deliberate choice. You didn’t stand in front of the mirror practicing to get your voice to this pitch.

Meriwether: No, she says in quotation marks. Just kidding.

John: Our next guest is no stranger to this show. Liz Hannah is the executive producer and co-creator of Hulu’s limited series The Girl from Plainville. She also executive produced and wrote for The Dropout. Her other credits include The Post, Long Shot, All the Right Places, and Mindhunter. Liz Hannah, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

Liz Hannah: Thanks for having me. Hey, everybody.

John: It’s so good to have the two of you here. We have two guests named Liz, which will not get at all confusing.

Hannah: You could just go by last names. It’s the easiest.

John: I was going to say.

Meriwether: We were in a writers room together, and we had a third Liz, Liz Heldens, who’s incredible. We would just all call each other by our last names, so I’m probably going to be Meriwether and she’s probably going to be Hannah for today’s podcast.

John: Hannah versus Meriwether does feel like some sort of big title fight.

Hannah: We were also talking about Elizabeth Holmes. It was a very odd eight months of our lives.

John: For the rest of the show it’s Hannah and Meriwether.

Hannah: There you go.

John: You can call me August or John.

Hannah: Great.

John: Whatever you want to do. One of our recurring segments on this show, which I love and listeners like a lot too is How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories that are in the news and figure out how they could become movies or really basically limited series. You guys just both did. You both took things that were in the news and turned them into high-quality film and entertainment.

I want to obviously focus on your two shows, but also at the end I want to go through some other topics of things that are in the news right now and spitball ideas in terms of how you would adapt these into limited series down the road, if they were appealing to be adapted. I’ll bring up that one of the topics we proposed as a potential one, one of our guests said, “Could we not do that one? I’m actually looking at getting the rights right now.” That is how close to the source we’re getting to on these. We’ll get into that.

In our bonus topic for Premium members, let’s talk about showrunning and producing while pregnant, because that’s something you both had experience with, because Hannah very recently had a baby.

Hannah: He’s here. He’s very fresh.

John: I love it.

Hannah: He also has some fresh attitude that will maybe be chiming in. We’ll see.

John: That’s great. Rachel Bloom, when she was on this show, she was breastfeeding. We’re normalizing maternal things happening while-

Hannah: Look, we all have feelings. He has a lot of them right now and has to talk about them.

John: He’s got to express himself.

Hannah: Doesn’t know what hands are, so the only thing he can do is scream.

John: I love it. Let’s talk about this moment we’re in right now with limited series that are based on actual events, because there’s so many on TV right now. We have your two shows. We have The Dropout, The Girl from Plainville, but we also have We Crashed, The Thing About Pam, Super Pumped, Inventing Anna, Pam and Tommy, The Tinder Swindler. This is a moment where a lot of these things are happening. I want to start with your two shows. Maybe we’ll start with The Dropout. Miss Meriwether, how did The Dropout come to be? What was the first thing? Was this something you pursued? Did they come to you? What was the origin story The Dropout, the story of Elizabeth Holmes?

Meriwether: I was finishing New Girl, and Searchlight contacted me, because they had optioned the podcast The Dropout, which is incredible and anyone who’s interested in the story should listen to it. They had Kate McKinnon already attached, and it was already set up at Hulu. They were just like, “We have everything in place. We just need a writer.” Just a little thing.

John: A small thing.

Meriwether: I do feel like Searchlight, this was their first television show. I think they are coming at it with more of like the movie thing, of like, we just need to write. It’s like, no, welcome to television. I read Nick Bilton’s Vanity Fair article. There was a really big article. Vanity Fair with Theranos was falling apart. I’d read it, I think a couple of years before Searchlight contacted me, and I loved the story. I just hadn’t done anything with it. I was familiar with the story. By the time they contacted me, I just had that feeling like, there’s been a documentary, there’s been a book, there’s been a lot of reporting about it. I think at that point there were some companies in Silicon Valley that had Elizabeth Holmes Fridays or whatever. Didn’t we find that out, Hannah, that they had been dressing up like [inaudible 00:05:20]?

Hannah: When we were in the room, I was in Austin for something, and it was Halloween. I saw three Elizabeth Holmeses walk in. This was before the show. I think I texted you guys. I was like, “What goes next? Everybody already dresses like her.”

Meriwether: This story was definitely in the news. I had that question that I’m sure you had too, Hannah, which was just like why does this need to be dramatized, why does this need to be a limited series. I think the answer I came up with was that I felt like it hadn’t been told from her point of view. Her interior world hadn’t been explored. I thought it would add to the story. The only people who can do that are writers. It’s not the job of journalists to picture themselves in somebody’s shoes. I felt like that would really add to the story. I went in for the meeting. As I was talking about it in the meeting, I just got more and more animated. I just found myself getting really emotionally involved in the actual meeting. I had that out-of-body experience where I was like, “I really want this [inaudible 00:06:32] care about this story,” which is never good in the meeting.

Hannah: To realize it?

Meriwether: Yeah.

John: You’re talking yourself into it.

Meriwether: Then you’re like, “I’m not going to be able to walk away from this.” Then Liz Hannah hired Liz Heldens, incredible drama writers, because I had no drama experience, and really knew that I needed help in that way. Then we wrote it. We were supposed to start shooting March 2020. Then COVID happened, and we lost our director and Kate McKinnon, and then spent a year trying to put it all back together again.

John: I definitely want to focus on the writing of this, because I’m so curious what your process was going into it, because you’d run shows before where you’re cranking out 20 episodes, 24 episodes in a year. This is such a different beast. Before we get to the writing of it, I’m curious what the origin story was for The Girl from Plainville. This is again based on a real story of a young woman is accused of leading a man, another teenager, into suicide. What was the start of this? Was there a book? Was there an article? Who came to who with the idea of doing this?

Hannah: There was an article called The Girl from Plainville by Jesse Barron in Esquire. I had not read it. I’d heard about it. I’d obviously heard of the case, but really in a peripheral way, I think in maybe how we all knew it, which was I knew it happened. I knew less about that than I knew about Elizabeth Holmes upon being approached to do The Dropout. I hadn’t listened to the Dropout podcast but knew it existed and knew more about her, at least in the zeitgeist, than I did about Michelle Carter. The article existed, and then there was the documentary, I Love You, Now Die by Erin Lee Carr, that was on HBO. Universal had optioned the article.

Patrick McManus, my co-creator and co-showrunner, was attached to do it, but really wanted a partner on it, and didn’t feel that he could or wanted to tell the story all by himself. Elle Fanning was considering doing it. I had worked with Elle previously. We’d been looking for things to do again together. They brought it to me. I was like, “Hard pass.” We were still in the room on The Dropout I think when they approached. I was like, “What kind of… “ The similar approach was just like why do this, what is there to add to the story, but also I was like, “I just spent a long time unpacking the interior life of a quite complicated woman who everyone hates. I don’t know if I want to dive into that again.”

I didn’t read the article until Elle wouldn’t take no for an answer, and neither would Brittany Kahan Ward, who’s my manager and our producing partner. I read the article, and the thing that really struck me was, similar to Elizabeth Holmes, which there’s so much more to this girl to unpack, and also that I really felt like she had been depicted in a very salacious way in the media that maybe undercut some of the larger conversations to be had about the case itself and about the relationship itself, and I think very dismissively talked about suicide, rather than having a larger conversation about mental health and the toxicity of this relationship and the toxicity of technology and all of these things. It felt very of now to tell that story. This was in December 2019. Patrick and I sat down and tried the pilot. We were going to take it out, and then the pandemic happened.

The thing that I couldn’t relate to in the show was how you could be so consumed by your phone. I’m consumed by social media, but I don’t have a relationship with my phone, because I didn’t grow up with it. It’s a different experience to just not have been 12 and have an iPhone or a Twitter account, and to not necessarily understand the connection that you can have with somebody that’s so distanced between that. Black Mirror and then the pandemic happened, and every relationship I had was with everybody over a phone. It became very timely in a weird way.

That was really where it started, and very similar to why I was interested in doing The Dropout, which frankly was because Meriwether was doing it. I was like, there’s a why now aspect which I think is interesting, but there’s also a voice aspect, which I think Meriwether is one of the best writers I know. I wanted to work with her and hear that. That was really exciting. I think when you decide to do one of these things, it’s what we’ve been talking about, unless it’s going to be additive, then it just feels like we’re putting another thing on television. There’s enough.

John: From the start, did you guys know how many episodes this series was going to be. Meriwether, did you know that this was going to be x number of shows?

Meriwether: Isn’t this funny, because Hannah knows all the answers to these questions?

John: If your voice fails, Hannah can fill in.

Hannah: This one’s a really funny one.

Meriwether: First of all, I was terrified of drama, and I was terrified of drama-linked stories and drama-linked scripts. I was like, “Six, six, it’s definitely six,” which felt like the shortest amount that you could do. I was also like, “I don’t know how much the audience is going to want to engage with this story.” Then we started researching it and working on it and interviewing people, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It just became clear that six wasn’t going to be enough. For a long time it was seven or eight. It was either going to be seven or eight.

Hannah: Unless you’d asked Dan LeFranc, who still wants 10 episodes.

Meriwether: He’s still working on two more. Even after the writers room ended, Hulu was still like, “By the way… ” They were incredibly patient with me, but it was up to a point where they were like, “We need to know. We’re making a budget. We need to know if this is seven or eight episodes.” I finally was just like, “Eight,” because I needed them to budget in case it needed to be eight. I think what I was so afraid of was that the eighth episode was going to feel like it was just wrapping up. I think what was tricky about The Dropout story was that in my mind at least, and I think people who are familiar with the story, and anybody who’s seen All the President’s Men, that first article comes out and you’re like, “That’s the end of the story.” The more I was reading about what happened afterwards, I realized the article didn’t actually stop Theranos, that it was a mix of the article and just this federal agency.

Hannah: Bureaucracy.

Meriwether: Yeah, it’s bureaucracy. Then in the room, in the writers room, they talked a lot about wanting to end at Burning Man, which was always the dream, that we were going to end it with her and Billy at Burning Man.

Hannah: There was an acid trip in there at one point. There was a lot.

Meriwether: Hannah, we’ve never talked about this, but I credit [inaudible 00:13:35] for stopping the Burning Man dream, because what had been Burning Man turned into one woman getting into an Uber.

Hannah: It is actually amazing, the whole process that takes place in a short amount of time. There was an acid trip and there was a burning down of something. It’s the burning down of the building thing.

Meriwether: Who knows? What about you? Did you know what the amount of episodes was, Hannah? How did that work?

Hannah: I think we always knew it was eight. I don’t know, it felt like not 10 and not 6. That felt like a nice, round number.

John: Was that a creative decision or was that like, this is economically viable to do 8 episodes, whereas 6 is too few for us to pay out, and 10 is-

Hannah: It’s a bit of both. Six is really hard to convince a studio to do. They just don’t make money back when it’s six, for a sundry of reasons. I think you could maybe get away with seven if you were like, “Creatively it doesn’t make sense for us to have an eighth,” and you made a real case for it. In all frankness, I think there’s a bit of extension that happens in Plainville for the eighth episode, but at the same time we also knew that we wanted to give Conrad a full day, his last day as an entire episode, and give him his moment. Knowing that then backed us into the eight. We definitely never were like, “There’s more to the story after that.” Dan also wasn’t in the Plainville room. I’m sure had he been, we would still be talking about parts 9 and 10 of Plainville.

Meriwether: It was so foreign to me just as somebody who had spent eight years being told everything I had to do, and to the point where I think it was the first season when we were really a hit. After you plan a whole season, getting a call towards the end that’s like, “You need to put two more episodes on the air,” it’s… I almost felt like I had too much freedom, where I was just like, “How many episodes do you want this to be?” I’m like, “What? What is this alternate universe where I get to decide things?” I put off the decision for as long as I could.

Hannah: Length was also a weird thing for me. I know we did this in the room for Dropout 2 is… The page length, they were like, “If it has a five in front of it, that’s maybe a problem.” They wouldn’t push back on it. I don’t know if you had a similar experience, but in post it was like, we have the amount of minutes it had to be for international sales, and that was it. It was like, as long as it hits this, which I think for us was 42 minutes. Our episode length could really be anywhere from 42 to 60 minutes and could even go over if it needed to. We don’t, but we could’ve. We had that conversation. That was really weird and interesting to have this… There’s no handcuffs. If this is a 40-minute episode, then it’s a 40-minute episode. Do whatever is creatively right for it.

Meriwether: I strong-armed them. I am not good without limits. I was like, “Just tell me what is the best time for episodes to be.” They finally gave in and were like, “51, 52.” Then I went into post with that. This was so foreign to me. I was used to hitting 21:35 no matter what, and to the point where you’re like… We called it ball shaving. I don’t know if we should put-

John: That’s awesome.

Meriwether: To the point where I was in with the editor taking frames out of… It was so bizarre to me to have that kind of freedom.

John: Before you get to the ball shaving and the final post of it all, you have to write these episodes. Let’s talk about the writing of the two shows, because from what you’re describing it doesn’t sound like what I expected, because Hannah, I assumed you came in after there was a pilot and after there was an order, but it sounds like you were earlier than that. Hannah, let’s start with Girl From Plainville which I think might be a little bit more normal. You’re at Universal. They said, “We want you to do the show.” Then they’re going to take it to Hulu. Did you guys write a pilot episode first before you wrote everything else? Talk to me about that pilot? What other documents did you write at the same time?

Hannah: We wrote a pilot and a pitch document, and that was it. We also made the article. Erin Lee Carr was on as consulting producer on the show. We had Erin and Jesse there for anything. The pilot that we wrote, and then that was how we sold the show, aside from removing some scenes, is pretty close to what’s on the air. There’s not a lot that changed.

Meriwether: It’s so good, by the way.

Hannah: Thank you. There’s a writing motif, I was just telling somebody about this earlier, that we had in the show. I don’t know that we need past, present, fantasy, text fantasy, and then this other thing on top of it. That’s no longer in there. Other than that, it was that. We sold it to Hulu. It was the same partner as I’d worked with on The Dropout. Then we opened the room and it was pretty straightforward. We had a 20-week room. We wrote six out of eight in the room. Then I wrote seven, and then Patrick and I wrote eight. We had outlines I think for… We knew what eight was always going to be. We had that done and then we just had to write it, which we did about four days before we went into production.

John: Universal’s hiring you guys to write this pilot. You guys are writing this document and this pitch document before you’re going out to pitching it to the Hulus and the other potential distributors for it. What is the pitch document like for this? What’s in that? How long is it? Is it a keynote? Is it a pdf? What is a pitch document?

Hannah: The greatest thing that ever happened was that I didn’t have to drive to Santa Monica four times randomly over the course of two weeks, because it was all on Zoom. I don’t know that I’ll ever go back to pitching in person. It was glorious, because also, guess what. Little pages, document right up on my screen, you can’t see it and I can’t see you. I can just read, and it’s great. I can ad lib and do my little shtick. It was great. That was it.

The document was why we had come to the show. It was a synopsis of the pilot, because generally no one reads the pilot until they hear the pitch. Then they’re like, “Oh, maybe.” Then they read it. You remember when you read in the pilot, that you didn’t read, that these things happened. Then it was like a here’s what the show will be. We went into it with what are the ways that people will pass on this show. We knew putting the texting out there was a way to pass, because it’s the thing we’ve all been trying to figure out how to do for the last 20 years is put texting on screen and not make it just subtitles or just I’m reading my phone and seeing texting. Patrick in our very first meeting had pitched me the idea of their last conversation being in person. Then we took that and ran with it through the whole show of having these texting reenactments of them being in the same place together. That was in the pitch. Then we had the fantasies, the Glee fantasies in the pitch. They were not musical numbers yet, but they did have those.

John: This document, you’re saying it’s a pdf. Is it just text or do you have images to show-

Hannah: Just text. It’s interesting. I don’t do a visual component to pitching. I’ll either become too obsessive about it or I [inaudible 00:21:03] myself and then I don’t write the actual document. I’m like, “Look at all the pretty pictures.” I know people that do it. My husband is a writer/producer and he uses a visual component in his pitches, and it’s really effective. As the audience for his practice pitches, I find it very effective.

I do it with directing sometimes, because I think that’s a much more… You’re trying to be specific about your vision for this. We did a visual component when we did our final pitch-out of the season before we went into production and our production plan. That was when Lisa Cholodenko and Fred Elmes had come on, and so they had said how we were going to aesthetically deal with some of these things. It’s just words. Then at the end we were like, “Elle Fanning will star on it, so you should buy it.” That was about it.

John: You should buy it. Absolutely. Star of one of your other big series. Meriwether, for you, it was already set up at Hulu. You had a star. You had Kate McKinnon attached. It sounds like you actually brought in writers to help you from the start. Is that correct?

Meriwether: Yeah, it was really bizarre, also having now sold my next project as a limited series. I did it in a more traditional way. I’m realizing how strange The Dropout was. I came in and they were just anxious to get going. I had a conversation with Hulu. It was the classic Hollywood thing where they don’t tell you it’s a pitch. They don’t tell you it’s-

Hannah: It’s a meeting. It’s just a meeting. There’s no pressure.

Meriwether: No pressure. It’s a meeting. You would think I would know at this point. I had notes on my computer. I’d actually had an idea for what the structure was going to be, so I pitched them the loose structure of what the episodes were. Then we just got a room together and we started working on it. I think before the room began, I wrote out some document. I don’t remember what it was, but I think it was an overview of what the series was going to be and what each episode roughly was going to be. At that point I thought it was six episodes. It wasn’t the most accurate thing.

Hannah: The pilot was pretty… It was there.

Meriwether: I’d outlined it, right?

Hannah: Yeah, you had outlined the pilot. Then there was a few pages of what each episode then was going to be. A lot of how we would break that show in particular was by years, because so much time had passed. It was like this episode is between X and X years or X and X month, and then here’s everything that happens in that, and that’s what we’ll address. Then going into the room, it was like the weaning of that and finding where each story was.

Meriwether: We had that overview. I was used to getting into the breaking. Then we realized that we had to do so much research. We had to become engineers and chemists and talk to a bunch of people. The crazy thing was what I was simultaneously… Because they were in a hurry to get it out, joke was on them, ultimately. I was simultaneously running an ABC sitcom called Bless This Mess that was about a young couple on a farm. I had the two rooms going at the same time.

Hannah: We were on different sides of an office. It was one side of windows, and then the other side of windows.

John: Who gets Meriwether’s attention at this moment, and you’re trying pitch [inaudible 00:24:40]

Meriwether: I was running back and… It was the most strange reality of walking into one room and having conversations about chickens and-

Hannah: Microfluidity.

Meriwether: Chicken comedy. The call sheet for Bless This Mess would sometimes be four goats. It’s having those conversations, and then going into The Dropout room,we’re having very serious conversations about sexual assault and microfluidics and a lot of things.

John: These were actual rooms. This is also a difference, because this was pre-pandemic. You were literally together with bodies around a table figuring out this stuff and looking at the same whiteboard experience, which is not norm anymore. That’s all changed.

Meriwether: I think we had an awkward mixer, where it was the Bless This Mess writers mixer.

Hannah: Yeah, we had a lunch. It was kind of like step-kids meeting for the first time. It was very strange. Isn’t Cheaper By the Dozen about that? I think that was based on that lunch. We didn’t have that for Plainville.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between the Plainville room and this room.

Hannah: Do we have to?

John: The Plainville room, you had a pilot already, so you were hiring writers to come in to help you out on that. Everyone could look at the same master plan, like, “This is the pilot. This is the show we’re trying to make.” Then what was the process of figuring out from there how to break out this information across these episodes? Had you done this before?

Hannah: I hadn’t showrun before, no.

John: What was your approach?

Hannah: Fear, terror, a sense of humor about myself. “Yes, but” is what I would say about the pilot, because we had the pilot written, but the pilot is extremely different than the rest of the show, because it doesn’t… Conrad is not introduced, his timeline is not introduced until Episode 2, and the prosecution doesn’t begin until Episode 3, or the real investigation doesn’t begin until Episode 3. The pilot we had, and we had that for a total touchstone and pacing, but we were looking for writers. Patrick was about to go do Dr. Death. He had just wrapped the writers room for that around the time we had done The Dropout. There were a few writers on that that I met with and really loved and wanted to bring on. There was a continuity to it, particularly because Patrick was going into production on Death five or six weeks into the room.

The big thing for me about all the writers that came in was I wanted writers that didn’t want to write a true crime story. I wanted writers who didn’t have an interest in just being a straightforward true crime story. I wanted them to come in and do different things, which was similar to The Dropout, if not the same. I don’t think any of us had any interest. I don’t think anybody had really done true crime except sort of me with Mindhunter, but that doesn’t really count. There were a lot of playwrights in the room. Heldens, who’s the best, she’s the best of the Lizzes, had done network dramas for a long time.

Meriwether: Friday Night Lights.

Hannah: Friday Night Lights. We had talked about that, because we were obsessed with Friday Night Lights. I think I played it cool for two days and then was like, “Can we just talk about Friday Night Lights?” We all approached it from a very different way. Then Heldens would be like, “This is how a show is written.” We were like, “Copy.”

That was the approach that I took to Plainville was just having a bunch of interesting brains, not necessarily brains that were experienced in writing this material. We knew similarly with the structure, like what we were talking about before, we knew that the final episode was going to be… I actually think we thought the penultimate episode was going to be Coco’s last day, and then ultimately as we got into the breaking realized it was going to be the last episode. Then we had the spine of the investigation and the trial and things like that.

I would say the biggest obstacle we had is that nobody was interested in the trial, because we were like, “We’ve seen it.” It was similar with Elizabeth, where at a certain point we’re like, “We’ve reached this place where everybody knows her. How do you make it interesting? Everybody’s seen this part from documentaries.” I would say the trial and the breaking of that was by far the most difficult part of the process because we were hamstrung into making it. You have to tell the facts and you have to tell the story that I think is fascinating, of how did this girl convicted off of something she said, that we don’t know if she said, based off a text message to another friend. It’s a very flimsy thing to be convicted on. That was fascinating to me. We’ve also seen trials before, so how do you make it interesting?

John: Now Meriwether, for something like New Girl, you are breaking story, you’re writing an episode, you’re shooting an episode, you are posting an episode all at the same time. How different was it going from that to this where you went into production with these scripts written? It felt like you were doing one thing at a time.

Meriwether: Is that what you think happened?

John: Were there things that you would do differently based on what you learned through this?

Meriwether: Yeah. I learned an important thing, which is that I can’t run two shows at the same time. I certainly can’t-

John: I don’t understand how someone could.

Meriwether: A show on network that’s airing at the same time that I’m running another show, because the way you described my job on New Girl was my job on Bless This Mess 2. We were shooting, editing, and writing, and then I was also running this other thing. At a certain point I think I just couldn’t. I couldn’t anymore. It was too hard. I really am in awe of those showrunners that can do that. It was an important step for me to realize that I can’t. I’ll never put myself in that situation again.

John: I couldn’t do what you did on New Girl, where you’re running a show that’s filming right now.

Meriwether: I couldn’t do it either.

John: You did it for seven seasons, by the way. You did it for seven seasons, so I think-

Meriwether: I had a lot of help. It’s very hard. It’s not conducive to great television.

John: Or good life or happiness.

Hannah: It’s not conducive to life.

Meriwether: I didn’t have kids when I was on New Girl. I spent nights at the office. It was my entire life. It consumed my whole life. It’s just not a good way to work. I was so happy with all of the IATSE stories. I do feel like a lot of the way that television gets made needs to adjust a little bit.

John: Was this experience on The Dropout better in that way in terms of doing one thing at a time? What were the pros and what were the cons? I’ve definitely heard a lot of the cons, which was that sometimes the writing process was so divorced, by months or by a year, from the production process, that people end up being dragged across… A producer, in your case, could be still producing a show that they wrote a year ago, and they’re not getting paid any more money and they’re actually being pushed down towards scale levels of pay, because they’re still producing this thing, or the original writers can’t be involved with the actual production, because they’re now on three shows after this. Those are the cons.

Meriwether: The writers room on Dropout, I was doing a bunch of things at the same time, but we weren’t shooting it. That was different. I think the system hurts the younger writers the most, because I feel like working on New Girl was this amazing crash course for a lot of people, including myself, on television production. I think it’s so important and so great to see an episode from start to finish, and even if it gets rewritten a million times, but to be able to go to the table or hear what the notes are, hear how the genre handles the notes, go to set, all those things are invaluable. It’s honestly in a job that doesn’t have really a school that you can go to to figure out. It made me sad that the writers on The Dropout weren’t involved in the production at all. I was texting Hannah screenshots of the monitor. I was like, “This is your episode.” I really didn’t like that way of working. I felt like that was strange.

Hannah: COVID on top of it. At least for us, we couldn’t bring our writers to set. Even if you can, because now it’s just so rare to have the writer who wrote the episode cover the episode or even be a part of it. Even pre-COVID, I agree, it’s just not a typical thing anymore.

Meriwether: I felt guilty, because I was like, “You’re not being paid anymore. I can’t ask you to be on set.” It’s just crazy.

Hannah: When it’s disconnected like that, you’re still not in the writers room. It’s like [inaudible 00:33:32] what’s the incentive to do it, other than the learning experience? I think it’s really important for everyone to, if they can, just go visit for a couple days and be on set and observe and be a part of it. Because of COVID, we couldn’t do that for any of our writers. We couldn’t do it for any of our support staff, because we were on lockdown for… I think Dropout wrapped before us, because we started prep in June, and we wrapped in the middle of December. We were really fortunate to bridge both Delta and Omicron.

Meriwether: Oh my gosh.

Hannah: We were PCR testing every single day until two weeks after Thanksgiving. Then we were PCR testing three days a week. Then we got hit by Omicron two days before we wrapped. I turned to Dan Minahan, the director, and I was like, “Dan, I have to leave. I have to leave here, so you have to finish this episode of television before 2022. We have to finish it.” He was like, “There’s no one left to do the show.” I was like, “I don’t care. It’ll be you and me.” I agree. It’s a real bummer that writers… Being a writer in television is 30% of the job. Being a writer as a showrunner is 15% of the job. There’s so much more to it. If you’re not exposed to it, you have no idea.

Meriwether: I will say the pro for me was after the room was finished, and because we had COVID, and I had a year to sit with the scripts. It was the first time in my life. I guess when I was writing for theater I had the same time. That part of it was incredible. I just could sit with the scripts and think. I had nothing else to do. I just got to write. What a gift. That’s great. I think once we started production…

When you’re making network television, you’re getting constant feedback, and sometimes it’s great to incorporate that into the show, and sometimes it can be destructive, because you’re chasing numbers, or you read a tweet and then you change a whole storyline. I think when you’re making network television, you have to protect yourself a little bit of that. I was scared because I was like, “We’re not seeing anything. I’m not seeing anything. I don’t have any feedback. I don’t have any audience. I just have to keep going down this road.” That part of it was a little unnerving too. This is a very long answer to your question. I think for me it was a lot of pros and cons, in interesting ways. I feel like I learned a lot from doing it.

John: Let’s wrap up this pros and cons with our fantasy world, because you’re both people who have successfully run these limited series now. If you could set it up in your dream way, what would you do differently or how would it work? Is there a way to get those writers on the set? Is there a way to make sure that we can actually have that sort of apprenticeship that you learned, the good thing about New Girl? Is there any stuff that you can bring through to this process? Hannah, from features, is there stuff that we could be doing to make these even better?

Hannah: I’m laughing just because I’m like, I really just wanted more time and money and not having to-

John: A unique thing, yes.

Hannah: The COVID situation was really detrimental I think to everybody, and obviously everybody in the world, but I think to filmmaking and to television it was really detrimental. There was just so much that was impacted creatively in the show that that was really a bummer, and that bums me out. More time and money, please.

John: More time and money.

Hannah: I take it.

John: No COVID.

Hannah: I take it here. Thank you.

John: Structurally, is there a way to make the experience of doing these shows better for writers and ultimately [inaudible 00:37:11] creative project at the end? I’m just thinking ahead. If people who are setting up these shows now, what kinds of things could they ask for that would make it a better process for them as showrunners but also for their staff?

Hannah: I would just say I do think it has to do with money, which is making it part of your budget that you’re bringing the writer to set. I also think it’s a part of talking about how we make these shows, which is… Meriwether, you do this, and I know some other showrunners that do this, but not a lot of people do this. You talk about the showrunner, you don’t talk about the room, and normalizing the fact that television is not made by one singular person, that it’s a group of people that make it.

It’s similar to talking about being rewritten in features. When you’re rewritten in features, the first time it happens to you, you’re like, “What? This never happened. How is this happening?” Then you talk to a feature writer and you’re like, “Oh no, this happens in every single script. It will happen to you for the rest of your career. It does not matter how big you are, how little you are. It will happen forever. You have to just have conversations about it. There’s a good way to do it and a bad way to do it. We’ve talked about that before, if you’re the rewriter reaching out to the person you’re rewriting, however it is. I think that having a larger conversation of, this episode was written by this person, and this is the person who came up with this… There’s enough credit to go around. The only way that I think networks and studios will find it important to bring those people to set and empower them is if we empower them. We’re like, “We can’t do this without them. They know this.”

I was really fortunate to bring my number two in the room, Ashley Michael Hoban, to set because I was like, “I’ve never run a show before.” Patrick’s, it was in post on Death, I think, and then it was airing. I’m not doing this by myself. That’s a really quick way for me to lose my mind and for this to be a terrible show. Hoban was there the entire run of the show and covered set. It was amazing. I literally would not have survived without her, and the show would’ve not been good without her. I just think that took just convincing. I just think there’s enough credit to go around that we should just be like, “These are the people who need to be here to make it better.” You hire 9,000 PAs, because we can’t do these things ourselves. It’s not dissimilar to, we need writers around to make this better.

John: Let’s talk about the writer’s responsibility on the set, because I’m sure it varies from project to project. Liz, you were covering set sometimes, but you also had someone else helping you there, Liz Hannah. Meriwether, were you on set for the whole thing? What were your responsibilities on a day of shooting?

Meriwether: For your listeners who are going to hear the bonus content, I’ve just recently given birth. I know that I gave birth on April 10th, which is my son’s birthday, and we started shooting in June. I had an infant and also COVID. I was on a feed, which was… For me, it’s so hard.

Hannah: It’s horrible.

Meriwether: It’s so hard.

Hannah: It’s awful.

Meriwether: I really felt for the director, and trying to text notes that are complicated, that are like, “Can she move her… ” Putting that over a text message is crazy. I didn’t have a room anymore. Everything that Hannah just said was brilliant and exactly right. I loved the script coordinator who had been with me for the year, that after we had the room, Zach Panozzo, who I asked to be on set, so I just promoted him to associate producer, and he was on set every day. He had a really tough job of me texting him and him having to go and give notes to the director, who was occasionally not psyched that there was this dude here shoving a phone in his face.

Hannah: To be fair, they’re not always psyched when it’s you approaching them without the phone.

Meriwether: That was really hard. That being said, I think I also am glad I wasn’t there at every moment. I feel like on New Girl, sometimes when we got behind, I was always trying to fix things on set or fix story issues or character stuff on set. I liked having a little distance I think in the end, because I don’t know how to direct a drama. I think it was kind of good that I was on this couch in a weird little bubble, looking at a feed, pumping milk out of my breasts. It was a very weird existence.

John: Hannah, what were you doing?

Hannah: I was on location the whole time. We all moved to Savannah from June to December.

Meriwether: Oh my god.

Hannah: My husband and I drove across the country with our dog. Similarly, the day after we arrived in Savannah, I found out I was pregnant, which was not a plan that we had. That was a bit of a twist. I was pregnant the entire time we were shooting. By the time we wrapped I was seven and a half months pregnant. I was on set in Savannah in the summer. We’ll talk about it for the bonus. It’s great.

John: Obviously, as the writer covering set, you’re there to make sure that this scene is actually doing what you need it to do. You’re there as a second set of eyes and whispering to the director and getting stuff moved. Were you also rewriting or changing things?

Hannah: Yeah.

John: How much change on the day?

Hannah: Quite a lot. Not on the day necessarily, but there was a lot that changed before we went into production and prep. Patrick was there for prep. Ashley Michael was there for prep. I was there. Then our producing partner Brittany Kahan Ward was there. Brittany basically would body-block people from coming into our offices so we could write. We had seven of eight written. Patrick and I wrote eight. I think during prep, we turned in the first draft. Then I think our shortest script was 57 pages when we flew to Savannah or when we got to Savannah. That was exceptionally long. They all had to be cut. I think every script got cut between 7 and 11 pages. That was just a massive overhaul that we had to do to begin with.

Something that I really like to do, that we’ve done in the room, but haven’t been able to do with all the episodes, because obviously seven and eight weren’t written, we’ve done on this Mindhunter, was we pulled characters, storylines, put them in a final draft document, and treated them almost like they were features. We would have 400 pages of Wendy and would be like, how does she flow through the season? Then you put them back in and see how they speak to each other.

Meriwether: That’s so cool. That’s such a good idea.

Hannah: It was Courtenay Miles on Mindhunter, and Fincher, were like, “Can you take this character and do this?” I was like, “Yes.” Again, it was one of those things where I’m like, “That actually sounds like something that’s common sense to do,” and I’d never done it. I’d never done it for a feature either, just taking a character and being like, here are their scenes. We did that in Plainville with Michelle, in particular because her arc is so circular, and that if you watch the past timeline in the finale and then you watch the present timeline in the pilot, you’re fully caught up. There’s one hour that’s been skipped basically. We were able to do that and spend time on that. Then once a director and a cinematographer come on, this process was not super dissimilar from features in terms of Lisa and Fred were there for prep for a good amount of time and were very involved in how we were going to tell a lot of these stories.

We did I think four tone meetings for one and three and were really drilling down on it. That’s what we were doing for all the prep. Then I covered for one and three. Then Ashley Michael and Patrick did two. She covered me when I was directing. She also covered four and five. I would prep while they were covering. We basically just did that until we lost time, and now we’re here.

Meriwether: I always think a writer on set though… What I always found was so amazing about it was that they had this breadth of knowledge. They knew what every joke was supposed to be and why it was there. To me it was like this person who could speak to the choices that we had made in the writer’s room. I did feel that the lack of that and not having the right answer-

Hannah: It’s like an encyclopedia.

Meriwether: It’s an encyclopedia of what happened in the writers room, which I think is really important. Similarly, because of the situation, I had I think marathon tone meetings that Showalter I think is still scarred from. I think we were averaging about four hours an episode, which is pretty embarrassing.

Hannah: Yeah, but detailed. Very detailed.

Meriwether: I felt like I was just going to have to say everything. It actually did help I think in the end. A lot of rewrites came from the tone meeting, of just talking stuff through. I wasn’t actually doing that much rewriting on set, which was really helpful. I went into production not having written… I had a first draft of Seven, and I had not written Eight at all. I don’t recommend that.

Hannah: Having to write Eight while we were in production was brutal. This was the first time I was a director and I was covered on set, which was a fascinating experience. I was like, “I’ll be fine. I don’t need a writer to cover me. Of the two, I wrote one of them. It’ll be fine.” Then I got three days into production and I turned to Brittany and I was like, “I think I need Ashley Michael to come back.” She was like, “She’s coming back on Friday.”

Meriwether: You need it.

Hannah: It sounds silly, because it’s like, you wrote the episode, you’re a showrunner, why do you need a writer there. It’s because as the director, you’re not thinking about it.

Meriwether: Story.

Hannah: I don’t want to rewrite while I’m also trying to convey to an actor what the interpretation of the material is. I don’t want to have to figure out why the scene is not working in real life when it worked on the page while we have 10 hours to shoot, and then also having a producer on set. That’s the other thing. I was the producer on set when I wasn’t just the writer on set. There were things that would happen that I was like, I as the writer and director now cannot be the producer. You can’t wear all of the hats at once, as much as you want to. I was extraordinarily pregnant at that point and barely mobile. If anything, it doubled down the need for writers to be on set, for features, for TV, for everything. It’s just having another set of eyes is the best gift you could have. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want it.

John: A couple of terms that have come up here that I wanted to make sure we’re talking through. A tone meeting for the two of you is really walking through the script with director or other important department heads in terms of this is what’s happening in the scene, this is what it needs to be, make sure you’re not getting the wrong version of the scene at the end of the day. What else is important to cover in a tone meeting?

Hannah: Any questions they have for anything they don’t understand. The first tone meeting is usually when you get a lot of the notes from them. We did multiple tone meetings for every episode, just because it was just a bananas show and there was a lot that was confusing about it. We would do that. Then it’s really like you go through every line of dialog, every choice a character makes, every moment of the show.

Meriwether: It’s supposed to be your chance to talk to the director. In an ideal world, it’s like this is your version of communicating to the director how you would want it directed, I guess. On New Girl, once we were in production, the tone meeting unfortunately became my first real actually engaging with the director on an episode. A lot of the times our amazing line producer, Erin O’Malley, got the rhythm of that and would try to… While she was prepping with the director, she would know that things would pop up, and she’d text me like, “He’s doing this,” or, “She’s doing,” whatever, because there were certainly times when we’d get to tone meeting and I’d be like, “Wait, that’s completely [inaudible 00:49:24].”

Usually, the tone meetings are set for the Friday before we start shooting on Monday when you’re doing network. That’s too late to make big, big changes. I was trying to get ahead of that. We started calling them pre-tone meetings. They were taking so long that they just became the tone meeting, because nobody was going to do a pre-tone meeting and a tone meeting. All of the designers started listening in, just because so much comes up. For us in The Dropout, it became a concept meeting and a tone meeting, where it was talking through what everything was going to be. Television is supposed to be pretty organized with meetings and production and stuff. I think doing limited series, people are making different rules and what works for them a little bit more.

John: You’re halfway between how a feature would do things and how a normal series would do things, because in both of your shows, you had some sets you could come back to. Were either of your shows block shot or did you shoot episode by episode?

Hannah: Yeah.

Meriwether: Yeah.

John: You were block shooting. Defining terms, in block shooting you can group together all of an actor’s scenes or all of a set that you’re going to use that appears in multiple episodes, so you can efficiently shoot that out and then move on to the next thing. It’s always a question of how to best manage that time.

Meriwether: I’ve never done that before, because for network you don’t really block shoot, because the stuff is just not ready with enough time to block shoot. We block shot The Dropout Episodes 1-4.

John: Wow.

Meriwether: Repping for four drama episodes at the same time, it was like… I couldn’t-

Hannah: When you told me that, because you sent me a photo of old white guys in August, and I was like, “You guys are already on Episode 4?” You were like, “We’re block shooting four episodes.” I was like, “That’s terrible.” What a nightmare. I can’t believe you guys did that.

Meriwether: Keeping it all in your head where you’re like, “Wait, that’s a scene in Episode 4,” it’s just… Then after that we did two. It’s two at a time.

Hannah: We did two at a time, and then we had two solos. Two and Eight were single episodes.

John: Generally, in block shooting you have the same director and cinematographer who’d be working on those things so they could collaborate on that.

Hannah: We had an AV team swap it, going back and forth. Just going back to the tone meeting really quick, because I also toned Six and Seven with Patrick, which was a funny experience to… When you have a co-showrunner, there’s also a funny experience. It’s like who’s going to blink first on what they want to say the scene is about, to see if they’re wrong, because he and I would split scenes and then we’d do passes on each other’s scenes. I think with Seven, we were talking about something, and we were just like, “What do you think this should be about? How should we do this?” It’s fun. It’s a fun experience I encourage everybody to do.

John: That’s nice. Let’s wrap up this conversation and talk about stories based on true events, where these people are still alive. These are people who could come after the studio producers and stuff. At what point were there conversations with legal departments about these are things we can do and things that we can say or can’t say?

Hannah: Constant. All the time.

Meriwether: All the time.

John: You’re going to have to make choices about how you’re portraying these events. There’s certain things which are going to be easily, factually documentable. These text messages happened or didn’t happen. There’s going to be things that you are inventing because you’re inventing a show. At what stage did legal get involved? How early did it happen? How much was it a factor in the story you ended up being able to tell? Let’s start with Girl From Plainville. Obviously, the trial happened. There’s documentation about a lot of stuff. As I watch the show, there is an opening credit thing saying this is based on real events but they’re fictional things. What was the conversation?

Hannah: The short conversation is that we talked to legal I think before we even sold the show. We talked to legal when we were writing the pilot. There were a number of things, not the least of which was Glee, that we knew had to be in the show. We didn’t get the okay to use Glee until three weeks before the show premiered, four weeks before the show premiered.

John: Wow.

Hannah: There was a lot that there were plan B’s on. That was a constant conversation.

Meriwether: That’s crazy. Sorry.

Hannah: We had the okay to do Make You Feel My Love when we shot it. We reshot that in December. That was originally shot with the way that you could cut basically seeing Glee out or only use fair use, which was about three to five seconds, and then you really get into it and it’s two and a half seconds, which meant nothing. We had that version. It just did not work. The whole point was to see it. Patrick spoke to our partners at Hulu. Then we all got on the phone with everybody and were like, “We want to re-shoot it, but we don’t want to re-shoot it unless we can use Glee.” We got that. We were in our last week of shooting. It was early December probably. Then we didn’t get the rights to do the rest of Glee until right before it premiered. We were constantly talking to legal.

Then because we had the text messages, the one thing I really learned from The Dropout that I brought onto this show was having a dedicated researcher, hiring somebody specifically to be a researcher, because there was so much more than even we thought we would need to know in The Dropout and then very quickly realized… I have no idea what microfluidics still is. I think once, I could write a sentence about it and it maybe was accurate, but it’s gone now.

Meriwether: Tiny fluids.

Hannah: I know that, but how they work.

John: Teeny, tiny fluids.

Hannah: We had somebody draw a diagram of the box for us on a whiteboard, because we did not understand it. By the way, it didn’t work, so there’s a reason we didn’t understand it. It was very confusing to us. I hired a dedicated researcher named Patrick Murphy, who’s incredible. He came on very soon at the beginning and made all the text messages searchable for us and made them consumable so that it wasn’t just like literally scrolling through text. Then that was given to our lawyers at the studio so that they could vet every script. Every text message conversation in the show is either exactly the conversation they had or paraphrased for time or they were like, “Heart you,” things like that. It was constant. Then we changed the names of anybody who was underage during the show, except for Conrad in the show.

Meriwether: I obviously never worked with a lawyer on anything that I’d ever written.

John: New Girl wasn’t going to liable anybody. New Girl was happy reality-esque.

Meriwether: It was interesting, because I think at first I was really thrown by it. I think that we started having conversations with legal as soon as we started turning material in. Hannah was there for a lot of it. It was just so exhaustive and just every tiny thing and our amazing writers assistants and script coordinators having to answer a lot of these legal emails and things with our research and being able to-

Hannah: Annotations.

Meriwether: Back it up and annotations, yeah. I think at a certain point, I started really appreciating the conversation. I started thinking about it like it’s keeping you honest in many ways. As a writer you can get really caught up in the story and just trying to tell it in the best way that you think. Often, the real story has nuances and gray areas and just contradictions that are interesting. I think it definitely was frustrating at times. Then other times I feel like it veered us in better directions than it would’ve otherwise. The other thing about legal notes is sometimes they sound really big. They sound really global. There’s really scary legal language where it’s like defamation and all this. Then when you get down to it, it’s like, can you change this glass to a plastic cup?

Hannah: I was going to say.

Meriwether: That was one particular example of that.

Hannah: It’s still one of my favorite legal conversations to use as an example in the room, where I’m like, “When you get this note, this is how you can do it,” which is there’s a scene in the show where… It’s in the trailer, but I don’t think it’s in the show, which is funny. Sunny was going to throw a glass at Elizabeth, and it was the green juice, and it shattered down the hall. It was a 20, 30-minute conversation about this glass and what it could mean.

John: A glass that shattered could be dangerous, whereas a plastic cup is not.

Hannah: Yes. Meriwether was like, “What if it’s plastic?” They were like, “Yeah, totally, that would work.” We were like, “That’s 20 minutes of our lives that we’ll never get back.” Again, it makes sense, and you know why they’re doing it. They’re doing their job. That’s why they have their job, and I don’t. When you break it down to that minimal of a thing and you’re very stressed out about being sued, it’s…

Meriwether: Beyond being stressed out about being sued, I felt, and I’m sure Hannah felt this too, just an enormous responsibility. I thought about it constantly. It was something that I was constantly worried about.

John: Meriwether, there’s legal and there’s ethical. You were telling a story, and some of these people will not have their own chance to tell the story, so you’re going to be the public representation of what they were thinking, what they were doing. I think your show, Hannah, about the ethical and moral responsibilities of portraying teen suicide… While there’s a warning card and there’s all this stuff and there’s resources available, it must have been a constant discussion about how are we going to responsibly portray this real thing that happened in a way that’s interesting but that’s not going to be glamorizing. What were some of the conversations you had about that? Who else did you involve in those conversations?

Hannah: There was a lot of conversation about that before we even agreed to do the show, because it was like, “Is this the right thing to do? Does this need to exist?” Ultimately, I do think it does, again, for what we were talking about. I think it can hopefully be additive to a conversation about the three-dimensionality of mental health, that mental health is health and we should talk about it, and that I think with Coco in particular, and to some extent Michelle, that his suicide was so abrupt and shocking to his family, and who he was with Michelle was not the person that he was with everyone else, and that also he had a really good day the day before he died, or he had a really good morning the day of his death, and that suicidal ideation and depression is not a contiguous line. It’s not a straight line. It’s a roller coaster. You get flipped upside down. You go backwards and forwards. I think that not just expecting somebody who’s depressed to present as depressed I think was a conversation that we’ve been having for a long time and was something that I thought… I thought that this show could help be additive in that conversation, in that depiction.

Also, I’m not a mental health worker. I don’t have any experience in that. We brought on the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which was the foundation we’d worked with on Bright Places as well. Their team read every outline and read every script. They watched the cuts. They were extremely additive in avoiding triggers or being aware of triggers. There were certain things. Conrad dies by suicide in the show. That was something that obviously is going to have to happen in the show. Being able to tell that in a way that doesn’t feel grotesque or gratuitous or horrific or any of those things was extremely important to us, that we were telling responsibly.

Meriwether: I thought you did that so well in the pilot with them-

Hannah: Thank you.

Meriwether: …discovering his body. I love that the camera stayed on the police officer and that you just were getting the information that you needed from… I think there’s obviously a lot that is done in the writing, but it should be such a conversation with the director and how things are being shot and the way that they’re being represented.

Hannah: I think all of our directors met with AFSP to have those conversations as well. That in particular was something that we talked to them about was how to show… We never show his body on the show in that way. Obviously, we have images of it or glimpses of it. That was quite gratuitous to me in particular, and to Patrick. We didn’t want to do that.

Something that I learned on the show that I never knew before, and I’d made a movie that dealt with similar issues, was that the terminology or the phrasing of it is died by suicide, because committed puts the blame and onus on the person who’s suffering. That depression that leads to suicide is like cancer. That is like taking the blame off of that person, which for me was a revelation and was really honestly that very small, which was in our very first conversation with AFSP, that very small… They corrected me. They were like, “Hey, just so you know, this is how we talk about it.” That really actually opened up the whole conversation of Conrad’s journey and trying to be respectful.

I absolutely live in fear that the thing I don’t want to do is ever make somebody feel not seen because of the show or because of something that we were trying to say and feel ignored or that we did something salacious or anything like that. We really actively tried to avoid that at all times.

John: Even thinking about that moment where the body is discovered, we stay with Norbert Leo Butz’s character, who calls to say there’s yellow tape everywhere, doesn’t even say that it’s death. It’s just that it’s about the moment or the situation and not the evaluation of what’s happened there.

Hannah: Going to what Meriwether said, that’s actually what Co said to Lynn. In that truth is stranger than fiction or more emotional than fiction, everything that happens in the pilot is something that was sourced. A lot of the conversation were things that we got from court transcripts or interviews. Jesse Barron had done a lot of interviews and had a lot of material that couldn’t make it into the Esquire article that we had. Lynn in particular for me is somebody that I felt an enormous amount of responsibility for, in telling her story. She was actually the reason I leaned into the show in a lot of ways. I love her. I think she’s such a fascinating woman. The way she speaks is so eloquent. What she’s gone through is horrific. I feel a real responsibility, of course.

John: Great. Now, we’ve had a long conversation about some of the shows you’ve made. I don’t think we have time to do a big deep dive on how these other things could be a movie. I want to hit the headlines here. We’ll put links in the show notes for what we were going to talk about more fully. Maybe we can vote on which of these three things is most interesting for you guys to pitch as a future limited series.

The first one we want to talk through was Birds Aren’t Real, which is early 2017, Peter McIndoe was studying psychology at the University of Alabama, and he went to a protest, and he wanted to be a counter-protester, and he held up a sign called Birds Aren’t Real, which was just a joke. Then he became an improvver who was going on this whole big fake conspiracy about birds not being real. My teenage daughter loves it. I think it’s a great meme. Is there a story to be told about Birds Aren’t Real?

Hannah: Yes.

John: Either of our Lizzes, do you think there’s something to be made there?

Hannah: I’m trying to pull up the… Maybe I won’t, because it’s actually my One Cool Thing is this article, so I won’t say it. I would say that there’s something to be made about the society that does that, that we’re the society that two years ago one of the most famous NBA stars in the League is like, “The Earth is flat.” That’s where we’re at in our space.

Meriwether: I feel like it’s such an amazing story about young people too. That part of it really jumps out at me as just what it feels like to be a young person right now where you’re living in this absurd time and it coming out in that absurd way. That feels really funny to me. Or you lean in and you just do a documentary about how birds are real, as if you’re explaining birds to somebody.

Hannah: It’s the Pelican Brief. We actually watch the documentary.

John: We love it.

Meriwether: That’s such a dad joke.

Hannah: I know. You’re welcome. It happens though.

John: I do also love that he’s homeschooled and that he says that that’s a big part of how he has this feeling about… Being raised in the bubble of homeschooling and in a very Christian upbringing is interesting.

You’ve both made great series about young blonde women who are the center of a story in which mental health becomes a big thing. Let’s talk about the Britney Spears conservatorship and the end of the Britney Spears conservatorship. What is the series we might make about Britney Spears? One of the things we always are wrestling with when Craig’s on the show with us is where do you start and where do you end the story. Is there a story to be made about the conservatorship and her being trapped in this and breaking free of it? Do you start the story earlier? What kind of Britney Spears limited series would be interesting to make?

Hannah: I’m just laughing because I feel like I’m going to end up making this show, because Elle and I recently discovered I’ve only worked with blonde actresses in my career. I’m just going to make another blonde story.

Meriwether: The gaslighting part of it is really interesting to me. I think that the experience of realizing that you’re trapped in this thing… The story that really jumped out at me about all of it was the putting a bug in her room, that her dad put a bug in her room. Just the feeling of safety with the family and then slowly realizing that that family is against you I think is fascinating. I feel like that would be what I would focus on, as long as you could have a lot of big musical numbers, I guess.

Hannah: Obviously. The thing that makes me the saddest of that story is that Britney did need help. She needed help. She needed somebody to help her get out of a very dark place. They took advantage of her in that way. She still didn’t get help. That’s the part that ultimately is so tragic to me is that she didn’t get what was the only thing she needed. The way we talk about mental health, and particularly women, and maybe just because I had a baby, but postpartum…

The thing that sticks with me that she talked about was her sitting in that restaurant with her two kids because the paparazzi were outside, and nobody would help her. Everyone was making fun of her in that restaurant. That’s horrific. I’m not Britney Spears, and I could not imagine my child having a meltdown and everyone being horrible to me in a crowded place. I find that so tragic.

Meriwether: That’s interesting. Would you start the story there? It’s a rock and a hard place. She’s either going to be out in public on her own and totally under attack, or she’s going to be in her family where she thinks is safe, is actually-

Hannah: The complete opposite.

Meriwether: …against her. I think that’s fascinating. My agent who’s no longer my agent, early on when I started writing, I was talking to him about wanting to go to therapy. He was like, “No, don’t go to therapy. I need you to keep writing, keep making scripts.” He was joking, but I think that mindset of just keep producing, just keep producing, and nothing else-

Hannah: Don’t take care of yourself.

Meriwether: Yeah. That part of it’s interesting. I also love that in the Britney Spears story, that Instagram becomes this outlet for her is fascinating.

Hannah: I’m really into this. Should we do it?

John: By the time this episode comes out, you guys could start this up. I feel like the two of you together [inaudible 01:10:04].

Meriwether: I do think that question of would we need that-

John: Do we need it?

Meriwether: Her story has been taken from her so many times. It would be very interesting. At this point she needs to tell her own story, I feel.

John: Finally, MacKenzie Scott, so MacKenzie Bezos Scott. I only knew her as Jess Bezos’s ex-wife, who has been giving away all her money. I wasn’t clear on her backstory. She actually has a really interesting backstory. In some ways it reminds me of The Dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, in that she grew up with a lot of money, all the money went away. She struggled to get through her writing degree.

Meriwether: She had to leave high school because they couldn’t pay for her school, right?

John: Yeah, but then ends up becoming quite a good writer and then being with Jeff Bezos and helping him start Amazon. She was a much more interesting character. Now I have to say, she has dark hair, so that may just rule her out from Liz Hannah’s-

Meriwether: Oh, Jesus.

Hannah: Didn’t read the article because of that. I was like, “Ah.”

Meriwether: By the way, I did make a show with an actress with dark hair for a very long time.

John: Famously dark hair and bangs.

Hannah: Also, I just want to be clear that I’m a brunette, so let’s not make this a situation. I just think it’s funny. That’s all.

John: Is there a MacKenzie Bezos story to be told that is not set around Jeff Bezos? What are you thinking about her as a character at the center of a series? Is there a series to be made there? I’m not sure there is, but tell me what your instinct is.

Meriwether: I love that she’s given away $12 billion. I think about that all the time, just happening into so much money. I think I would start it in the middle of her marriage or the beginning of the end of the marriage and then just track the experience of getting divorced from the world’s richest man. Then she falls in love with a high school teacher, which I think is amazing, and then starts giving away… She’s given away more money than anybody else in the world, I think, if I remember.

Hannah: I think in that amount of time.

John: Meriwether, what you’re describing though is… I wonder whether you need to tell the actual real person’s story or if it’s just an interesting jumping-off place, because you could imagine a woman who gets divorced and ends up with a crazy amount of money. It doesn’t have to be billions, but just a crazy amount of money, and then falls in love with the chemistry teacher. That’s an interesting premise in and of itself, somebody who is so-

Hannah: I smell a rom-com.

John: I’m just wondering if it’s a Marry Me. I think there’s something more classically comedic about it.

Meriwether: That’s interesting. I don’t know. It’s such a marriage and a couple that I feel like people want to know about. That’s another interesting one, because she’s really, really private. I think it would have to be a question if you’d want to invade that privacy.

John: There’s also the possibility of where… Succession isn’t technically about the Murdochs.

Meriwether: That’s true.

John: It’s sort of about the Murdochs. Maybe you could do a show that’s not exactly them, but that high-profile divorce is at the center of it.

Meriwether: That’s a great idea.

John: I’ll sell that one. Divide the three [inaudible 01:13:20].

Meriwether: Ours is about Sydney Beers.

Hannah: I also can’t believe we’ve been talking for 90 minutes and Succession just got brought up, and neither of us were the ones that brought it up.

John: Hey. [Crosstalk 01:13:33].

Hannah: An interesting twist. Didn’t expect it. I love the idea that while Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are both trying to buy Twitter and flying into outer space, she’s just writing checks for billions of dollars.

John: To the YMCA, yeah.

Hannah: It’s like the best way to get back on your asshole ex-husband is be a really good person and make him look even shittier. It’s kind of amazing.

Meriwether: I also think it’s amazing all she wanted to do was publish a book, and then she ends up in a relationship with the man who’s killing bookstores, and then she can’t sell her…

John: That irony is amazing.

Meriwether: Maybe you can do an insane First Wives Club with Melinda Gates. By the way, I do love true stories. I know there’s probably now too many of them and we’re going to go in a different direction. My dad is a journalist. I feel like there’s something interesting to me. I do get excited about them.

John: You were describing at the start of the conversation that you want people to tell you what the rules are, what the boundaries are. What’s nice about reality is there’s some boundaries there, and that does help [inaudible 01:14:42].

Meriwether: Having you repeat that back to me was like therapy. I’m like, oh yeah, I do like when people tell me what the rules are.

Hannah: I also think what you said about the interior life and that… Giving purpose to true story is I think the important thing. For me, it serves a purpose if you’re telling the interior story, and that can’t be told by journalists, or shouldn’t, or that’s not their job, as you said. I thought that was really smart. I’m also somebody who’s literally made a career doing true stories, and so I apologize. So sorry.

John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things on the show. I have two very related things. These are two AI-powered art generation tools. This is where you give them a prompt and they come back at you with just amazing artwork that has been generated by your prompt. One’s called Midjourney. The other one’s Dall-E. Let me see if I can share this in the Zoom so you guys can see. I’ll share a link here so you guys can see this. The thing I loved most about Dall-E was there’s an example of The Matrix if directed by Wes Anderson. That was the prompt.

Meriwether: Do I want that?

Hannah: That’s amazing.

Meriwether: I think I do. I think I do want that.

John: [Crosstalk 01:15:57].

Hannah: Is that Fantastic Mr. Fox?

John: Sort of, yeah.

Hannah: I was trying to think of, with some of these things, who’s the filmmaker or the storyteller to do the jumping-off point for that. There’s something interesting about a David Lynchian Birds Are Real story.

Meriwether: The whole thing is just a man in a room with a curtain behind him talking about birds.

Hannah: Or he controls all the birds in the world.

Meriwether: You could also do, Hannah… I’m sorry I’m still stuck on this.

Hannah: This is great.

Meriwether: You could do a bird as the main character talking about how it’s not real.

Hannah: He’s having a crisis.

John: A dissociative disorder.

Meriwether: This is amazing.

Hannah: What’s that movie where Amy Schumer thought she was like Emily Ratjkowski, that movie I Feel Pretty, but you do that with a bird, where a bird thinks he’s a human. Is that where we go? I feel like, guys, we’re set on this one. We’ve got a few shows and movies.

John: 100%. The concept art will all be generated by-

Hannah: I love this.

John: …these two great AI things, which are remarkable. Bart Simpson by Pablo Picasso is also fantastic. Literally, if a real person painted this, I would buy these paintings. I just think they’re terrific.

Hannah: These Spider-Man ones are dope.

Meriwether: This is awesome.

Hannah: I love this.

John: The same stuff’s coming for writing, which is scary, but also interesting. We’ll see where we’re at. Ten years from now I’ll be talking to the AI people who created the next-

Hannah: I know. People already think writers are expendable, so let’s just make a computer app to do it.

John: Hannah, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Hannah: I do. There’s this article in The Atlantic that I read yesterday that I saw people going around. If you haven’t read it, I really recommend it. Also, if I listened to it as a podcast, because now these… I love that you don’t have to read them, you can hear them. Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt. Strong recommend. It’s fascinating. The long and short of it is that social media’s the devil and none of us should be on it.

John: That feels right.

Hannah: I shared it on Instagram. It felt very weird.

John: Perfect.

Meriwether: Perfect spot for it.

John: Hypocrisy.

Hannah: I thought it was great. I thought it was exactly where it should live.

John: Meriwether, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Meriwether: I just recently re-watched, for the millionth time, Notorious, the Alfred Hitchcock movie. I just love it so much. That’s not super cutting edge. It’s definitely not AI-generated art. There’s this scene between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. When I go back and rewatch things, I often just find myself on Wikipedia reading about it. I didn’t realize there’s a scene in the beginning where they’re kissing for so long. Apparently, they had to break up the kiss after two minutes, and then they would go back to kissing, because of the code. They weren’t allowed to kiss for longer than two minutes. If you watch it, they’re kissing and then they break apart and then they start kissing again, and then they break apart and then they start kissing again.

John: I feel like I’ve seen the movie, but a long time ago. I can’t even imagine two minutes of kissing. That just feels like that’s a long kiss.

Meriwether: Wait, it must’ve been shorter than that. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m misquoting it. It was definitely because of the code they had to keep breaking up the kissing.

John: That’s great.

Meriwether: It’s so hot. It always blows my mind.

John: Love it.

Meriwether: They’re not even allowed to open their mouth when they kiss each other. Most of it is them just smelling each other’s faces. You’re like, why is that the hottest thing?

John: I find characters who are about to touch, that’s the most tantalizing moment. When they actually touch, great.

Meriwether: The To Catch A Thief scene where… I obviously love Hitchcock. They’re watching fireworks. They’re not even touching. It’s Grace Kelly and Cary Grant watching fireworks. Maybe they were just all really beautiful. I don’t know. Anyway, I love that movie.

Hannah: I was going to say, it’s also Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. I would watch them-

Meriwether: That’s true.

John: Beautiful people.

Hannah: I think that’s a Hitchcock thing though, convincing you you’ve seen something that you haven’t and finding the tension in that.

John: Hitchcock would’ve been a great director for you guys’ show because he loved pretty blondes. He would’ve made a hell of a Dropout. Elizabeth Holmes and Hitchcock together, come on. She’s an icy blonde.

Meriwether: Can you imagine Hitchcock directing television? Can you imagine him sitting through a tone meeting?

John: No, I don’t think that would work especially well.

Meriwether: That was another thing in the Wikipedia page. There was a moment when Ingrid Bergman had one idea on set, and he loved her so much that he took the idea. It actually made it onto the Wikipedia page because actors were so-

John: It’s so remarkable.

Meriwether: …afraid to not speak in his presence. I don’t know.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. Are the two of you on Twitter?

Hannah: I am.

John: Talk about social media and the evils of social media.

Meriwether: I was hacked, and I never got back on.

John: Smart choice there, Meriwether. Hannah, where are you on Twitter?

Hannah: @itslizhannah, same on Instagram. I don’t have Twitter on my phone anymore, which feels like a real-

John: That’s smart.

Hannah: I became obsessive, and it needs to go away. I also sit around with a child now. I’m just scrolling. It’s doom scrolling constantly.

John: Not good.

Meriwether: Instead of following me on social media, watch that scene in Notorious.

John: That’s how you get the real, full Liz Meriwether experience.

Hannah: Read the article about how social media’s destroying our lives.

John: You can find the show notes for these episodes and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You 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 babies and having babies and being pregnant while making television programs. Liz Hannah and Liz Meriwether, absolute delight having you on the show. You are always welcome back any time, even without a new series.

Hannah: This was great.

Meriwether: What a dream.

Hannah: Thank you.

Meriwether: What a dream. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Let’s talk about babies, because I think people who’ve listened to the show for a long time know that I absolutely adore babies. I’m obsessed with babies. If I could just be a part-time baby nurse, I would be delighted. Give me a baby. You guys have babies. Hannah, you were describing that during production you showed up to set and you found out you were pregnant and went through all of your pregnancy while there.

Hannah: I had an OB in Savannah. It was a bizarre experience.

Meriwether: Oh my goodness.

Hannah: Was it a thing? Did production know that you were pregnant? What were your choices there? What were the decisions?

Meriwether: I told my manager, our producing partner, who’s the EP that was on the ground with me. I told her four seconds after I told my husband. I told my assistant, because I was like, “I can’t tell… “ You’re not supposed to tell anybody until you’re 12 weeks. I think we started production, or we were close, it was a week out when I hit 12 weeks. Then I through it told a few people. I told Elle and I told our costume designer, Mirren, who I’ve worked with a number of times and love. I didn’t really tell anyone. I didn’t look pregnant, quote unquote, until the last week of production. I just looked like I was gaining production weight the whole time, which I also did, so that was fun.

Meriwether: That’s what we called the Peggy on Mad Men.

Hannah: I did the Peggy. I basically just pretended I was eating for two but only one.

Meriwether: By the way, it must be nice that you didn’t look pregnant. I wouldn’t know how that feels.

Hannah: I did, and now I still look like I’m pregnant, eight weeks after giving birth. That was actually fine. I really loved being pregnant. I was really happy that I had something that had to distract me from doom scrolling about pregnancy and what could happen and all of the horrific things that went through my mind of what could happen to my child, and then also had a distraction from the show.

I wasn’t necessarily able to, although I’m sure my partners just completely disagree, take it too seriously. I took it seriously enough in that it was my job and I wanted it to be as good as it could, but I was also like, “I have a baby, and that feels really important.” It didn’t become all-consuming until we were… We were in post while we were doing the show, but we were in post for the last four episodes, five episodes when we got back. Then I was eight, nine and a half months pregnant doing post, and that was really brutal. I had amazing partners. I only did one conference call from the hospital after giving birth.

John: Now, Meriwether, you were in the same boat. You were pregnant during production.

Meriwether: Yeah. It was my second baby. For my first baby, I was also pregnant and… It’s a very common experience. I don’t believe in the don’t tell people until 12 weeks, as somebody who’s had a miscarriage, because I feel like if you want to tell people right away and then you have a miscarriage, people also need to know that.

Hannah: Absolutely.

Meriwether: It’s really important, unless you just don’t want to share. Then that’s also fine. I guess I just feel like the rule about don’t tell people until after 12 weeks is just to preserve other people, not to help you.

Hannah: I think for me it was my superstition of being very jinxy. It was like, “If I tell people, then something will go wrong,” which that’s not true. My husband also wore the same clothes during the March Madness, because we kept winning, which I’m sure affected the game. I agree. I think it’s normalizing all of that.

Meriwether: In a strange way, Zoom helped a lot, because it wasn’t immediately apparent that I was pregnant. I think it’s obviously totally unspoken at this point because people have been drained, but there is that feeling of, oh no, is this going to mean that we can’t… I got pregnant when we were in this real transition moment with the project. There was definitely a feeling of, is this going to mean the end of this, because we’re not going to have her focus?

I did a lot of overcompensating of just like, “I’m going to hire a million nannies.” I wish that wasn’t the go-to thing. I obviously completely believe in family leave, and it’s so important. It’s just really hard with production, because when it… The Dropout, we’d been sitting waiting for a year. Then when they tell you it’s time, there’s really nothing you can do. You just have to take each day at a time and listen to yourself and think the thing that you’re doing is really important, but also taking care of yourself is really important and just having to check in with yourself a lot.

I think for me I don’t like being pregnant. I am not overly fond of infants, because I feel it’s sort of just terror. Then it started being fun later on when it wasn’t just pure terror. I think having something else to do, having something else to think about I think was really helpful for me. I will say for certain I think male executives, if you’re in a fight with them and then you just start rubbing your pregnant belly, sometimes you win arguments that you shouldn’t win, because there’s a Mother Earth goddess over here. I definitely think sometimes it works in your favor.

Hannah: I definitely also didn’t, I think, give enough credit to… I thought people would think I was a burden, or similarly, I couldn’t do my job, just because I think that’s what’s ingrained in all of us, whereas my assistant knew from the beginning and was amazing, and then our crafty women found out, because I just kept eating constantly, and they were like, “Is she okay?” They literally took care of me the entire time in production. They kept it a secret until I was ready to tell people or until I started to show. Then they would check on me all day every day. They were like my mothers on set. These were two women who I’d never met until we went to Savannah. The community of women and parents, I wouldn’t say it was even gender-specific, I would just say of parents on the show that took care of me, was really remarkable. I didn’t necessarily expect that. Yes, there were times that I was hysterically crying. I was like, “Guys, I’m fine. This is just a thing that’s going to happen, and move on. I’m not as sad as I could feel right now.” I think that was really something that I had never anticipated was the open arms of people taking care of me on that. Even in arguments on set, it was I think a little more subdued.

The first three months I was so stressed out and so freaked out about the show and so freaked out about being pregnant, I really did think I was going to lose the baby, because I was not in a good place. I held that in for a really long time. Talking about it, going to what you were saying, Meriwether, freed me up to start preemptively dealing with all of the emotions I was dealing with.

Meriwether: It’s tough, because in an ideal world, aka Europe, there’s help. There’s help built in to being a citizen of that country and just getting childcare. I just said in my answer, I’m going to hire a bunch of nannies, which was sort of a joke, but I can afford that. It was absolutely crucial to me being able to do this show. I wonder if there’s some way to build that in. I don’t want to say studios should have to pay for… It’s absolutely a necessary thing that you need, and I would not be able to do it without… I had a baby nurse and a nanny, because I have two kids. I don’t know. I think that’s really important and sometimes gets left out of the conversation. It’s just like, oh she was pregnant and she did the show. It’s like, no, I had an enormous amount of help that I was paying.

Hannah: I love that Melanie Lynskey thanked her nanny when she won a Craig’s Choice Award. I got so emotional seeing that, because I have a night nurse for my son. I literally could not function as a human, nor do my job. I released the show two weeks after I gave birth. I could not do that without help. My husband couldn’t do it on his own. My husband is super involved, but I don’t know how we could do all of that. There’s an enormous amount of privilege in me being able to say that sentence, the fact that I was able to do anything because I could afford a night nurse, or I can get sleep because of that. I can make choices about my life because of it. I can continue to work. There’s an enormous amount of privilege that is very unfair in I think how we deal with children.

Meriwether: The other thing I would say is also postpartum. I think that’s also hugely important. When we shot the Bless This Mess pilot, I was pumping, and I had to pump in an actual barn where we were shooting, near cows, real cows. That was a low point. A low point for my assistant was carrying that milk, I’m sure, back to the freezer. I think just the difficulty in the logistics of pumping and breastfeeding as it relates to production I think is something that isn’t talked about a lot. How do you make sure that there’s a place to pump on set for people who need it?

John: We had Jack Thorne on the podcast recently. He was talking about disability access for members of crew. I don’t want to medicalize or fragilize pregnancy, which is such an incredibly common thing, but it feels like those accommodations and accessibility for people who need to pump breast milk or just have a place to sit down because they need to be able to sit down, it feels like it’s part of the same conversations, like how do you make sure that-

Meriwether: Yes, humans.

John: …sets are designed for everybody who needs to be there and who can be there, because otherwise people are going to get excluded. You guys were running the shows. They had to figure out ways to accommodate you. If you weren’t, it would’ve been tougher. There wouldn’t have been the same-

Meriwether: Absolutely. It’s infuriating. It’s totally infuriating. You’re right, it’s not just pregnancy. It’s just accepting that people working on shows, on sets, are human beings, and writers rooms too.

Hannah: I’m going to shout out my dad. My dad’s a designer, and he wrote a book called Access By Design 30 years ago, which is about not having disability access, but having just access for humanity. You don’t have stairs and a ramp. You just have a ramp, because people who are able to walk on two legs can walk up a ramp. We don’t need stairs to differentiate. Having door handles that everyone can use rather than specifically calling out somebody who can’t use it. That to me is something of just like we don’t have to have the pod where I go in and do this thing. We just should have it all be accessible at all times to whatever any individual’s need is, because nobody’s the same. Sorry I cut you off, Meriwether, but what you were talking about with writers room I agree with.

Meriwether: The short seasons of these streaming shows are also not conducive to women taking leave. That’s another thing that’s complicated, because on New Girl people were able to go away for a month or two and come back. When I first started New Girl, a male writer came to me and was like, “My wife’s having a baby.” My showrunners, who are great men, but they were just telling me how things work, and they were like, “He gets a week off.” I was like, “Okay.” I to my dying day regret it, but I was like, “Okay, you get a week off.”

I think that mentality, like this is how it’s always been done, if you take any more than that you’re being overly precious about it, is totally wrong. I also understand the difficulty of shorter seasons where you’re like, if I take a month off, I’m missing half of the room or something. It’s all a bit complicated. If you want to put it in purely cynical terms, that’s how people do their best work. If you want good shows, if you want good content, make the experience pleasant and livable. It took me a while to learn that, by the way. I really had to figure that out.

Hannah: I also think shorter order and limited series, because at least with ongoing series you have a hiatus of some kind and there’s some consistency. If you get more seasons you know [inaudible 01:35:51]. Limiteds you can just stack on top of each other. They can be happening any time. Patrick, like I said, was doing Death and Plainville at the same time. He had done another show before that. He has a family and was basically gone from his family for three years. Though there’s a benefit, I creatively really enjoy doing limiteds, because I feel like I’m able to express everything in a short span. I get to take risks and do some things that I wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to do and something ongoing. I also think there’s benefits of things that are ongoing that you don’t have on limiteds. I think for me it was baby steps. It was like I’ll do a 2-hour and then an 8-hour and then I’ll be okay maybe doing 13.

That I think is really an expectation now in this industry, particularly with showrunners that are experienced in doing limiteds, is that you just have the next one lined up and you’re ready to go. It’s really, really, really hard. It’s the hardest thing I have ever professionally done was make this show, and regardless of having a child, need a break, but then I also was pregnant and had a child and my maternity leave was my quote unquote vacation, which FYI it’s not. Also, there’s not really a maternity leave.

Meriwether: You didn’t think it was a… I had the time of my life.

Hannah: I’ve been sipping Mai Tais and just waving at my child from afar because he’s perfect. My husband just texted me and he’s like, “How’s it going?” because he’s losing his shit.

Meriwether: I know, I have to go put my kids to bed.

John: We can wrap this up. Thank you so much for this conversation on babies. We’ll circle back in 10 years and see whether the industry’s improved how we handle pregnancy and babies.

Hannah: I don’t think so.

John: There’s no way to say anymore.

Hannah: We may have the David Lynchian Birds Aren’t Real show.

Meriwether: I would like to see that.

John: We’ll follow up.

Meriwether: Thank you so much.

John: Thanks.

Hannah: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• The Dropout on Hulu and The Dropout Podcast
• The Girl from Plainville Show and the Esquire article by Jesse Barron
• Liz Meriwether
• Liz Hannah on Twitter
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt for the Atlantic
• Notorious Alfred Hitchcock Film
• AI art – MidJourney and Dall-E
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 547 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting screenwriters.

Today on the show, we live on a planet experiencing climate change, yet the stories we tell tend to ignore this uncomfortable fact. We’ll look at ways writers can address that with two of the folks behind a new campaign to put some good energy out there. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about how you ask for money, be that for making a movie or for launching a campaign to save the planet.

First, producer Megana Rao is here, and we have some follow-up to get through. Megana, what stuff has come in through the mailbox that we need to address on this podcast?

**Megana Rao:** Tony wrote in regarding Episode 545, the nuclear episode. He recommended this great film about Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

**John:** This had come up as like, oh, someone should make a movie about Stanislav Petrov, who’s the Russian who did not start a nuclear war. I said on the thing, “We don’t do movies about people who didn’t do things.”

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Who stood in the way of things. I looked through the trailer of it, because it says, oh, all these famous people are in this. Wow. How did I never hear about this? It’s a documentary that has reenactment footage in it. It’s a hybrid in between, but it’s not a full-on normal feature.

**Megana:** Scripted, exactly.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. What else have we got?

**Megana:** In Episode 530, Jack Thorne introduced us to the 1in4 Coalition, which is an organization that focuses on accommodations for disabilities in the UK entertainment industry.

**John:** That’s right. He was talking to us about simple things like bathrooms that are accessible for everybody and making sure that there’s a person on set whose responsibility it is to really focus on making sure that people can do their jobs and that there’s nothing holding them back because of accessibility issues. They’ve made some good progress in the UK based on his speeches and other people doing work on the ground.

**Megana:** Absolutely. Then the Inevitable Foundation, which is the American equivalent of that 1in4 Coalition, just released an accommodations report this week. They created a calculator to look at the cost of what it would actually cost production to have X percentage of disabled people on their sets or in their writers room. One of their missions is that they want to close the disability gap between real life and film and television, because disabled people make up over 20% of the population, but represent less than 1% of writers behind the screen. They mostly focus on mid-level screenwriters. In this project they looked at two budgets. One was for a 24-week writers room. They looked at the cost if there were 25% disabled writers versus 100% disabled writers. Then they looked at a 20-week budget for a 10-episode show and then did the same thing and calculated the cost there.

**John:** Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes and to the report, and also to this Hollywood Reporter article which does a good job of walking through it. This is Richie Siegel and Marisa, who you and I had actually spoken with before, because I did a little thing with them for the Inevitable Foundation.

One of the things that’s interesting is they’re putting some real numbers on what those costs would be, because I think sometimes you’re scared to walk into those conversations. It’s like, “Oh my god, it’s going to be so expensive.” What I like about the report is they’re focusing on some of the really small things. It could just be adjustable chairs for different height people. That is a simple thing. Some things are more expensive like ASL interpreters for a thing. Also, it scales differently with how many people need that thing on your set. If you need an ASL interpreter for one person, that can scale up to more than that one person. It helps the whole production when you have that stuff figured out in advance. Some of the costs really weren’t that big. I think the percentage cost for those writer rooms, it was sometimes 1% to 12%, but it wasn’t a crazy, crazy number. Compared to the things we spend money on in Hollywood, it was not a huge number.

**Megana:** Totally. They break down all of the costs in this really easy-to-read way that feels so obvious, like some of the things that they’re asking for are $4. It also brings up that I think when you are someone who is lower level on a production or it’s your first day at work, you’re like, “Who do I ask for these things?” It can be so uncomfortable to ask for really small things that might make going to the bathroom easier.

**John:** That’s what I think Jack Thorne was really emphasizing, I think, in their report. They were talking about having trained disability coordinator people, so that you know there’s a person you can go to to ask for that thing, so you’re not the person who has to go ask the producer for the thing. You can go to the specific person, just the same way we have a COVID testing coordinator and we have intimacy coordinators. There’s a person whose job it is to really think about that for the production, and so it doesn’t fall on the line producer or some other job.

**Megana:** In the report they survey 35 artists, writers, directors, showrunners, actors, and the combined projects that those people have worked on are 600 productions. Something that I was so struck by is that productions are spending money on accommodations to make things more accessible, but it seems like the people that they’re trying to help are being left out of those conversations. In one example, the production had hired an ASL interpreter, but this person actually didn’t-

**John:** They learned ASL on YouTube. They were not actually qualified to be doing the job that they were trying to do.

**Megana:** Someone had Celiac’s disease and someone gave them a gluten-filled doughnut and lied to them about it. I was so surprised by, and I guess it makes sense, that it seems like the discomfort around dealing with people who are differently abled is preventing any sort of communication from happening, whereas it’s very normal for us to now ask, “Do you have any dietary restrictions?” I think it’s just a new way of framing how we approach people and set expectations before going into things.

**John:** That’s actually a good segue to framing expectations about how we are going to be working on sets and telling our stories as we transition to talking about climate. Maybe we’ll introduce our guests for this week. First, I’m going to introduce Anna Jane Joyner. She has been working for over 15 years in climate communication strategy and campaigning. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Glamor, MTV, the Associated Press, New York Times, and more. Most recently, Anna Jane is the founder and director of Good Energy, which has released a playbook for how film and TV can welcome feature storylines on climate issues. Welcome, Anna Jane.

**Anna Jane Joyner:** Thank you so much for having me.

**John:** An absolute pleasure to be here. I saw you first at a presentation that happened this last week where you’re rolling out this big playbook, which is a big, giant event at the Academy Theater. I want to get into how this all came to be and where you’re at. Where are you at at this very moment? Just this past week, are you on a high? Are you trying to get your energy back? How are you feeling?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, a combination. We’ve been working on the overall project for about three years, but on the playbook itself for a year. It was a whirlwind year. It felt very surreal to see it actually come to life and be out there in the world and have this great reception, both at the event at the Academy Museum, but also a lot of press around it and just general excitement, so definitely on a cloud.

**John:** We’re going to be putting a link so people can read it, but I really want to talk through some of the workable ideas from it on this podcast. To help us out with that, Quinn Emmett is a screenwriter, investor, father of three small humans. He also created Important, Not Important: Science for People Who Give A Shit, which is both a podcast and a newsletter. It covers science news, from climate to COVID, heat to hunger, agriculture to AI ethics. Quinn Emmett, I can’t believe you’re finally on the show. Welcome.

**Quinn Emmett:** I know. I was wondering how many times my wife would make the cut before I did. Then every time I think about that, I think you should just keep having my wife on the show probably.

**John:** Quinn’s wife is Dana Fox Emmett, who is one of my favorite humans in the world. I got to see her married off to you at a great celebration in Virginia many years ago.

**Quinn:** So long ago. So long ago. Thank you for having me. You are a mentor to me. I’m delighted to be here and to help Anna Jane any way I can.

**John:** The hook for this episode really is that this thing has just come out. Can you tell us what the playbook is, Anna Jane?

**Anna Jane:** It’s a playbook for screenwriting in the age of climate change, which is really just an array of both inspiration and information. It has all the classic things you would think of, information on impacts, the science, solutions, but all of it ties back to story itself, in screenwriting in particular. Then it has a lot of fun sections on characters and a cheat sheet, a lot on climate psychology, because obviously that’s very related to character development. It’s really just an array of both great information and tips, but also a lot of just inspiration and ideas that we hope people steal.

**John:** Now when Quinn first described it to me, I was expecting it to be a book or a pdf, some sort of physical printed document. While there is a small version of that, it’s mostly a website. If you go to goodenergystories.com, you’ll see all the stuff that you have built out. It’s a very elaborate array of… I think it’s designed so you can just fall into it and spend hours inside it, looking through stuff. Quinn, you’ve been writing about climate issues for all these years for Important, Not Important. How’d you get involved with it, and what was the hook for you?

**Quinn:** Time is a flat circle, and I don’t remember much. I don’t remember how I got roped into this/inserted myself, but I have been aware and so impressed by Anna Jane’s journey over the past decade and all the contributions she’s made to the movement, from her personal story to her greater effect in climate communications. I got into this because I was screenwriting, and mostly sci-fi and tech and things like that. I devised this fire hose of, hey, what’s the latest in science and tech and medicine and things like that. I realized a lot of my friends weren’t seeing that same news, folks who were interested in it. They were getting their news from Facebook, which turns out, not so great for everyone. That’s just what it’s been. It’s been this journey of, hey, how do I help people keep up with these things, but do something about it?

What Anna Jane was working on was such a bizarre intersection of my two jobs, which was it’s very difficult to keep up with what’s happening with this stuff to truly try and understand it, to decipher disinformation from what really matters, and if at all possible, to guess where we’re going, but more importantly, to really identify with the folks who were already being affected, whether by choice or not, and the folks that are working, as I like to say, on the front lines of the future, to do something about this, whether through mitigation or adaptation. There’s a million different ways. That’s people and stories and characters and struggles. Anna Jane said, “We need to build something so that the folks in Hollywood who have a hard enough time making movies and TV and all that can find ways to build the most important story of our time into the most prolific storytelling mediums of our time. I feel like what you built is just an incredible version of that.

**John:** Quinn, you’re trying to distinguish between news, which is information and facts, it’s a kind of storytelling, but it’s not the kind of storytelling that involves characters. Anna Jane, we often do a segment on this show called How Would This Be A Movie. Imagining you as a protagonist who’s building this organization, what is your character origin story? What gets you into doing this kind of work for 15 years?

**Anna Jane:** It’s a journey. I grew up in a conservative, evangelical community. My dad is a megachurch pastor, so definitely not who most people think of becoming a climate activist and communications guru. I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and I took environmental science, because it was supposed to be the easy science class, and learned about climate change. For me, the actual entry point was mountaintop removal coal mining, which is this kind of coal mining where they blow the tops off of mountains in Appalachia. I grew up in western North Carolina in the mountains, and then on the summers on the gulf coast of Alabama. That hit me in a very visceral, emotional, personal way just imagining the mountains near me being blown up and those communities being impacted. That’s what really got me into working on coal and environmental activism and climate.

A few years later, when I was the campaign director for a regional nonprofit in North Carolina, I was approached by Years of Living Dangerously, which is a Showtime documentary series on climate. They wanted to follow me trying to convince my dad that climate change is real for a year. We had a celebrity cohost, Ian Somerhalder. We spent a year trying to convince my dad, by introducing him to faith leaders who are climate leaders, but also some of the best climate scientists in the world. I intellectually understood the climate crisis and how severe it was, but when I did that, I was like, “Okay, I really need to read up on all of this and really immerse myself in the latest climate news.”

I was just listening to a TED Talk by David Roberts, who’s an amazing journalist. He just went through it in such a simple way, the climate crisis and the impacts. It just hit me. I just had this moment, I remember, where I was driving, where I really emotionally understood what we were up against, and from that moment on, knew that there was never anything else I could do. Also, working on Years of Living Dangerously introduced me to just the power of cinematic storytelling and the fact that we don’t have enough of it. That is what really turned me more. I was also passionate about climate stories. Growing up in religion is a masterclass in storytelling, so I knew the power of it. That’s what really got me into TV and film and thinking about how to portray it on screen.

**John:** Thinking about you as a protagonist, we always talk about a protagonist has to leave home and go on a journey and be transformed in this. Was it that speech that was the transforming moment or was it the first class that transformed you? What are the moments along the way that made you feel like, oh, this is what I meant to do, this is what scares me, maybe this is the cave I fear to enter that I must enter? What were those moments?

**Anna Jane:** That was definitely a big one, David Roberts. It showed you, if we’re at two degrees, this is the world, and six degrees, and just in this powerful, simple way, and that just showed how terrifying it was, frankly. It was a bet that somebody on Twitter had waged at him that he couldn’t talk about climate change in 11 minutes or explain it in 11 minutes. At the end he just said, “Your job, anyone who knows this, is to make the impossible possible. That is what we are up against. That’s all of our roles.” I really took that to heart. There’s that car moment listening to a TED Talk.

Then I would say the other piece is, so about six years ago I was working in New York for a company that was a B corporation, had a nonprofit climate arm, and we had a creative agency in-house. I got to do a bunch of my own documentaries and short films and work with a really amazing creative team. I decided to move back to the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which is where my mom’s family’s from. I had this romantic idea of, I’m going to move back to this place that my family’s been for five generations, that’s very sacred to me, that’s beautiful. It’s right on the water and is also on the front lines of climate change. My little town of 500 people is a peninsula, and it’s been called one of the most vulnerable places in the country to climate.

When I got down there, I was not anticipating the real trauma and stress of living on the front lines of climate changes. It’s now six months a year of hurricane season. It’s just every couple weeks, one of these starts forming, and you just have to stop everything you’re doing and prepare. It’s traumatic. It’s also morally complex, because you’re praying that it doesn’t hit you, but that means that it hits somebody else. Being down on the Gulf Coast has certainly brought climate home to me in a very, very personal way. I already had a lot of emotions and feelings about it, but it certainly upped that experience of just really profound grief and anxiety about how this is already impacting us.

**John:** Let’s talk about the emotions, because you said grief and anxiety, but also it sounds like this initial TED Talk was fear. Basically, they’re showing there’s a monster there and we have to fight this monster, yet the storytelling can’t only be about fear and grief and anxiety. There has to be positive things to talk about there as well, and hope and optimism and courage. As you’re trying to develop this playbook for people to be telling the stories in the space, how do you find those other emotions? I feel like the movies we’ve seen have always been about just doom. How do you key into those other things?

**Anna Jane:** I think you’re right. The tropes that we do see are the apocalypse and doom, or they’re a character who’s shaming another character about their plastic straws or SUV or what you, or they’re ecoterrorists. There’s a lot of those too. We would love to see some more versions of climate stories, which is really the purpose of the playbook is to expand that, and then you have possibilities. I have two feelings about it.

Dr. Britt Wray, who’s an expert on climate psychology and mental health, has this great line of thinking or quote that grief and anxiety isn’t inherently bad and hope isn’t inherently good. Grief and anxiety are pointing you toward something. She says this: climate, it’s not a pathology to feel anxiety about it. There’s a reason we feel anxiety about it. If you can really process that and turn towards doing something that this anxiety is pointing you towards doing, that is a really amazing transformation. Seeing characters go through that and really reckon with their difficult emotions around climate can very much not only help the writer process their own difficult emotions, but the audience as well. I really love those stories where the emotions show up and it’s hard and you see how people work through them and reckon with them. That’s a form of finding courage. A lot of great stories are that dark night and then you come out of it and then you find courage to go up against the impossible odds. I think that that’s huge.

Dr. Kate Marvel, who’s a climate scientist and was one of our advisors and wrote the climate science section. She’s also a beautiful essayist and storyteller. She has this great quote that we need courage, not hope to fight climate change. Re-framing it that way for me was just so powerful, because there are moments where it’s hard to find hope. It is a really big challenge. Even just what we’re already seeing with Hurricane Ida when it hit New Orleans last years, I just cried for two days. The Gulf Coast is going to change. There’s nothing we can do. For me, it’s more about finding courage, like how do we face this thing, which is such a lot of what stories are about. Everything from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to the Jesus story is about going up against really big odds. I do think you can find hope. There’s definitely still hope. We can still avoid the apocalypse outcome for our children. No matter what direction we’re going toward scientifically, we can build a society that can actually take care of each other, so that as we’re going through these impacts and transformations of our physical world, we can still take care of each other.

**John:** Now, obviously, the actual changes need to happen. There are some individual changes, but there’s more societal changes, political changes. Those are the wheels that need to turn. You’re focusing on what Hollywood’s role is and what the storytelling can be. I want to take a moment to think back about what impact has Hollywood actually had over the years in social issues, and to what degree is it just reflecting things or to what degree is it actually moving the needle. At our meeting we were talking through trying to brainstorm what are examples of situations where Hollywood and film and TV actually did have an impact. One of the things I was thinking about was smoking. People used to smoke on screen. You just don’t see smoking on screen. Smoking numbers have gone down. I think that is related. I think there’s less smoking and it’s not perceived as being cool anymore. That’s an example.

A negative example, we see the CSI effect. Because everyone watches CSI shows, in which there’s perfect crime forensics, the expectation for juries is that there should be perfect crime forensics. It should be fast and easy, and there should be DNA tests for everything. It should be easy and infallible. There’s definitely an impact that Hollywood can have in terms of what Americans think is normal. I think you’re trying to move the needle in terms of what Americans are thinking about in terms of climate.

**Anna Jane:** Absolutely.

**John:** Quinn, help me think through some of these other examples of bigger issues. Designated drivers, that’s a thing that I think I see in movies a lot now and in TV shows. It’s not okay to be driving drunk. That’s one. Other examples that you can think of?

**Quinn:** You guys have covered… I don’t remember, it was sometime in the last 100 episodes. You talked about the portrayal of dark government and those sort of things and realizing, hey, it might not be okay to keep showing these sort of things with how little we trust institutions these days, for better or worse.

Also, the goal of this isn’t to put the onus completely on Hollywood. I think one of the things Anna Jane and I talked about a lot is it was really important, in the language and the tone and the vernacular, to not say, “You’re not doing a good enough job.” It was important for us to say, “We need you. You’re the best in the world at this. If there’s anything you can get out of this, if one line prompts you to include one line in your movie or TV or you have an entire show, entire movie, entire series you want to bring out of this, that’s great too,” because as Anna Jane was alluding to, 30,000 feet to come on down.

In the past 15 years or so, as we’ve scaled up solar and wind and batteries and things like that, we’ve actually gotten rid of a lot of the worst-case scenarios with these eight degrees of warming, seven, six, five, four. Just this week there’s a big article in Nature saying if every government fulfilled just their current pledges, which to be clear, aren’t that great, we can keep it under two degrees. Of course, that’s a big ask. That’s actually enormous. Every tenth of a degree really does matter. When you ask the question, okay, what is it going to require for those governments to do that, it’s going to require the kitchen sink, just like defeating smoking wasn’t just not showing people smoking on TV and movies anymore. It was the warning labels we put onto the packages. It was all the lawsuits. It was all those things. It was banning it in restaurants and all these different places.

The answer, and where I work a lot, is people saying, okay, this is all great, but what can I do? The best answer to that, usually, whether it’s COVID or climate or whatever it might be, is what can you do, John? What is the intersection of your interests and your skills, and then I’ll give you 70 different ways that are very measurable where you can have an impact. What Hollywood screenwriters, or if you live in the UK, wherever it might be, Bollywood, wherever it might be, what you do is so impactful and has such reach and can have such exponential impact. Any publicity is good publicity. Look what happened with Don’t Look Up. That matters so much.

Again, the onus isn’t you’re not doing well enough. It’s we need you because you do this one thing so well, while people like Kate Marvel, who’s again an incredible essayist but also one of our most impactful atmospheric scientists, all of these people are going to make a difference, and the impact that screenwriters can have, and showrunners and story editors and people who work below the line to build these worlds that writers imagine. Everyone can have such a substantial impact. If we can provide a tool for people to answer that question of what can I do, then that’s the least we can do. It just will help move the needle so much. The answer is we’ve made a lot of progress, and we can make so much more, but we need everybody on board.

**John:** Let’s focus on some of the smaller things and bigger things in terms of what screenwriters and TV writers can do to show impact of climate change and solutions to climate change on screen. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the page we’re talking through. This is Climate Solutions On-Screen. Anna Jane, can you talk us through just some of the simple things? Then we can also get into the bigger things. I know Norman Lear is involved in this organization as well. I think what he did with The Jeffersons, which was portraying a successful Black family on screen, and putting it in everyone’s living rooms, did have an impact. There could be as big a thing about a climate-centered series like Scott Burns is doing, or we also had Gloria Calderon Kellett on the show to talk about One Day At A Time and how she did little small things on the show, like if they’re on the roof, they’re going to show some solar panels. There’s bigger things and smaller things. Can you give us a sense, from this playbook of these smaller things that we could be looking at for our characters in existing shows or movies?

**Anna Jane:** Definitely. Lynn and Norman Lear have been great champions of seeing more climate on screen. You’re exactly right. We talk about it as a spectrum. On the smaller things are almost more the set dressing. If you’re showing a roof, show solar panels on it. If you have a kitchen scene, show an electric stove, not a gas stove. If you have a car scene, have an EV. When on set, don’t have single-use plastic in your scenes. Have a water bottle. Those are just the really easy things that almost any production could do.

**John:** Those are things you’re not even really acknowledging in the course of the scene. It’s just normal to see that there.

**Anna Jane:** We know that that works, because it’s worked with smoking and it’s worked with other issues and it normalizes these behaviors and makes them sexy, depending on the context. Of course, that’s what we want. We want to make these things really desirable and sexy. Then I think from there it’s talking about it just in passing. You’re seeing that show up more, just in shows where it’s an ongoing story that isn’t about climate, but the character brings it up in passing conversation. We know that that is powerful, because again, it normalizes talking about it.

There’s this really strange dynamic that’s happening in the country where now according to Yale’s most recent research, 75% of American adults are concerned about climate change, everything from cautious to deeply alarmed. The deeply alarmed is now the biggest American audience of all the audiences they study. It’s a really small percentage of people who ever talk about it in their normal, day-to-day lives. It’s creating this sensation of feeling very isolated and also like you’re being gaslit by the world, which how the characters in Don’t Look Up felt, like there’s a meteor headed towards us and nobody seems to care. We also consistently, according to research, underestimate how much those around us care about it. We think that we care more than the other people around us, but that’s not true.

Just having it come up in passing conversation for a character that you’re already attached to and a story that you’re already attached to is really, really powerful. Then I think we see the more in-depth engagements with shows like Years and Years, where it’s not focused on climate, but it’s a consistent theme that impacts the family and the story because it’s set in the future.

**John:** Let’s go back and take a look at that middle ground thing where it’s not just set dressing, but it’s coming up in conversation, because I think the classic example you go back to in terms of one character makes a comment and that changes the whole industry is Merlot. In the movie Sideways, Paul Giamatti has his tirade against Merlot, and it actually has a demonstrable impact on Merlot sales for decades afterwards. It literally changed what grapes are planted in California based on the result of that movie and people not buying Merlot. If you have characters you care about, who you believe would be saying this thing, but are voicing a concern about this thing or that thing or a preference of this over that, that could have a real impact if it’s the right show, the right message, the right timing of it. It’s being judicious when you’re doing that.

**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, another amazing climate scientist, says that the number one thing that anyone can do about it is talk about it, is really being honest about the fact that this is impacting our lives and our psychology and our mental health and our physical environment. Having your characters do that I think also is just an honest portrayal of the world we’re living in now. If these characters were out there in the real world, it would be impacting their lives, and they would be thinking about it. Also, just for the impact on the audience, it really does a lot to normalize people’s own concerns and courage and thinking about it and saying it’s okay to be worried. These characters are also worried.

**John:** Choices in transportation feel like a really natural way to do that, because the choice of whether to get that bigger car, to get the smaller car, or to not get a car and use public transportation, those are things that are moments we can see on screen where characters are making choices. We can think about like, oh, what choice would I make if I were in that situation. You might make a different choice. Just because you see a bunch of big trucks around you, you might be the person who doesn’t get the big truck because of something that you saw on screen or a choice that someone else made that was different, because of a show you saw or a movie you saw.

**Quinn:** Going from the ground level back up, there’s some fascinating research that says the single most influential lever for why someone might get solar panels is whether their neighbor has them. That’s been measured a thousand times. We know that the biggest levers to pull, no question, are elections, legislation, and candidates who might be able to win races, that will vote for that sort of legislation that pulls a lever. We also know that that really doesn’t usually happen until it’s swelled from the ground up, until social norms have been changed, so when there’s been a paradigm shift.

If TV is like the friends that are in your living room every week or you’re binging them or whatever it might be or these big impactful movies, if we’re able to show those things more and more, whether it’s solar panels or a smaller car or it’s water issues or whatever it might be, that’s going to help build that. That’s going to help build it up to the point where it’s really tough for the folks who are in charge, who are able to have the biggest impact to ignore. Again, there’s a million different roles that people can play. When you ask, what can I do, it’s the same thing.

I reread Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird recently, which I love and I’ve dogeared a thousand times. It’s just these wonderful character questions like what do they dream about and what are they scared of and all this. It’s the same thing, just looking at your characters and going, “What can they do? How can they get involved in some way, whether it’s subtle or not?” The more you see that, the more you go, “That’s a job I didn’t know existed.”

**Anna Jane:** I think the way that we talk about it in the playbook is a climate lens, which is also just another generative, creative opportunity, thinking through how would this be impacting my story world, and my characters can open up all these new possibilities around plot and character development. I think that that’s exactly right. It’s just thinking through, if this character was alive in our world today, what would they be dreaming about, and how might they be engaging or thinking about this. Then I think Gloria Calderon Kellett at the event did such a good job of showing what that looks like in her show, where it’s a sitcom. It’s not about climate change, but one of the characters is really passionate about social justice issues. It was very natural to have that character dress up as Greta Thunberg for Halloween. There were some great jokes. It was funny. It totally worked for their characters and their story.

Then also talked to Scott Z. Burns, who just created an Apple Plus show that will come out I think next year, that’s heavily focused on climate. His co-showrunner and writer Dorothy Fortenberry has this great line that if climate isn’t in your story, then it’s science fiction. I think that that’s going to continue to be the case. In 10 years, if your characters aren’t acknowledging climate, it’s going to feel so outdated, because that is just going to increasingly impact our real lives and our real world.

**Quinn:** Now when I watch any show that is about an oncoming pandemic or something, or I see medical situations where people aren’t wearing masks, I’m like, “Put on your mask!” It feels really crazy. I love love love the show Station Eleven, but it started to be filmed before our pandemic. We see all these medical situations, and there’s a pandemic coming. I’m like, “Where are your masks?” It does feel like some sort of weird alt timeline universe that people are not acknowledging what we all know to be true.

**Anna Jane:** That was one of my favorite shows recently, because obviously it’s not a climate show but it does show how do these characters find beauty and joy in the midst of pretty harrowing circumstances. I think we need a lot more stories about that, around climate. That stuff can’t go away, as things continue to get more intense. We’re humans. We need stories. We need art. We need joy and beauty. Also, on the flip side, I was like, “This is set 15 years in the future. There’s a lot of climate change happening. They just don’t talk about it.” It would be so easy to just have thrown a little bit in there to acknowledge that their world is very changed.

**John:** We’d be focusing on the little things we can do or how the characters talk about it. Let’s zoom back out. There’s a page in your playbook called the Cheat sheet, which is bigger, broader things to be thinking about. One of the big frameworks you have for it is the climate crisis is here now. I think so often we talk about it as the day after tomorrow. We’re always jumping ahead 10 years like, “Oh, this is how bad it’s going to be,” and not acknowledging what you’re experiencing on the Gulf Coast, which is that it’s happening to you every day. There’s constant problems. The wolf’s not at the door. The wolf’s in the house. We have to deal with the wolf that’s in front of us.

Let’s talk through some of the other things in this cheat sheet, because there are things you might skip past but I think are important for us to be looking at. One of them is your idea of no shame, because I think so often it’s easy to think about, oh, they’re saying that, but then they’re also flying someplace, so they’re hypocrites. You have a quote there from Bill McKibben that says, “Everyone’s a climate hypocrite. The hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle.” You to be doing this, you had to fly here to Los Angeles to do this presentation. You have an impact as well. That doesn’t negate the good that you’re doing.

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, it’s really huge. I think it’s actually an intentional narrative that’s been seeded by the fossil fuel industry, who very much understands the power of storytelling. They commissioned a movie glorifying oil in the 1950s. It’s intentional. BP actually coined the term carbon footprint, and it was very much to put the onus of guilt and shame on the individual instead of the systemic problems, the fossil fuel industry, the governments that are allowing this to happen.

I think that when we do shame each other over flying, plastic straws, what have you… In the Deep South some people need trucks. EV trucks haven’t become affordable. Shame is a very good emotion for shutting you down. It doesn’t provide a psychological mindset for moving into a place of agency and action. That’s a very intentional thing that was done by the fossil fuel industry. I encourage people not to play into that. It’s easy to fall into. It also tends to set up the character who does care as the nag, like a lot of the annoying neighbor bitching at you about your recycling. We want to show characters who care who you like, or you don’t like, but they’re somebody who’s fascinating and not just bitching at you, ideally.

**John:** I think one of the other tropes and expectations we get to is that character, that nag, is a white person who is going after you. One of the things that I see you doing in this is that you’re trying to really center Black and indigenous people in this conversation. You had Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr., and one of the lines he said that I thought was so smartly crafted was, “From the front line to the fence line,” and really focusing on communities that are impacted by these things and centering them in the solution to it, and not just the victim of the problem.

**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. I think it’s very in line with a lot of representation and diversity conversations already happening in Hollywood. When it comes to climate, historically marginalized communities, largely BIPOC, are the ones who are near the fossil fuel industries that are poisoning air and water, Cancer Alley in Louisiana, largely Black communities. They’re also in the front lines. We see Standing Rock and all kinds of pipeline fights and fights against different fossil fuel infrastructure led by Black and indigenous leaders. It’s really important when we’re telling climate stories, those people are leading on the stories that they’re in.

**John:** There’s not a white savior who comes in-

**Anna Jane:** Exactly.

**John:** …just to solve the problem for them.

**Anna Jane:** They’re a part of the actual storytelling process, because they are largely the ones who are experiencing it first and worst.

**John:** Let’s try to wrap this up with some action steps, because this feels very much like a Quinn newsletter thing, like here’s what you can do. Obviously, any of our listeners can go to the climate playbook right now. It’s goodenergystories.com, and take a look at those things. What are some steps that you’d like people to take this week, this month, in terms of if you were a showrunner working on a show, what are some practical things they could do to start having these conversations in the room? What would you like them to do?

**Anna Jane:** Certainly reading it, but also sharing it with your writers and making sure that other people have access to it and are aware of it. We’re definitely trying to distribute it far and wide. The more that folks can do that, the better. We’re also offering workshops, and we’re happy to come into writers rooms and bring it to life off the page. Happy to do that. Definitely reach out to me if you’re interested in that. It’s like climate change, just talking about it, sharing it.

**John:** Great. How will you know if what you’re doing is successful. How will you know whether this good energy playbook has had the impact that you want to have? I know you have people involved who are data folks. Will you have a sense of whether this has worked?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah. We worked with USC’s Media Impact Project to study how often climate and any adjacent conversation is showing up in TV and film. It’s 2.8% between 2016 and 2020 showed up in scripted entertainment. We are going to continue measuring that to see how it’s going up. That was before Don’t Look Up. I’m curious how much that impacted audiences. Just looking, definitely going to study how does this change over time, and not only just the frequency, but how are the stories showing up. What are the narratives that are showing up?

**John:** Small sidebar. You don’t have to weigh in on this. I fully respect Don’t Look Up, and I’m so happy Don’t Look Up happened, but I do worry that it’s going to feel like that’s how you make a climate change movie. I don’t know that you’re going to have the impact you’re going to have, because I do worry that those people involved telling that story has just made it feel like it’s a Hollywood movie about this thing that’s really… It’s a metaphor. The meteor’s a metaphor for something else. I don’t know that it’s going to connect the dots in the ways that it all could. I’m happy that movie exists, but I think we could do so much more granular work to actually get some stuff happening.

**Anna Jane:** On Don’t Look Up, I do think that it opened a lot of doors by having a successful movie that was a metaphor, also for climate explicitly. They were very clear about that. Definitely want to see climate show up more in non-analogies, in real ways. One of the movies that I just loved that did that was First Reformed. I just re-watched it, because we do a bunch of case studies in the playbook. It’s just so beautifully written. I just feel like anyone who says that you can’t write climate without being preachy or didactic or boring or too technical, that movie just to me completely debunks that, because it’s just gorgeously written. That’s a lot of faith and climate intersections too, which I always find fascinating. I really love that one. It’s dark, but it ends on this moment of possibility and expansiveness. I really love those stories, where it’s helping you to befriend uncertainty but also letting you imagine something that happens.

**Quinn:** I always try to take the perspective of we’ll take whatever we can get here. One of the things I tried to emphasize as Anna and her team constructed this incredible tool, is we always have to remember how difficult it is for anyone at any stage in their career in Hollywood to get anything made. I watch my wife, who is the most hardworking, incredible human, and about as successful as it gets, struggle to get things made. One of our goals was literally anything you can get out of this, great, we’ll take it, because that 3% number can only go up. If you skim one page and you grab one thing, that’s something else, and that starts to change that social norm. We’ll take whatever we can get. Don’t Look Up felt the same way, whether it’s something more fantastical like Beasts of the Southern Wild about the Gulf Coast or it’s First Reformed or whatever it might be, the movie about the big forest fire last year.

**John:** Angelina Jolie?

**Quinn:** Yes. The point is, if you think there’s a limited number of stories to tell, you are just incredibly off base, because the folks that are already being affected by this have such a wide, beautiful variety of lived experiences who have stories to tell, who are already contributing, because their answer to what can I do is, it’s what I have to do. I have to make sure that my frontline community is getting the money or is electrifying buildings or whatever it might be. We’ll take any of these stories, because all of them make a difference.

**John:** They do. The other thing I would just stress is that you don’t necessarily have to announce your intentions. You don’t have to say, “Oh, we’re going to put a climate change story into this episode.” No, just do those little, small things. The network, or the studio, they’re not even necessarily going to notice that you did it. You’re making choices for your story that are the right choices, but also help tell the message.

**Quinn:** This’ll date me. It doesn’t need to say, “A very special episode of Parks and Rec.” We don’t need that. Just make it part of the world, and people will identify with it so much more.

**Anna Jane:** I really love it when it shows up very authentically. I think that’s really powerful. I do think people love the drama of my story, like the climate activist goes up against climate denier megachurch pastor father. All of us have fascinating stories. All of us are experiencing this in unique ways. There are literally billions of climate stories, because every single person in this world is affected, and every person to come will be affected.

**John:** Cool. It has come time for our One Cool Things, where we share something with our audience. I’ll start off. I’m going to start with Redactle, which is a new daily game, in the tradition of Wordle, because now there has to be a daily everything, a place you go to. Redactle is really tough. What it does is it takes an article on Wikipedia, one of the top 10,000 articles, so not something super obscure, but then it redacts almost all the worlds. Then you plug in words to uncover what it is. You have to figure out what is this actual article about. It’s really hard, but really challenging. If you’re a puzzley kind of person, you’re just trying to figure out what this could possibly be. I spent about a half an hour yesterday trying to figure out what an inclined plane article was, also known as a ramp. It’s rewarding. You do feel that sense of accomplishment when you actually have uncovered the thing. Redactle will be my One Cool Thing for this week. Quinn, why don’t you go next. What do you have for yours?

**Quinn:** I’m going to cheat. My One Cool Thing is my wife.

**John:** Aw.

**Quinn:** Besides just being an incredible human on her own, I was privileged enough to choose to do this work. She has been supportive in 10,000 different ways, including there’s really no way to get into this work without having some dark moments, even if you’re as privileged as I am. I deal with air pollution a lot less, now that I left California. I don’t want for clean water and food and things like that. The scope of it and what’s here and what’s coming can be very difficult. She’s found me under a blanket on the couch some nights, going, “Oh boy.” She’s the most incredible human alive. On the other hand, if you want to laugh with everything that’s going on, her new movie is fantastic. It’s a blast. It’s a throwback. It’s a delight.

**John:** That would be The Lost City. You have to actually name the movie.

**Quinn:** Yeah, The Lost City.

**John:** The Lost City.

**Quinn:** Yeah, that’s helpful. Sorry. It’s been so long. We’re so in it. Lost City, Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum. He takes off his pants. I don’t know what else to tell you.

**John:** Good stuff. Anna Jane, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Anna Jane:** I’m going to go with Russian Doll Season 2.

**John:** I’m excited to watch it. Are you enjoying it?

**Anna Jane:** I loved it. I binged it. It was my treat after launch. We launched on Tuesday. I was bringing on Wednesday. I’m like, “The universe gave me Russian Doll Season 2 as a gift.” The first season was really profoundly moving to me.

**John:** I watched it twice.

**Anna Jane:** I think I watched if four times. Just personally, I was going through stuff that it really helped with. On a global scale, working on climate can feel like you’re in this crazy death loop and like you’re going a little crazy, especially the first 10 years. Now everybody else is waking up too, which is great. This season goes back into her story. She is working through trauma from her family and history. I have a lot to do with that as well. I hear rumors that if they get a next season they might jump into the future. If you want to talk about climate, reach out to me. That show has just been profoundly life-changing for me.

**John:** Fantastic. Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jade Carta. 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. Anna Jane, are you on Twitter? Are you a Twitter person?

**Anna Jane:** I am. I’m @annajanejoyner.

**John:** Fantastic. We can also follow, is it @goodenergy?

**Anna Jane:** It’s @goodenergystory.

**John:** @goodenergystory. You can follow their Twitter account as well. Quinn Emmett, you are on Twitter? I don’t remember now.

**Quinn:** I am, yeah. Yes, when I’m not dealing with my children. It’s @quinnemmett.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. While you’re signing up for newsletters, you should also sign up for Quinn’s newsletter and podcast. Quinn, plug away.

**Quinn:** You can find that newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.com. You can find the podcast there as well. It’s weekly. It’s free. I don’t know. A lot of folks find some value in it.

**John:** Of course, goodenergystories.com is the place where you can get the playbook and find all that information there. If you would like a T-shirt, we have T-shirts. They are great. They’re available at Cotton Bureau. We have hoodies like the one I’m wearing. They’re very comfortable. Are you wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt at this moment, Quinn?

**Quinn:** No, I should’ve. That was a real mistake, because I have a closet full of them.

**John:** Yes, we all have our closets full. 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 asking people for money. Anna Jane and Quinn, thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Quinn:** Thanks, John.

**Anna Jane:** It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Anna Jane, to do this work, you had a vision, you had a goal, but again, we talk about you as a protagonist. At some point you, to enact this vision, had to get people to give you money to do this thing. Can you talk to me about how you approach people and say, “Hey, would you give me money to do this thing, this vision that I have for this organization?”

**Anna Jane:** I would say I’m still learning the art form, but I have been pretty successful with this particular project. I basically had the idea after consulting on Madam Secretary, on a storyline that was loosely based off of my story, but was like, why aren’t we seeing this show up more, and just started a personal… It really came from a very personal passion. I love TV and film. I’ve been a book nerd since I was little. It was very much like you follow your personal passion, and that opens up doors. I just started talking to as many writers as possible to figure out how we could help, what was going on.

From there, I went to the Sierra Club, who was my first climate home. I’ve worked with them off and on over the years a lot. I was like, “I think this is an opportunity that nobody seems to be looking at.” I think just the uniqueness and the fact that it intersected with what felt like we were craving more and more, that certainly opened up doors. The art of going out and dancing in front of billionaires to get money for work that you care about, I just… I think stories are powerful. We worked with a story scientist as an advisor, and just learning with him about the psychological reasons that stories impact you so much more than facts or data and can lead to action as a result of that. Not only was it just a vision for something that was missing, we really did the deep work of making the case from a just practical, psychological space that was really needed.

**John:** Vision is great, but at some point you are probably writing things. You can talk to us about writing podcasts. Talk to us about what you were writing and meeting with and slides. What was the work from, “Okay, we have this vague vision.” You went to the Sierra Club. With Sierra Club, did you go in and have a meeting? Did you have a pitch deck? Did you have a written document? What were you going into them with? When did you have the name Good Energy? How does all that stuff come together?

**Anna Jane:** That was in the spring of 2019. They were fairly easy, just because I already had a relationship with them. They could pretty quickly see the vision. Certainly in working with Bloomberg Philanthropies, who was our next big partner that came on, we had to be really intentional about piloting. That’s what we did with the Sierra Club was we talked to so many writers. We did two events. We really made the case that there was an opening for this and there was an appetite for it, but also practical things. Our creative director is a magician. All of our materials, including our pitch deck-

**John:** Your materials look great.

**Anna Jane:** It’s beautiful. I think we just created… It wasn’t just a vision. It was how we packaged it. We’ve tried, and some things didn’t work, and we learned from it and we tried again. Definitely when you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, there’s a lot of trial and error. Certainly, I think not only leaning into the vision and getting evidence, scientific evidence and also just qualitative evidence based on interests, but also really packaging it in a super beautiful way.

**John:** Sierra Club is seed money to get you started and do some little small events that are test of concept, proof of concept for a thing. Then you’re going to Bloomberg. Also I see you have Annenberg. You had that USC connection, because they could do some researchy stuff for you. It feels like there’s places out there that want to do things, that they want someone to come to them saying, “This is how we do the thing.” Is that what your function is?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, I definitely think people, including foundations, have this esoteric, like storytelling matters, but doing research on other organizations who do this… Define American was a huge inspiration for us.

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Anna Jane:** Sorry. It’s very similar. They do story consulting for immigration storylines. They’ve done research on the impact. It’s very significant. Looking at other organizations who do similar things, adopting it for climate, and showing that there’s this very practical model really helped. We took this esoteric vision and we brought it down to what does this actually look like.

**John:** Talk to us about going into a Bloomberg, going into a big foundation. How do you get the first meeting? What’s the process for going in there to ask for money? Do you know what dollars you’re asking for when you go into those things where you’re just saying, “Hey, please be a partner.” What’s that like?

**Anna Jane:** I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of privilege inherent in this. I had been working in the climate space for a long time and I had a reputable name. I’d done work that had done well before. I just knew a lot of people. I met the woman at Bloomberg, Lindsay Firestone, who’s been just pivotal not only for getting us money, but also just helping us really think through the model and grow it. Bloomberg is very data-driven. That is their thing. We really had to show that we could measure this, we could measure the impact, in addition to presenting the vision and really the practical steps for what this could look like. That continues. We’re getting better and better at it. We’re getting more evidence. We’re getting more data that shows that this is possible to do. It’s like Hollywood. A lot of it is relationships. That has to be combined with something, a really solid idea, and that’s packaged very well.

**John:** Now, as I went to this event, I noticed that there were a bunch of other organizations that were part of it. Bloomberg is obviously writing big checks, but you clearly partnered with a bunch of other organizations who are doing related things. Are they advisors? When did those people come on board with the process?

**Anna Jane:** Absolutely. Our other big funder is Walton Family Foundation and Doc Society. Then we have a bunch of great funders at smaller levels. Our network of partners is so critical for just bringing diversity of voices and a lot of stories. A lot of these organizations work with people on the ground. A lot of them work with BIPOC communities, so access to character inspirations and stories. Hip Hop Caucus is one of our partners who does incredible work not only on climate justice, but also on racial justice. They’ve worked with a lot of musicians in the hip-hop community. They really get the impact of culture work. Now they’re doing more and more storytelling work as well.

Then Center for Cultural Power is our anchor partner. They’ve done a lot of amazing work at the intersection of art and story and climate, but also gender justice and racial justice. They’ve just been pivotal. They were editors on the playbook, advisors. Then the Sierra Club. CA Foundation, the Writers Guild East has really helped us. Both of those organizations really helped us think through the audience. What really helped too is that my two co-writers on the playbook were TV writers, or are TV writers. That’s Carmiel Banasky and Rae Binstock. We not only were connecting with advisors who were writers the entire process, we actually brought in writers to help us craft it. That was hugely important. Writers Guild East also just really helped us think through.

**John:** Just going back to the writing again, so when we say writing, are you guys writing in Microsoft Word? Are these Google Docs? How are you putting together this very complicated site? How are you gathering all of this material and making sure it all feels like it has a consistent editorial voice?

**Anna Jane:** It was a herculean effort. It was a huge Google Doc that we were inputting into. We had a ton of guest writers. We also brought in Kate Marvel. One of my favorite sections is we worked with a consultant to Marvel’s world-building empire, and then also climate scientist Dr. Pete Kalmus. They really took the science and worked to project what these two worlds that we’re heading towards, one or the other or somewhere in between, would look like. We follow a character who’s born today and grows up in the best-case scenario, which is honest. It’s still harrowing. It does get worse. There’s nothing we can do to avoid that. It’s a lot better than the scenario we’re headed towards right now, which is more three degrees. You get to see what do these two different worlds look like at 2050 and then towards the end of the century. We brought in just a lot of amazing guest writers and also worked with TV… It was really intentional and important to us that the tone was… Fun is a weird word when it’s coming to climate, but there are moments of humor in there.

**John:** It’s inviting and it’s engaging. You’re not screaming as you’re going through it.

**Anna Jane:** Not too technical. We wanted it to be very accessible to storytellers and writers. It was important to us that the writing was really good, because our audience was writers. We also worked with a really amazing copywriter. We were intentional the entire time about making sure the writing was really solid.

**John:** Quinn, you got cut out of that whole segment. Anything you want to say?

**Quinn:** That’s the way it should be. Are you kidding me? I’m just a paperweight here.

**Anna Jane:** Quinn was an amazing advisor throughout the entire process.

**Quinn:** Anna’s amazing. Every time I read something new, it was just like, oh man. It’s incredible. My whole goal was just trying to always come back to the measurable outcome, which was is this section designed so that a screenwriter can easily and understandably get something practical out of it. It wasn’t, hey, let’s write 100 pages on all the climate science. That’s not going to be as helpful. It was always with that goal in mind. What’s out there is just so helpful. Again, it’s one of those things that seems so obvious once you have it. It’s because of course, this is a tool for these people to use. It just didn’t exist.

**John:** When you see it at the final product, of course that’s how it was going to be, and then you don’t see all the process that got you to that point. At what point did you know it was a website and not a printed thing?

**Anna Jane:** I have to shout out the Walton Family Foundation who made that possible, as well as the research. Originally, we only had funding for a pdf version. When we got maybe a third of the way in, we were just like, “This has to be a website.” Also, we talked to over 100 TV and film writers to inform the playbook and just realized through those conversations that it would be way more accessible on a website, so we shifted maybe four months in and were like, “We’ve got to figure this out.” We raised more money so that we can make it a website.

**John:** Great. Again, thank you very much for coming on the show and talking through this whole plan, and especially that’s how we raise money to make these things happen.

**Quinn:** Absolutely.

**Anna Jane:** It’s an art form. Still learning.

**Quinn:** Thanks for having us, John.

**John:** Cool. Thanks.

**Anna Jane:** Thank you so much.

Links:

* [Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/) Documentary
* [Download The Cost of Accommodations Report](https://inevitable.foundation/cost-of-accommodations/download) from the Inevitable Foundation and read more on [The Hollywood Reporter](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-inevitable-foundation-disability-accommodations-cost-study-movies-tv-1235131680/?_hsenc=p2ANqtz–L2n-kjr_qiSGqFieZri6yrMikpnCpb_V7he_SrT2rQcnerEPKQAfUJHYpZkE3lJxquHEz)
* [Good Energy Stories Playbook](https://www.goodenergystories.com/playbook)
* [David Robert Ted Talk on Climate Change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90)
* [Years of Living Dangerously Clip with Anna and her Dad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0d09DIv8vY)
* [Subscribe to Important, Not Important](https://www.importantnotimportant.com/)
* [Dana Fox](https://twitter.com/inthehenhouse) on Twitter and checkout [The Lost City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfKO9rYDmE8) Movie
* [Russian Doll Season 2](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627?source=35)
* [Redactle Game](https://www.redactle.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/)
* [Anna Jane Joyner](https://twitter.com/annajanejoyner) on Twitter
* [Quinn Emmett](https://twitter.com/quinnemmett) on Twitter
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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 548 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, films may have returned to theaters, but many of them are still being made exclusively for streamers. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of going straight to streaming, with the writers of two upcoming films.

First off, we have the writing team of Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, whose credits include How I Met Your Mother, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Most Likely To Murder, Pretty Smart, and the upcoming Chip ’n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, debuting later this month on Disney Plus. Dan and Doug, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Doug Mand: Thank you.

Dan Gregor: Excited to be here. Thank you for having us in your upstairs backroom.

John: Which of you is Chip and which of you is Dale?

Dan: I guess I was accused of being Dale. We did early recordings for temp voice. I was Dale and Doug was-

Doug: Chip.

Dan: We got dropped very quickly.

Doug: Emotionally, because it is a movie about friendship and partnership.

Dan: Through long-term Hollywood careers.

John: The people actually playing your roles in the movie, they’re newcomers, right? They’re no one you’ve ever heard of.

Dan: Nobody you’ve ever heard of. The character inspired by me is played by a young upstart named Andy Samberg.

Doug: The character inspired by me is a little whippersnapper named John Mulaney, who we all have high hopes for, but you never know in this business.

John: Things could turn on a dime.

Doug: Oh my gosh. We’re pulling for him though.

John: We are so excited to welcome our very own Aline Brosh McKenna, who’s recording… You’re going to be in the editing room for your upcoming Netflix feature, but now I see a library behind you, so you’re back at home, correct, Aline?

Aline Brosh McKenna: Indeed. We turned in a cut yesterday. We’re getting towards the end.

John: This would be a cut of Your Place Or Mine, her feature for Netflix. We’re so excited to see it. Do we have a release date for your film yet?

Aline: We do not.

John: Soon. I want soon.

Aline: It’s up to the folks who decide those sorts of things.

John: On this podcast we’re going to be discussing movies made for streamers and the uncertainty of when do our movies come out. We’ll also talk in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members about getting work done when you have a newborn, because Doug and Dan, you both have really young kids. I want to talk to you about that and the strategies you’re employing for actually getting things done when you have a small, screaming infant in your house.

Doug: Work a lot less.

Dan: Whoop, sorry, Premium.

John: A very short segment. First, we have some follow-up. Megana, can you help us out with some follow-up from previous episodes?

Megana Rao: In Episode 545 we spoke with Elizabeth Meriwether and Liz Hannah about How Would This Be A Movie. One of our topics was MacKenzie Scott. We talked about what a limited series about MacKenzie Scott would be like. Teresa tweeted at us, saying, “FYI, there is a TV comedy inspired by MacKenzie Scott, sort of, coming out on Apple TV Plus. It’s a Matthew Hubbard, Alan Yang show, and it stars Maya Rudolph.”

John: The combination of these people, Aline and I know. Maya Rudolph is incredibly funny. This would be inspired by MacKenzie Scott, but not really… Doug, I see a puzzled look on your face.

Doug: That’s just my resting face, but yeah, go ahead.

John: MacKenzie Scott was Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife who’s now giving away all this money. I looked at the show description for this new show. “Rudolph will star as Molly, a woman whose seemingly perfect life is upended when her husband leaves her with nothing but $87 billion.”

Doug: That’s great. That’s a very funny line.

John: That’s a good premise. When people talk about how do you write a good log line, that’s it. That’s a [crosstalk 00:03:25].

Doug: That’s a great log line. That’s fantastic.

Dan: That sounds great.

John: Kudos to Matthew Hubbard and Alan Yang for a very funny log line. May the show live up to it.

Dan: I think it’s really smart. I was listening to that episode, and I also was like, don’t get caught up in all the nonsense of how they met and their relationship. I just want to see-

Doug: Get right to it.

Dan: What’s it like to be a regular lady with $87 billion?

Doug: I don’t need the first episode to be like, “We met and it was all so great and he was just a regular guy.” I don’t care.

Dan: It’s really a funny premise.

Doug: Go spend that money. Let’s get to Brewster’s millions.

John: We like it. Now, Megana, you and I had a Bonus Segment a couple weeks back talking about murder houses and murder house architecture. We got some follow-up from Penelope about this.

Megana: Penelope from Melbourne said, “I was listening to your segment on murder house architecture, and it made me think of Tom Anderson’s brilliant essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, released in 2003. He explores in detail why modernist architecture is so often used as the headquarters of villains in movies and TV. It’s such a great documentary, well worth a look if you haven’t seen it yet.”

John: We’ll look at the trailer. I’ll link to the trailer in the show notes. I really liked this. It did really strike to me, if you see a modernist house in a movie, it’s almost always the villain who lives there. Even Charlie’s Angels, the villain lives in the Chemosphere, the most haunted modernist house of all time. In this trailer, I was looking, even LA Confidential, which I think of as being such a period movie, it was a period movie in a modernist era, and the bad guys live there.

Dan: Did you see Westworld?

John: Oh yeah.

Dan: It’s the deep future, and they mostly take place in the Old West. Still, when they ever leave, the villains are still living in the exact same evil modernist houses.

John: Frank Lloyd Wright’s-

Doug: Exactly.

John: …[inaudible 00:05:09] house.

Dan: Exactly. It’s 2030000 and we can’t ever have our mean people live anywhere but Frank Lloyd Wright.

Doug: It was wild that when CAA moved, also they moved to what looks like a large spaceship that’s ready to be sent off into the atmosphere.

Dan: Into the core of the earth.

Doug: There is an evil feeling when you roll in there. I love the CAA. It was just so perfect, it felt villainous, just their new location.

John: Now, Aline, in your film, do you have your characters living in modernist architecture or more traditional? Your film is set in Los Angeles, correct?

Aline: It is set in New York and Los Angeles. We have a little spin on that trope, which is that the person who needs to explore emotional growth lives in a rather modern, arid environment. The person who also needs to experience emotional growth but is a little bit more female, for starters, lives in a more cluttered, craftsman-y, Echo Park, not modern home. I guess I’m using those tropes as well, in a different format.

John: We love it. Last bit of follow-up. We had something from Adam in Brighton, England. Megana, help us out.

Megana: Adam wrote in and said, “On your last episode, I think it was Liz Hannah who said that six-episode seasons struggle to make a profit. As someone who often feels that shows are stretched too thin, I’ve long wondered if the problem is driven by business needs. Do you have any insight that you could share?

John: I have no insight, but we have a lot of people who have made a lot of TV here. Dan, help us out. Talk to us about shorter seasons and the economics and why you don’t see really short seasons.

Dan: The thing that seems pretty clear is that it’s amortized costs. If you have to build a set, all of a sudden that set for a couple episodes is very expensive, but if you’re doing it for a bunch of episodes, it’s expensive. Same thing with basically all of your contracts. Doug had a show that was a 10-episode order. I’m sure you had a sense of what… What would happen if you pushed it more or less?

Doug: I listened to that episode as well. I was like, “Oh, that is interesting,” because I had not had the six-episode discussion. Once you’re up and running, it’s a lot less money to do it, especially a show like Pretty Smart, which was a multi-cam, so the set’s built and you have everything in place. That’s the most I know about it. I didn’t know about the model for six to eight episodes, six episodes being a cutoff. I did not know about that. Neither of us have ever pitched something that would be that long.

John: Aline, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend obviously was… You were 13 episodes and then even longer I think at some times. What was the decision process for like… Originally you were a Showtime show, and then you went to CBS. How did the number of episodes factor into the budget?

Aline: They told us how many episodes to make. It was not our choice. We made 2 18-episode seasons and 2 13-episode seasons. It was based on the network studio and their needs. We ended up making 62 episodes. That would’ve been maybe five, six episodes of streaming or cable. We just made them in the overlapping network system, where everything was happening at the same time. We weren’t able to separate out the phases of production. That made it especially taxing and complicated, but it also allowed us to compress a lot of stuff into a relatively short amount of time.

John: You were able to do 18 episodes of a season within just a course of a calendar year, which as opposed to some of these limited series streaming things, it’s dragged out over 2 years just to do 6 or 8 episodes which is allotted.

Aline: I Love Lucy did 50.

Dan: A season?

Aline: Something like that.

Dan: Oh my god. How I Met Your Mother was a 22, 24, 25 one year, a season kind of show. They were talking about the creative problem of all that, which is you have these middles of the season where you’re like, “We’ve just got to keep these characters in a stasis for a chunk of time so that we can keep our plot endgame primed for where we wanted to go at the end.” You just don’t want to burn out. One of the things we learned on those shows was, man, every meaningful plot point is so priceless. You just don’t want to over-dole them out too quickly, because you really need them to last. The short episode orders are a joy for like, “No, just do it, do it, do it.” That’s why it’s great.

John: Now, Aline, also, you have a TV development deal. In shows that you’re developing, how early on in the conversation do you know how many episodes they want the show to be? If you’re setting up a pilot, do they already have a discussion of like, “Okay, this needs to be at least eight episodes. It needs to be at least 10.” When does that conversation happen?

Aline: That’s interesting. We have a couple pilots that are moving down the highway at some degree of velocity. We haven’t totally nailed it down yet. I think it might also have to do, at this point, with actors and how much time they want off and need off, and the idea now that actors really do go back and forth between not just TV and film, but multiple TV series, and so setting it up so that the actors… If you get a very famous actor and they have a specific number of episodes that they do or don’t want to do, I imagine that that would factor into it.

I’m interested in the idea, from a crafty point, of how much story you eat, because sometimes you can feel that deliberate slowing of the story eating, because creators don’t want to burn too much, because if you burn too much, you get into soap territory very quickly. One of the mini-series I have most admired recently, and by admired I mean was obsessed with, The Dropout. In The Dropout they eat a tremendous amount of story in the pilot. At the end of that pilot, you think, my god, I have been through so much already. I admire that, because it’s giving you the amount of story that you might get in a movie really at that point. Then I think we’ve all gotten to the place where we are accustomed to those episodes, which as Dan said, are between Episodes 4 and 7, where it seems like we’re going to do a flashback episode about the first time this person learned how to use a payphone. That’s going to be the whole episode.

John: We’ve been talking about TV, but I really want to focus on features this time, because you guys are both in the middle of making features for screenwriters. We’ll start with Doug and Dan. Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, this was obviously a passion project from a very young age. You always dreamed of making a Chip ‘n’ Dale.

Doug: It actually was. It was my favorite cartoon. I have drawings from my childhood that my parents dug up of me cosplaying the Rescue Rangers in different outfits.

John: That’s amazing. Rescue Rangers is not even something that’s on my radar at all. It was very specific. You were just the right age for the Rescue Rangers to be a thing.

Doug: It’s an old, mid-old millennial kind of niche. All of those cartoons aired on the Disney afternoon, which was right when you’d come home from school. They were on repeat. You’d see these episodes hundreds of times, and so you memorized them.

John: It wasn’t the kind of IP where it was like everyone in the world was like, “Oh my god, we have to make a Rescue Rangers movie.”

Dan: That’s why they came to us.

Doug: Exactly.

John: When did they come to you, Doug, to do this?

Doug: I just did a timeline, just because it’s coming out and I just wanted to look at it. They came to us in I guess maybe the beginning of 2015. They were like, “We’re thinking about doing this.”

John: Who is they that came to you?

Doug: It was Louie Provost over at Disney, who is still there, which is a miracle that we had the same executive, and Mandeville Pictures. We had done some work with both of them. We had had meetings with them. They were like, “We think you guys would be great for this.” Our initial response was, “Why? Maybe not.”

Dan: What you’re saying exactly, which is like, does anyone even know who they are? It’s so niche. Even to me, who was obsessed with it for a little period of time, it was again the fourth-most important out of four cartoons. It’s really not a big deal.

Doug: It was, I think, a big deal in our career too. We weren’t getting a lot of IP brought to us. To Disney’s credit and to Mandeville’s credit, they were very much like, “Come to us with anything, any version of it.” Dan and I started talking about it. We took the essence of the why even do this and put that within the picture of the film.

Dan: The original title of the movie was The Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Reboot That Nobody Asked For.

John: How many years ago was this?

Doug: 2015 was our first pitch.

John: This is way before Disney Plus.

Doug: This was sold as a feature.

John: A Disney feature film.

Doug: Exactly. We were both scratching our heads. We pitched this movie that was a noir and had elements of LA Confidential in it.

Dan: Just to give the premise of it really quickly, it’s basically Chip and Dale are these two chipmunks, who in the early ’90s, this Disney afternoon, they would basically do what’s happening right now, which is they would repurpose old Disney characters, put them in new outfits, new adventures, give them new personalities. This was one of them. Chip and Dale were Donald Duck’s foils in the ’50s, ’60s. They were just nonspeaking chipmunks who ate peanut butter.

Doug: They were background actors or secondary actors. We play them as actors who played these roles.

Dan: They basically get put into… The concept is that they are the actors who played the Rescue Rangers in this early ‘90s sitcom. Now it is 30 years later. They are washed up actors, over the hill. In a Tropic Thunder, Three Amigos kind of storyline, they get embroiled in a real world mystery plot, very reminiscent of a Roger Rabbit kind of world.

John: Great. There’s some animation, but it’s mostly a live action feature.

Dan: It’s live action hybrid. It’s as much as it could be a hybrid as possible, because it’s as if cartoons are real people who live in real Hollywood and the real world, like Roger Rabbit.

John: Roger Rabbit rules.

Dan: Exactly.

John: Fantastic. You have this idea. You’re pitching it to Disney. They’re saying, “Fantastic. That’s great.” The feature version of that is incredibly expensive, the theatrical feature, not only to make it, but also to release it. What happens?

Dan: There are so few slots. We’re writing this, and we’re like, “They’re not going to make this movie.”

John: Yeah, because there’s always going to be a princess movie to make.

Doug: There’s a princess movie, and then there’s the Marvel movies that you have to contend with.

Doug: Star Wars, all of it.

Dan: Again, this is a movie that like, do people really need to see… Are people clamoring to see this, when they have four Thors to make? We’re writing it and we’re really enjoying it, and the response is really positive. That’s not always the case, even when you’re proud of something. Eventually it gets to the place of-

Dan: It just peters out, because they’re trying to figure out how could this be a much bigger four-quadrant movie. We’re like, “That’s just not what this is. It’s a weird offbeat comedy wrapped in a mystery.” Then it just peters out and it just sits dormant.

John: It becomes dormant and eventually gets [crosstalk 00:16:16].

Dan: It gets put on the shelf, but to their credit, which you don’t always get, our producers at Mandeville were big fans. Somewhere they met Akiva Schaffer…

Doug: Akiva Schaffer.

Dan: …who’s wildly funny and a great director…

Doug: From the Lonely Island.

Dan: …from the Lonely Island. They were like, “He might be good for this.” They show him the script. He laughs at the title, The Rescue Rangers Reboot That No One Wants. He reads it and he’s like, “I do like this.” At this point, Disney Plus exists now. The combination of those two things gave it new life. Akiva was like, “I’m interested in this.” Disney was excited about him and the idea that maybe you could make a movie that doesn’t have to be-

John: The pressure’s off of it, because it doesn’t have to open on a weekend and make $8 million.j

Doug: It doesn’t have to be a four-quadrant, like Dan is saying, in the same way.

John: Aline, I want to talk to you about your film, because talk about movies they don’t make anymore or movies that’d be hard to make. What was the origin story for Your Place Or Mine? It feels like the kind of romantic comedy that used to be made theatrically a lot, and now it’s harder to make. How did this movie get set up?

Aline: The origin story was that in 2010 when we were making Morning Glory, I needed a place to stay in New York because my per diem wasn’t really covering all of it. Our friend Ted Griffin had a lovely apartment in New York I knew that he wasn’t using full-time, so I asked him if I could stay there. He was living such a bachelor life at the time, that I really enjoyed being a mom in a bachelor space. I thought it would be funny to do a movie about two friends, where the mom is living in the bachelor’s space, and the bachelor is living in the mom’s space. I had that idea for a long time. A lot of the ideas that I’ve ended up doing, I carried around in my brain for a long time. Crazy Ex was one too. What I do is I cradle these little puppies in my arms, and then I wait for someone that I want to raise the puppy with.

My old friend Michael Costigan partnered with Jason Bateman. They had a deal with Netflix, which I think originated around the Ozark series. I had breakfast with them at John Benny’s. It was similar to when I met Rachel and as I was talking to Rachel I went, “You know what? Crazy Ex, she’s going to dig it.” At this breakfast I said to Jason and Michael… I pitched them the idea. They really loved it. The setting up process was, because they had this relationship with Netflix, we just went to Netflix and told the story to our exec at the time, Sarah Bowen, who’s no longer there. It was really easy and straightforward. I didn’t do what I normally have done with pitches, which is to go everywhere and sit in a million rooms. That was a great relief. The development process, the style of development was very different. I don’t actually know to what… I know that part of that is the culture of these streamers. Part of it is the individuals that I was working with. It was a more straightforward, business-like process in an interesting way.

John: Did you feel like when you made your deal at Netflix that it was a deal to develop a script or basically like, “We’re going to have you write the script and we’re probably going to make it.”

Aline: It did feel more like that. We who have been doing this screenwriting gig for a long time have sold in a number of different configurations. Sometimes you’re pitching stuff and everyone’s going, “I don’t know. We’ll give this a shot. Let’s see what happens.” Sometimes you’re writing in a situation where they have an actor, they’re in a rush. They need to do it. You think it might get made. It’s your football to drop. In this case, there was a feeling that they wanted to do romantic comedies that were with stars, maybe bigger stars on the platform. That was the design of it. I felt like that was something that they had identified a need for. As a writer, that’s always the best situation to be in.

What Dan and Doug are describing is you’re making a dish that wasn’t necessarily ordered, in which case the dish has to be that much better. When you’re making a dish that has been ordered, with Devil Wears Prada, not only had that dish been ordered, but people were banging on the table saying, “Where is it?” There’s a relationship between your product and your project and their appetite, but a really great script can overcome what might be a natural disinclination towards the project, which is what Dan and Doug overcame with the inventiveness of their writing.

John: Dan and Doug, it sounds like, holding this metaphor of the dish no one ordered, it was like, “Oh, this is really, really good. We have nothing we can do with it.” Then the world changed, and suddenly, oh, there’s actually a place that this would be perfect for. It sounds like the kinds of movies that Aline likes to make and this idea that she had… Aline, your movie would’ve been hard to set up at a conventional studio, unless you’d actually already had those big actors attached, correct?

Aline: That’s correct. Even then, because it was a star-dependent movie, we had to then get stars. One of the things about being a writer is it’s a fast-moving river. It’s always been. It is now more than ever. The number of buyers, who’s buying, what they’re looking for, it changes really quickly. It’s also interesting, as I said, for John and I, who came up in a quite calcified system where there were only certain types of jobs. I know that people are bemoaning the lack of predictability and consistency in the marketplace right now, but I think there’s a way to look at that as opportunities. When there is this transitional stuff happening, there are people who need certain kind of content. If you can identify who’s looking for what, then you can figure out who wants to buy your particular brand of pierogis.

Dan: Also, something you were saying about cradling your puppies, even more so, nothing’s ever really dead. That’s the other part that is… It’s heartbreaking when things seem like they go away or they die, but they never really do. They’re always gestating in your mind. They’re gestating in the larger business. There very well might be another time where it just makes sense to come back to life in a totally different iteration or a different concept.

John: We’re going to have a question later on that’s really about that, when do ideas actually just come back, or do you just wait for the right time for that idea to come back. Let’s talk about, in addition to the studio features we’ve made, you’ve also made indie features. I’m thinking about Most Likely To Murder, which to me feels like a movie that if it had come out in a streaming time, probably would’ve gone to streaming and it would have had a better home.

Dan: That was a movie that we… I wish that it got more clear traction. I think if it had been made for a Netflix, it would’ve been something that made a lot of sense. We made it. We did it for Lionsgate, but without a clear plan. They were just launching a thing called Studio L, a wisp in the wind, that no one really has any idea what the hell that is anymore. For a moment they were like, “We’re going to make digital movies.” Also they were trying to make straight-to-video comedies. That was not what we were making. It didn’t even really fit in their business model. We ended up selling it as part of a deal to Hulu, but it didn’t get the launch that I think it would’ve gotten if it was something that-

John: My movie The Nines, we debuted at Sundance, had a big debut there, sold off of that. It went to theatrical, but it was just like it never found that home. Two years later, if it had gone to Sundance, a streamer would’ve bought and it would’ve showed up on a streamer, and I could say, “Oh, it’s on Netflix,” or I could point to where they could see it. People tweet at me now, it’s like, “Where can I see your movie?” You could download it on iTunes. It’s frustrating.

Doug: You can buy it on Amazon, which is sort of something, but it’s not-

Dan: The deal with Hulu just ran out, so we’re [crosstalk 00:24:01].

Aline: Side note is that Doug Mand delivers an incredibly hilarious performance in that movie. If you want to see Doug Mand on screen in a film, he’s really funny.

Dan: With one of the more egregiously terrible facial hair performances in history.

Doug: It’s more my facial hair that’s doing the performance and I’m just along for the ride.

John: Dan, you brought up straight-to-video. I had forgotten that term, weirdly, because it just-

Dan: It doesn’t mean anything anymore.

John: That was the equivalent I think of what we’re talking about with streamers, like different genres there. You could make a movie for theatrical or you could make a movie for straight-to-video. There was a pejorative quality saying something goes straight to video. There were things that that was the right place to put that genre of film.

Dan: There’s something great about, again, the marketplace of content now, where yeah, if you want to make a small movie for a particular audience, then great, that’s fine. That’s part of the market.

John: I want to wrap up this part of the conversation by talking about a thing that is different about the actual features or straight to video is really the back end, because there was a clear model for what the back end was going to be like for movies that were made for the actual release or made for home video, because there were residuals. There was ways that you could make your money out of these things. We can share as much as we want to share about what are deals are looking like for this. Aline, for your movie, I hope it’s a huge, ginormous success. I hope that Netflix takes out those little ads saying how big it is, like how Ryan Reynolds’s movies are so big. That won’t impact your financials very much at all. I see you shaking your head. As you are making your deal going into it, are you trying to account for that? How are you thinking about that?

Aline: They gave me an opportunity to direct a movie with big stars and adequate resources. I think in the long run that will benefit me, if you’re looking at the bottom line, which I don’t tend to do that much, but it will benefit me that way. That’s really how I think about that one. With Cruella, it was an outgrowth of the pandemic that it got released day and date during the pandemic. I ended up getting the best upfront definition, because it was on whatever you call pan-demand, which is our best definition. It was day and date with the release. Obviously, the release was depressed by the pandemic. That ended up having a backend that I just didn’t expect.

I think that that’s going to change and evolve and will probably be driven somewhat by actors, because I think the upfront money might evolve as these companies have more data about what the revenue is actually accruing to them from these packages, because right now it’s guesswork. The actors have been, as with Scarlett and Disney, the actors have been on the forefront of trying to figure out exactly how much money these folks are making and trying to draft off of that. My personal thing didn’t impact me that much, but I can see coming up Prada and 27 Dresses happened to come out in the middle of the DVD boom.

John: Your residuals on those movies but be absurd.

Doug: God bless.

Dan: Oh boy.

Doug: Just make it public, Aline. Let’s open the books up.

Dan: Just write it down and show us.

John: I don’t want to nail you down to a dollar figure, but [crosstalk 00:27:16].

Aline: It’s a lot.

John: Millions of dollars.

Aline: They were right in that zone. Really what money means for a writer is time to do stuff you love. Those were so meaningful to me early in my career in terms of, hey, I’m going to take a break and do Crazy Ex, which was a pay cut for me in certain respects, because I have a pretty steady residual stream. All these new models are going to affect writers in terms of the kinds of choices they can make. I will say that the opportunities that streamers have almost everyone that came up in my generation to do things that they’d always wanted to do, that there wasn’t necessarily outlets to make in either the network television or the traditional studio, which seemed to take turns being the sausage factory. It used to be that TV was grinding out mid-range hot dogs and then it was features that were doing that and then the TV became fancy and now it feels like there’s a little bit of a shift going underway. All of those changes that you have to track as a writer, in my particular case I was balancing the fact that they were giving me a great opportunity with I wouldn’t get the backend.

Dan: Rescue Rangers, we signed the deal as a theatrical and so there was no discussion of it whatsoever. There’s a writing credit.

Doug: The writing credit bonus.

Dan: The writing credit bonus…

Doug: [Inaudible 00:28:42].

Dan: …that we’ll get when this comes out. I don’t know when we’ll actually get it. Even all that stuff, the movie was in this weird little flux where it was all of a sudden going well, and then there was a moment where they were discussing, “Maybe we will switch it to theatrical.” Then COVID happened. Then they were like, “Nobody’s ever going to go to the movies again.” They started just assuming it was going to be Disney Plus again. Then they started signing all of the actors to Disney Plus, to streaming-only contracts. All of a sudden they got to a point where they’re like, “Oh, we’re back in a world where there is theatrical.” Now we couldn’t even switch back to theatrical if they wanted, because they can’t renegotiate the contract now.

John: It’s a weird time.

Aline: I know some people who made movies just pre-streamer to be in either independent films or festival films and then tried desperately to sell them to a streamer, and in certain instances it was too complicated to do that. They had to watch their movies come out and plunge like zeppelins that’d been stabbed with a pencil. I think streamers are really great for getting movies out there that are just not being made in any other way. I guess that’s probably the most banal statement I could possibly make. There’s just such a huge menu, budget range of things that are being made. It’s almost more like silent films, where they were cranking out, we’re going to make a Tom mix, we’re going to make a romance, we’re going to adapt Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we’re going to do a whole mix of things. John and I will tell you, features for a good 8 to 10 years were not that. It was a very, very limited menu and a very limited genre area that we were given to work in.

John: Let’s transition back to TV, because we have some questions from our listeners that you guys are incredibly well suited to answer. Megana, can you help us out with Christopher’s question here.

Megana: Christopher asks, “A recent deadline article on the 2022 pilot season cited networks as increasingly opting for, quote, ‘presentations’ instead of filming pilots. I’m familiar with this practice for unscripted shows, and to a lesser extent, one-hour dramas, but I’ve never encountered it before for sitcoms. I know John has some experience with the mechanics of a presentation from his DC show with the WB, but I can’t find anything about what a presentation would look like for a sitcom, especially a network sitcom which is already only around 22 minutes long.”

John: Doug, can you talk to us about… Didn’t you do a presentation for your show?

Doug: We did not. That show Pretty Smart for Netflix was a pitch. They saw a place for it. It made sense for their schedule.

John: Did you shoot a pilot or you shot series?

Doug: We went right to series.

Aline: Weirdly enough, I’ve done one.

John: Talk about presentation, Aline.

Aline: I did a presentation, I’m going to say 20 years ago, or maybe even more. It’s a fancy word for no money, to make a scratch track. It’s a bummer. It’s really hard.

Dan: It goes right in the trash. That’s the worst part is you make it, and it’s usually under different contracts, or a lot of the time it’s just different crews. It doesn’t even look the way that the show would look. It’s just a proof of concept.

Doug: This is how we got our break really. It’s where I think presentation should be, which is myself, Dan, and Adam Pally, all best friends, still are, and we had an idea for a sitcom, and then we went out with our own money, none of us had representation, and shot a cold open for the show and an opening credit sequence at under a thousand dollars and then sent it to everyone we knew. That was a proof of concept. I think that’s what presentation should be, as opposed to doing 22 minutes. Better to do like, give me that money and let me show you an example of, for a sitcom, what the comedy feels like, what these characters are like.

Dan: Our next one, we paired with a producer who financed a presentation. They financed maybe a 12-minute presentation for a half-hour sitcom. It was one of those things where again it was super useful. We still ended up selling it to the CW. Before, they were looking to only do dramas, but then Crazy Ex broke that cycle. It was super helpful. They’re great. It’s a lot of work and a lot of money.

Doug: You can’t say that this is what 22 minutes is going to look like, because you’re asking me to do it at a third of the cost, maybe even less. I don’t like the idea of them shifting to that, because that’s just saying let’s just squeeze out as much money as we can. I’d rather say give me that budget and let us do six minutes of the show.

John: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, that was famously a presentation where they shot it themselves. It was a proof of concept for, this is the chemistry between these guys, this is the idea, and that could change everything, as opposed to DC, when I taught that presentation, the idea was that it was a cheaper pilot, so basically you had your pilot script and then you would pick certain screens from that pilot script and have only those. We were shooting things that had to fit back into the original pilot. It was the worst of both worlds. The only thing I would say was helpful for that-

Doug: Wait, I’m sorry, so like Scene 1, Scene 5, Scene 12.

John: Yeah.

Dan: They wanted to use it. If they were going to make a show, they were like, we’re not going back and shooting this.

John: There you go.

Doug: That’s even more make-believe, isn’t it?

Dan: That is all the [crosstalk 00:34:02].

Aline: It’s such a vote of semi-confidence too. It’s like you match with someone on Hinge, and instead of going to dinner with them, you’re like, “I’ll meet you for coffee 15 minutes at 9 a.m.” They’re not going into it with… It’s such a meh. It’s so hard to make things even when everyone is so enthusiastic. When we did it, it just also allowed them to change things and give crazy notes. We ended up with an 11-minute presentation that is one of the craziest documents in my career everywhere. It’s somewhere in there, that closet, on a VCR cassette. It was bonkers. It’s in a weird way better to wait until people really care about what you’re doing and can give you a little support. It also strikes me as hilarious. You know how you can never explain to your parents what you do?

Doug: Oh, god.

Aline: Try explaining a pilot presentation to your parents.

Dan: I will say I think for corporations, shifting the development process towards that is stupid and ridiculous and it’s just a weird way to not pay as much money. I will say this forever. If you can get a little bit of your own money together to make your own pilot presentation, I do think a well-made piece of film can go much farther than a script can sometimes for someone on the come-up.

Doug: Especially if you’re not established.

John: [inaudible 00:35:25] Adam Pally on it. That can show his-

Doug: Exactly. We had an unknown Ellie Kemper in that presentation, at the time, she hadn’t booked anything at that point, and a bunch of people who ended up doing great things. This is always the advice we give to up-and-coming writers is to go out, find your community, and shoot things. It’s hard to get people to read your writing if know one knows you.

Aline: Now you can put them on TikTok. TikToks can go up to five minutes now.

John: There you go.

Dan: Basically a feature.

Aline: You can make something great with your friends and put it on TikTok.

John: Megana, what else do you have for us?

Megana: Jeffery asks about writing gender-agnostic characters. He says, “In my work in progress, my two main characters are women, and I want to encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else. When describing what these characters do, I’m toying with the idea of using they pronouns for them. For example, Senator McMartin rushes in late for the news conference. They step to the mic, only to spot their former business partner in the front row. Do you think this would be a good general approach to avoid using a default he/she, or do I risk getting a reader who thinks I don’t know how to write? Would this be worth using a reader’s note before the script begins?”

John: Before we discuss this, I want us each to vote, good idea or bad idea. Dan, good idea, bad idea?

Dan: Bad idea.

John: Doug?

Doug: I lean towards bad idea.

John: Aline?

Aline: I lean towards an explanatory note.

Doug: Didn’t vote, Aline. I would’ve leaned towards that too if I knew that was an option, Aline.

Aline: Really political over here today.

John: I’m going to vote bad idea. I’ll give my context and then everyone can weigh in. I totally respect what Jeffery’s trying to do, but I also think that in 2022 they/them pronouns is for characters who identify as not being on the gender binary. To throw up your hands like, “I don’t care,” is actually worse in some ways. I think as a writer you’re making a choice about who you’re putting in there. You cannot be as specific as you want to be if you’re not actually even deciding with the gender of this character is. That’s my instinct here.

Dan: Thank you for taking the lead on that, John.

Aline: Sorry, the question is how do I leave it open to as many types… You can say Officer Rao, and then in parentheses you can say male, female, or nonbinary, parentheses. Then you can say, “I will be using he,” so that they know that… I’m assuming they’re trying to keep it open, not write a nonbinary character, because obviously those would be different things. If you want to encourage them to keep it open, you can give them a gender-neutral name and then note that it could be played by…

Dan: I also want to know when I’m reading someone, especially I haven’t read before, what they envision the character to be. I think that’s okay to do. Then when casting discussions come around, you can always pull back and go, “You know what? This could actually be XYZ and I didn’t think about that.” I think specificity helps. You’re painting a picture for these people with your words.

Doug: Specificity’s everything. It’s everything.

Dan: It becomes more obtuse and more like, okay. It’s a choose your own adventure of like, oh, this is who I’m going to imagine then.

John: Exactly. It’s hard to put that scene in your head if you don’t know what am I even looking at, who is this person. A line is going to read differently from this character versus that character.

Dan: Completely. It’s a non-decision in your script.

Aline: I disagree. I think there’s a lot of times, especially when you’re writing a smaller part, that you can write parentheses, any gender, or parentheses, any ethnicity, so that you’re leaving it open. We’ve done that. We did that a lot.

John: Certainly for characters that basically have essentially no lines, and they’re purely functional, sure, great. You’re doing that sporadically. As Jeffery’s describing, encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else, you can encourage that when you hand in the script, but you cannot just write that in on the page.

Dan: It’s fine to put a note that says, “Hey, whoever finances and makes this project, please cast openly with gender-neutral casting as much as possible.” It just seems a little cart before the horse. It doesn’t belong in the body of the script in my mind.

John: Also, generally, I think by choosing not to make a choice, if you have a social goal in mind for this, you could make some choices to make some of these roles female that would not always be female, or could be nonbinary that would not otherwise be. Specificity there can actually push your gender forward. Megana, what else do you have for us?

Megana: Great. Margaret asks about page density. She says, “I have a rom-com that is currently 104 dense pages. I snipped and squooshed and killed orphans to get to that svelte size, but now I’m wondering if more white space would make it a more enjoyable read. Do you think slenderness in the hand, measured by number of pages, or ease of quick reading is more important? If the latter, do you have any thoughts about how to put a dense script on a white-space-expanding diet? Where would the extra space be most useful, margins or between lines or everywhere? Nowhere do I have more than four lines of action or description or dialog, but still it looks dense.”

Aline: I’m going to quote Craig Mazin here, which is the return key is your friend. I never do a line of description more than… Rarely more than two, but definitely not more than three.

John: If you read through a bunch of scripts, there’s a wide range of stuff. There’s not one perfect thing to do for this. Judy Kay, don’t change the margins. Don’t try to make your margins bigger. That’s not going to help anybody. Also look at maybe what kind of script are you writing? If you’re writing a script with a lot of dialog, there’s going to be some natural white space there anyway, just because the margins have set in for that. I worry you may be worrying about the wrong things.

Dan: Look, my feeling on page stuff is that it’s purely a psychological tool for the person who’s receiving the script. We’ve all made enough scripts to know that the page count is functionally meaningless. Our shooting script for Rescue Rangers was 175 pages. The actual practical thing, when they re-transcribe the thing you’ve actually put on screen, every little um, eh, huh, it becomes 175 pages, but the movie’s 90 minutes. It doesn’t mean anything, the page count really. It’s just the way that people will receive it in development. Do they feel like it moves? Do they feel like it flows? Does it feel too heavy in their hand? It’s just that dumb stuff. I go home on my weekend read and they have a pile of six screenplays. They’re going to go to the thinnest one first, because they don’t want to take more time.

Aline: It’s a sales document, you’re right. If you open it and you see big, chunky, 10-line paragraphs, you’re like, “No, I’m not in the mood for that.”

John: 100%.

Doug: I don’t want to be prescriptive on it either, but I do think that first page… If I see a first page that is all scene direction, and I like reading… If there’s anything, I’d be like, look at those first couple pages and see what can you thin out to draw the reader in.

Dan: There’s nothing worse than the actions… We’ve done a lot of action movies, a lot of action movie rewrites. When you come in on an action movie where you’re seeing just pages and pages of the action described, you’re telling me the kind of machine gun they’re using, I don’t care. It’s a slog of a read. It’s not particularly interesting. It’s never character-forwarding. That’s probably the biggest thing is that it’s very-

Doug: Character or story.

Dan: Exactly. It just becomes meaningless details. It’s not fun. It’s not a good read.

Aline: I think from a writing standpoint, don’t you guys also think that most of the mistakes people make is too much stuff, not not enough stuff? A lot of times when you’re reading it, it’s like, she’s got a purple T-shirt and a button-down and Levis, and she walks over to the car and she opens it with her right hand. You’re like, which of those things do I care about? Which one of those are you pointing out? You can figure out what color the car is and what shoes they’re wearing later if the important thing is that she’s right-handed because later someone’s going to get stabbed with a left-handed knife or something. That’s what you have to highlight. I think beginning writers often, and I would include myself as a beginning writer for sure, there’s just a tonnage of extraneous detail, because you’re trying to show how beautifully and exquisitely you’ve imagined everything. You can’t do that. It’s like lighting. You’re trying to direct everyone’s attention to exactly where you want it to be.

Dan: You just said it. It’s directing. When you get late in a process and you’re having production meetings and you need to get every single detail in someone’s head, that’s the time to really get granular. Most of that stuff doesn’t need to be in there. You’re just trying to give a vibe a lot of the time.

Doug: You have to ask yourself what matters, I guess. If you’re telling me about the clothing, this is a person who just wears yellow, or you’re telling me what hand they use to open the door, do they have a broken right arm so they have to use their left. I think you have to ask yourself those questions of does this really affect the story, the character. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t need to be there, most likely.

John: Megana, another question for us?

Megana: JJ asks, “On a recent episode, John mentioned how near impossible it is to get a musical going at the moment. I have a musical out to buyers right now, and it’s been a lot of passes so far. The feedback has all been positive. People love the script, but more than a handful of buyers have said they simply can’t get a musical across the line right now. I wrote it in 2019 before the unsuccessful theatrical runs of a few notable musicals changed the landscape. My question is, what do you do when a script that excited agents, producers, and the director at the time it was written is ready to hit the market at a less than friendly time for the genre? Is a second chance possible a few years down the road? Is it dead? I’m very bummed at the moment and not too optimistic about the remaining places we are out to. Has this ever happened to either of you before?”

John: Yeah, this just happened to be. JJ could basically be just me writing. I did take a musical out. We basically went to all the streamers. Going into it, I’d heard musicals are really tough because of Dear Evan Hansen, because of West Side Story not working, but also just a whole slew of things, and so that certain streamers are saying no. They didn’t want to hear a pitch, because they said no. Other places, like, “Oh, we’re excited to hear the pitch.” I go in, it’s like, “It’s just so good. No, we can’t do a musical. I can’t get this approved,” which is heartbreaking but it feels [crosstalk 00:45:40].

Doug: You told me this the other day, and my heart sunk, because I am in the thick of a musical that I sold with Rachel Bloom to Amazon. On the other part of the subject, this is a movie that Rachel and I had developed a handful of years ago, took it out to all the places that do this stuff, all nos. We were like, “All right, it’s dead.” Then several years later, there was an executive shakeup at Amazon. The junior exec who loved it got promoted. His boss left. He had a new boss. He was like, “I have different directives. I’ve been thinking about this movie for years. Are you guys still open to do it with me?” We were like, “Yeah.” It again came back to life in this way that we had totally put it to bed. We’re in the thick of developing a musical for Amazon. I hope that all these things are conditional, because I would like for it to be a real movie.

John: It sounds like your movie’s already a little bit set up at a place. That definitely helps. It’s already in the track. Whether it’ll get that green light is the question.

Doug: Exactly.

John: You also have the track record of you and Rachel working on it. It also reminds me of Rescue Rangers, which is basically like there was a moment in which this was the way, the place that we could make it, and then it just goes away again. With musicals, we are just putting a pin in it. We will revisit after… There’s musicals that are in the pipe right now that could be huge hits.

Aline: It’s original musicals that are the problem, because Mamma Mia, Glee, things that draw on existing songs do way, way better. Having backed ourselves against the wall with this, with Crazy Ex, the thing I will share, when we were testing the Crazy Ex pilot, Rachel starts singing 10 minutes in. When you test TV, you have dials. The episode starts, and people are into it. People always responded extremely well to Rachel. People are enjoying the pilot. You can see the enjoyment line going up, up, up, up, up. There’s a scene she quits her job. Then the second she starts singing, when I’m telling you nosedive, it was as if everyone in the testing had just yanked their dial to zero. I remember turning to Rachel and saying, “That’s a traditional show tune, so maybe that’s why.” Then later in the episode there’s an R and B song with a rap solo in it, which has Rachel in her underwear for most of it. Same thing, they’re loving it, the dial’s really high. The second people start singing, the whole audience cranks it to the left.

If you looked at it, audiences have an innate allergy to songs they haven’t heard before in that format. I’m not sure why that is. It is a humongous overcome. If you’re doing Bohemian Rhapsody or the Elton John movie or Mamma Mia, people get excited when they hear those songs. I wonder if there’s ever a world where you take the Olivia Rodrigo album, and before you even release it as an album, you already have some sort of script ready to go so that once that becomes a hit, you have something that you can put into production with existing songs that are already a hit. It has to be a hit somewhere else in order to live in a comfortable… It’s very, very difficult. While our show had a certain cult status, we were for many, many months the lowest rated show on network television.

Doug: I don’t know if we were going to get to this before. I think it’s all connected in terms of when you let go of a project after you’ve made it and maybe it has been passed on. To talk about Rescue Rangers for a second, something that Dan and I actually haven’t spoken about that much is the idea of open writing assignments and doing free work. We were brought in on a different open writing assignment and asked to do free work, being like, “What’s your take on this property?” We spent a lot of time breaking out a take. We were like, “Why would we do this? This is such a long shot anyway.” We really liked the take. Then they passed on it. Then when Rescue Rangers came around, we were like, “There are some parts of this that are helpful.”

I think that it just goes to show that… There was a feeling of like, all that work was for absolutely nothing. I don’t think that’s ever the case. That’s the bit of silver lining in it. This is not to tell people to go out and do free work ad nauseum. There is an aspect of like, oh, that came back. That’s not done. It doesn’t have to be someone else green-lighting the same, exact thing. There were elements of it that we were like, “Let’s look back at that,” and be like, “There are elements that we can pitch for the Rescue Rangers and create around them.” That was very rewarding, because we’ve done so much. We all have done pitching on things that never went anywhere, never got paid to do. That time spent developing an idea is not a wasted time.

John: I’ll say that this musical that I wasn’t able to get set up, I did have 12 good meetings with places, and I have relationships with those places that I didn’t before. I didn’t get the thing going, but at least I know which of those executives I like. I definitely know which executives I will never, ever, ever work with. There’s a list of two or three people I kept telling my agents, “I will never work with her.”

Doug: Great.

John: That was good too.

Doug: Also, there’ll be a hit musical in five years.

John: Exactly.

Doug: All of a sudden there’ll be a boom for musicals, and then this’ll come back to life.

John: The two things that are in production right now that will come out soon. There’s 13 at Netflix, which could be great, but no one knows the songs. Then Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell have a movie for Apple TV Plus, a Christmas Carol story, which is-

Aline: The two-part Wicked movie.

John: The two-part Wicked movie will also happen. That’s already known properties. On the animation side, I have Toto, which is a musical, but it’s also animation, which has special rules.

Aline: It has special rules. With respect to the projects, you have that, you own that. That’s in your computer and in your brain. My company is called Lean Machine, but I often had this joke that I was going to call it Dead Horse Productions because if I believe in it, I will drag it around indefinitely. A lot of the things that I’ve gotten made are things that I just would not give up on. Crazy Ex was one of those. Every single television network that you’ve ever heard of has passed on it multiple times. I am a big believer, it’s a good idea… John, you’ll be sitting at [inaudible 00:52:10] with someone and they’ll say, “I’m looking for this.” You’ll say, “That’s funny, because I happen to have one of those.”

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a television show which I loved when it came out. My daughter had never seen it. We watched the pilot to Lost this past week.

Doug: Oh my god, [crosstalk 00:52:27]. We got to talk about this.

Dan: We were just talking about it.

Doug: I actually have this debate constantly. I’m sorry to interrupt your One Cool Thing.

John: I believe the pilot to Lost holds up remarkably well, incredibly well. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to the pilot script for it, which I never actually read. It’s very, very dense on the page. It’s not what I would normally like to read. It’s so good. It includes a bunch of scenes that are dropped out of the show. As I was watching it, I was just noting the act breaks in it and how long before we get to that first act being done. It’s just a genius thing. I feel like in many ways, the same… Aliens was the script that I always kept going back to to look at how you write action. I feel like people should need to look at the Lost pilot script again just in terms of how you do that show, because I’ve seen so many versions of that show that are trying to be the Lost pilot. The Lost pilot is just so much better, so smartly done.

Dan: The Lost pilot is spectacular. There’s so many episodes of that show that are spectacular. Can you divorce the ending from any other part of it? This is my fear and feeling, that the ending abandons so many of the things that were needed and asked of the audience that I don’t think it’s a fair ask to start it.

John: To start watching Lost?

Dan: I don’t think it’s appropriate.

John: Oh my gosh. I think Lost is an absolute delight. I encourage people to watch Lost. You cannot watch Lost without watching the Lost pilot. Really, what I’m encouraging everyone to do is just watch the Lost pilot. It’s on Hulu right now.

Dan: It’s a great pilot. It’s going nowhere, guys.

Doug: It goes somewhere for a very long time.

Dan: It leads to nothing.

Doug: I don’t completely agree with that.

Dan: It’s a winding road down into a dirt pit.

Doug: You might be sending your daughter down a path that will be ultimately depressing and unsatisfying, but that journey is fantastic.

John: I had David Lindelof on the show. One of the things he says is the the experience of people who watch Lost all at once is so different than the experience that we had watching it week after week. Things like when there’s two characters who get trapped in a jail thing for six weeks or something, six episodes I think, it’s excruciating, but the people who watched those episodes all together, it was like, oh, that actually tracks and makes a lot of sense. I do feel like a person who’s watching Lost now is getting a very different experience than we did having it strung out over the course of-

Dan: Also, they have access to all the spoilers immediately. Maybe that’s to the benefit, where the what’s in the box question isn’t as loaded, because they know where this is going. They’re signing up for it.

John: The single best cold open ever on an episode was when you get inside the hatch for the first time.

Dan: Oh my god, I think about that all the time. It’s seared into my brain. I’m like, “We’re going in. We’re going in.”

Doug: I sing that song to myself all the time.

Dan: Exactly. Again, I was just so obsessed with that show, to the point where it was actually one of the things that I started really connecting with my wife about when we started dating. We went to a Lost exhibit, where they showed us all of the props from the show. I was so deeply, deeply in love. We were getting into all the weird Fibonacci math equation mysteries. Megana remembers that.

Doug: You guys were made for each other.

Dan: There’s a personal aspect to this.

John: Doug, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Doug: Yeah, I actually do. It is music-related. It is an app that’s been around I think for a while, but no one ever seems to know it when I talk about it. It’s called Radioooo with four O’s. It’s world music that is really fun. The music is curated by country and decade. You just go on and you can either let them pick randomly for you… This morning, I was driving my daughter to school. We were listening to music from Angola in the 1980s, and she loved it. You’re discovering things that you’re not getting on your Discover Weekly. It goes all the way from 1900 to 2020. It covers almost every single country in the world. It’s really, really great.

Dan: That’s awesome.

John: Dan, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Dan: Aline knows that the pandemic, I became a real sauce boy. I love condiments.

Doug: I think he was always a sauce boy.

Aline: Gregor and I were threatening during the pandemic to start an Instagram account called Condimentally Yours.

Doug: We were like, “Wait, is this a full TV show?”

Dan: Condiments, spices, sauces are really my obsession right now. My favorite one-stop shop for Middle Eastern spices, because that’s my favorite cuisine, is New York Shuk.

John: It’s an online store or LA?

Dan: I think it has a brick and mortar in New York, but it’s an online store. It goes all over the world. It’s beautiful packaging, great website. You get your preserved lemons there, your harissa, get your hawaij, get your za’atar. Get all the stuff, baharat, a lot of really important things.

Doug: All things you didn’t know you needed.

Dan: Exactly. A lot of important secondary stuff.

Aline: Gregor and I are both children of sabras, so we have that Middle Eastern stuff in common.

Dan: Exactly. You can even get a harissa spice and just put harissa spice in stuff without the sauce.

John: Harissa’s great.

Dan: Harissa’s great.

John: That’s great.

Dan: I highly recommend you go to New York Shuk, S-H-U-K, and buy their stuff. I’m not being paid.

Doug: You should be.

Dan: I love them.

John: Aline, you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Aline: I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is Megana, because I’ve been listening to… I listened to the 20 questions episodes. I find that I have a little leap of joy in my heart when I know Megana’s going to be on an episode, because I really enjoy hearing from younger writers, and especially younger women. I think there is lots to learn from writers that are older, but I honestly learn so much from not just writers but executives, the people at my company who are younger. I love to hear about what they’re experiencing and what the market looks like for them and how they’re breaking in. I love Megana and Craig. That’s one of my favorite duos. Then Megana and John have their own special magic. I really enjoy it when I have that little leap that you have when you are watching an episode of your favorite TV show and you see that Reese Witherspoon is guest starring on Friends or something. I think Megana is a rather modest person, but she’s actually, I think, inviting a lot of people into Scriptnotes. She works her butt off. Megana, you are my One Cool Thing.

Doug: Wow. What a voice too.

Megana: Oh my gosh. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to go lie down. I don’t know how to process how happy I am. That’s so nice. Thank you.

Doug: No, we need you. That’s the whole point. We need your voice.

Megana: Thank you so much. That’s so kind, Aline.

Aline: I love it. I wish there had been someone like that when I was a young writer. I wish there had been someone that I could listen to who was also trying to figure out how to put all these pieces together. You’re trying to figure out an entire industry and your own voice at the same time. I was cleaning out some cabinets. I came across a file that I had of original ideas that I was going to pitch. Oh my god. It was so scattershot. I was trying to work in every genre and tone imaginable. They’re insane. I love that period of your life when you’re trying to synthesize all these things. I have kids who are on their way to being grown. My son is graduating from college. I think embracing that time in your life when you’re on the on-ramp… I really love to hear from people like that. It’s been a nice addition to Scriptnotes and the Gen X codgers that we are.

John: That was our show for this week. We are still trying to sort out our schedule. Next week is likely to be a best of episode as we get back onto our normal Tuesday schedule. Scriptnotes is always produced by our amazing Megana Rao, our One Cool Thing Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Pedro Aguilera. 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 as long as I stay on Twitter. Dan, Doug, are you guys on Twitter?

Dan: Yeah, @gregorcorp, C-O-R-P.

Doug: I’m @thedougmand, M-A-N-D.

John: @thedougmand. Aline, you’re using Twitter right now?

Aline: I’m @alinebmckenna.

John: Fantastic.

Aline: You’ll find important things like what is the best Kansas song. I’ve got important things on my Twitter. I really do.

John: Stuff you’d need to know. We have T-shirts and 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 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 ones we’re about to record on having a newborn in the house. Aline, Doug, Dan, thank you so much for coming on.

Dan: Thank you.

Doug: Thank you. This was great.

Aline: Woot woot.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Doug and Dan, you have very young kids. Dan, I know your baby was born at the very start of the pandemic.

Dan: Yeah, March 20th.

John: Wow, that’s just right in the heart of it.

Dan: Right at the start.

John: Doug, one kid, two kids? Where are you?

Doug: One child, born end of 2017.

John: A little more experience then on this. You had to be doing a lot of writing work while this new life was living in your house. I want to talk a little bit about becoming a new parent and trying to maintain your career and trying to maintain your life, because I remember when I had our daughter, that first month was just so, so, so bleak. Then the moments where I would try to sneak away and actually write, I felt guilty for abandoning my other half and my child. What are some strategies that, Dan, you’re implementing right now with your kid?

Dan: Honestly, this is a very ritzy strategy, but I have an office in my house. I had the place I would go and work. At a certain point, my daughter turned a cognition corner and no longer lost track of me when I closed a door.

John: Object permanence happened.

Dan: Exactly. She would just bang on the door, just completely just bang until I’d come back out. Working at home became actually impossible. Me and my wife rented a little studio apartment down the street. We’d just walk down the street to go write in this little studio apartment.

John: You throw some goldfish on the floor for your daughter.

Dan: Exactly.

Doug: A big jug of water.

Dan: We put her in a bubble and just let her roll around the house with some water and goldfish. Just a little bit of private space has been by far the thing that has enabled it. I know that’s not necessarily available to everyone. That’s my first advice. Doug, do you have any particulars?

Doug: I do think a room of one’s own is really important to get out. Right before the pandemic, a year before… I have an office as well. My wife is a writer. I would go to a workspace. I loved it. I just loved writing from there. Then coming back home, it was really hard when the pandemic hit, because the guilt is what I felt. I have a garage where I can work out of. The bathroom was inside. I would go in. I’d be like, “No, dad’s not home right now. I’m just here.” There was a guilt. It’s like, you’re home, why aren’t you with your daughter? These are amazing, precious moments. I think if you can create a space, even if that’s, now that the pandemic is not as intense… It’s still quite real. Go somewhere to work. I think that’s helpful.

Also, just be vigilant with your scheduling, just being like, “This is the time that I write.” I think we all waste probably a lot of time not writing when we say we’re writing. If you have an hour, write for an hour. You’ll probably find that you’re getting more done in that time. Don’t beat yourself up for that. Then when you’re with your child, I would say whenever you can not bring your phone in, that’s been a big thing. Your child can sense when you’re not there emotionally. You’re looking at your phone. I try to give my daughter at least 20, 25 minutes where my phone is in another room and I’m just there with her. That makes me feel like not such an absentee father.

John: We’re recording this in the space over my garage. It was an absolute godsend when we had a kid. We would just make a show like, “Papa’s going off to work, bye.” I would walk up the stairs.

Doug: Close the window blinds so she can’t see you.

John: My former assistant, Stuart, was working downstairs. At a certain point she became mobile, and she would come in and talk to Stuart, but she had no idea that I worked upstairs.

Doug: Oh my gosh.

Dan: Oh my gosh.

John: I’d just be very, very quiet. Then eventually she started to wonder, “Why is Papa’s car still here?” It was like, “Oh, he must’ve walked to work.” Not technically a lie. I did walk to work.

Doug: Yes, you did.

John: Eventually, when it became clear, like, “Does Papa work upstairs?” we had a conversation about, “This is workspace. This is home space. You’re basically not allowed up there.”

Dan: The sneaking around my child is the most ludicrous thing. If I have to stop back in during the middle of the day, I will use the backdoor, I will tiptoe. I will pray to God that I am getting out of her line of vision so that she doesn’t see me, because if she sees me in the middle of the day then it’s like, I got put in a half hour.

Doug: At what age did you tell your daughter? Was there any-

John: Blow-back?

Doug: “That’s what’s been going on this whole time.”

John: She was either four or five before she really understood that-

Doug: She still doesn’t know [crosstalk 01:06:14].

John: Then at a certain point, they stop caring completely. Aline, we should talk about… We have older kids now.

Aline: I’m on the other end of it, because my kids are 19 and 22. In case anybody is feeling really guilty about it, I left… A friend of mine gave me an office in his office when my Charlie, my older son, was 18 months old. I always had an office outside the house after that. I have neurotically asked my children many, many times if they felt deprived by having a parent, specifically a mother who was working. They insist that it was fine and they actually liked it. That’s either what they’re saying to me so that I can continue paying their rent or they actually believe that. If you’re used to writing and you’re used to expressing yourself and that makes you happy, in whatever way writing can make you happy, but if that is a form of self-care, just remember that a happy, fulfilled parent is a wonderful thing. Specifically, I hope that moms don’t beat themselves up about finding a workspace for themselves.

Doug: It’s a great thing for your child to see.

Aline: Yeah, is that you’re being productive.

Doug: Yeah, this is Mom working, this is Dad working. It’s also part of life.

Aline: Definitely. One of the things that August and I have in common is a deep love of babies. Man, I love a baby.

John: Oh god, I love babies so much.

Aline: I spend so much time trying to spend time with Gregor and Rachel’s baby, especially during the pandemic, I was getting tested as much as I could so I could go and see her and see them. One time Dan said to Rachel, “Aline does know that this is just a baby, right, and it’s not her baby?”

Dan: I just want to make sure you know.

John: [crosstalk 01:07:55] those contracts like all output isn’t shared.

Dan: Exactly.

John: You’re writing partners.

Dan: Exactly.

Aline: Man, I loved it. It’s nice also, you get to work and you get to go home and have this most magnificent thing to interact with that takes your mind off of work and who doesn’t care that you got notes about you need to dig deeper.

Dan: Doug said this, but a writing day for me, my writing process truly was like, ease in around 11, and then do nothing for 6 hours. Then in my mind I was like, I’m only good at writing for a really intense burst from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. That’s how I lived my whole life. I was like, “I’m a late-night writer.” Boy, that went out the window with a kid. To Doug’s point, it’s just like, no, I’m clocking in. It just got me much better at the idea of clocking in, clocking out. These are my work hours, and I need to be able to make this a functional day job in a very real sense, where it’s like I need to be home by 5:30 to start doing bedtime kid stuff.

Aline: That’s why we did the Crazy Ex room the way we did. We had so many parents. My kids were 10-ish and 13-ish. I’d just want to get out of there. We had a lot of parents in that room. As the show went on, we had more and more. I had learned from my kids being little, yeah, you become much more efficient, and you want to get the eff out of there. We also didn’t do a lot of post-room lingering. It does make you more focused and efficient.

Doug: I would also say, if you don’t have the means, also I really like writing in a library. I had been doing that a lot. There’s something about being around other people working. If it’s not a workspace, there are wonderful libraries in most cities and towns. You really feel like you’re clocking in. I like that feeling of… It’s work that I enjoy. In there you’re really like, “I don’t want to be here all day. I’m going to do an hour and a half, two hours.”

Dan: I don’t want to go the bathroom.

Doug: Yeah, don’t want to go the bathroom and I don’t want to look at… Looking at websites and browsing the internet in the library is a very just gross feeling. You’re just like, “Just let’s write. Let’s just do it.” That’s a resource that a lot of people don’t use.

John: One challenge with being gone for most of the day and coming back at 5, 5:30, that’s often the absolute worst time of day for a kid. That’s often the time when they’re most upset. I think sometimes a vicious cycle happens where you feel bad for being gone all day, but your kid feels bad because it’s 5:30 and they’re hitting unhappy hour, and so you’re the bad parent who’s returned. You may need to adjust your schedules a little bit just so you can get a little bit more happy time with your kid too.

Dan: I haven’t had that yet. Thankfully, she’s still pretty decent at that hour. I’m sure it’ll get worse.

John: It’ll get worse. Thank you guys so much again for this conversation about parenthood.

Doug: Thank you.

Dan: Thank you. Thanks, Aline.

Aline: Thanks, Scriptnotes peeps.

Links:

• Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers May 20th on Disney+
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• Dan Gregor on Twitter
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• Outro by Pedro Aguilera (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20-questions-with-craig).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 544 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Last week, Megana and I answered 20 listener questions without Craig. This week he’s doing the same without me, because I am not here. This introduction is prerecorded and the show is completely in the hands of Craig and producer Megana Rao, so God help us all. I now turn over hosting duties to them.

**Craig:** Hosting duties belong to us. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will finally have a chance to discuss millennial stuff. Megana, welcome to our show.

**Megana Rao:** Thank you, Craig. Thank you for having me.

**Craig:** We both feel a little bit naughty right now. I think that would be fair to say, right?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You mentioned that we felt a little bit like perhaps when the teacher leaves the classroom and we’re put in charge of the class but we’re not really in charge of the class, or like if our dad owned a store and he left and we had to work the cash register.

**Megana:** It’s like, what amount of freedom do I have but I still care about the store?

**Craig:** Because you’re the good kid, and I’m the kid that clearly doesn’t care. If something goes wrong, ultimately you’ll be held responsible, not only by our parent, but by your own overactive conscience. You also love me, so you’re really torn here. You’re in a tough spot. All we can do is talk about keyboards. Logitech K860 does have Bluetooth, Megana. Are you aware of this?

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’re getting into follow-up here. This is what John would normally structure for us. I’m going to read this. Joseph wrote in regarding the keyboard discussion. He went through the same journey that I did, from Microsoft Sculpt to Logitech K860. He knows that he’s never been tempted by John’s crazy, inverted thing, and neither has anyone else.

**Megana:** Have you ever tried using it?

**Craig:** Yeah, I did. I think at his house I sat down and did it for a minute and went, “Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.”

**Megana:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Joseph was saying while the Logitech does work with Logitech dongles, it also works with regular Bluetooth. What? What? I’m going to have to try that shortly. That’s exciting. I’m into that. Oh my god. Then apparently you and John took a typing test.

**Megana:** In Episode 543 that John and I recorded, we followed up on the touch typing conversation you guys had, because I was feeling very insecure that I didn’t know what touch typing was, and that maybe I didn’t know how to type properly, but turns out I do.

**Craig:** Oh, Megana.

**Megana:** I took a typing test.

**Craig:** This is so good.

**Megana:** I got 81 words per minute and 100% accuracy.

**Craig:** I think anyone over 70 I think is starting to get into really good territory. Once you hit 100, you’re getting into zip zip, and then anything over that, you’re talking about professional stenographers and so forth. 81 words a minute is terrific. It’s terrific.

**Megana:** Thank you. Thank you. John got a 62 on his stand-up keyboard.

**Craig:** Which means probably on a regular keyboard he would be 4,000 words a minute.

**Megana:** Exactly, in the hundreds for sure.

**Craig:** It sounds like I’m going to have to take this one. Once we finish recording here, I’ll sit down and bang this out and report back dutifully.

**Megana:** Perfect.

**Craig:** How I do. Megana, for the love of God, just honestly. Apparently, there’s a bonus question here.

**Megana:** Yes. Today we’re going to get into 20 questions that listeners have wrote in for you.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Oh, my.

**Megana:** There was one question that came in through Twitter that asked, “Did Megana take Craig’s advice to watch Barton Fink?” As follow-up, we’re going to answer that here. I have watched Barton Fink now. I really enjoyed it. I understand why you recommended it to me.

**Craig:** I’m glad that you liked it. Obviously, a lot of Barton Fink is somewhat obtuse by design, but it’s an incredible view of the screenwriter, both as victim and also as wretch. Dig in a little bit. Tell me what struck you about it. I’m curious.

**Megana:** First of all, absolutely unexpected turn of events in it. Brilliantly executed and very satisfying by the end. As I was watching it, I was like, “Where could this possibly go?” I’m not sure that I had any of my questions really answered, but I felt very pleased by the end.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Megana:** Barton Fink as a character was so painful to watch, perhaps because of some self-loathing, him talking over John Goodman’s character about how much he wants to be the voice of the common man and never lets him speak.

**Craig:** The common man. “You don’t listen!”

**Megana:** When he’s talking about how much he envies John Goodman because he leads the life of the mind, oh god, it was –

**Craig:** “I’ll show you the life of the mind.” One of the things about Barton Fink that I love so much is that in addition to the kind of baked-in inauthenticity of the writer, I guess the Coen brothers turning the lens back on themselves in a fascinating way. It also is a pretty disturbing examination of writer’s block and the weird, creepy decay that can happen in your own brain where things are just melting inside your mind. The entire hotel that they’re staying in begins to melt.

**Megana:** The wallpaper.

**Craig:** The wallpaper. The paste that comes out the wallpaper is the same as this infectious ooze coming out of Madman Mundt’s ear. It’s all this creepy connection. I have all these deep theories about Barton Fink and what I think about it.

I was lucky enough to work on a movie that John Goodman was in. He is lovely, such a sweet guy, very quiet. I wouldn’t say shy. Maybe a little bit. A little bit shy in his own way. I walked over to him at one point when he was alone, and I said, “This is a wonderful moment for me because I’m such a fan and also I get to ask you about Barton Fink, because I have all these theories. I would just be fascinated to know what you thought.” He said, “I have no idea what it means.” He said, “Those guys are geniuses. My job, as far as I could tell, was to make sure that I knew my lines on the day. On the day, I really worked hard to make sure I knew my lines and was able to say them the way they wrote them. I have no idea what it means.” I was like, “That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” In my life. We did talk about the scene where he’s running down the hallway and how they did the fire, so it was fun. Anyway, point is, John Goodman doesn’t know what it means, so I think you’re allowed to think it means whatever you want it to be. I’m glad you liked it, at the very least.

**Megana:** I did like it. I love the Hollywood of it. I love the head of the studio. It was so fun. It’s like, yes, I know that Michael Lerner’s character flipped so quickly, but what a joy to be on that ride while you are.

**Craig:** I’ve been there. As awful as they were and continue to be, there’s something of the Weinsteins in there. When they wanted to charm you, boy did they go all the way. Everybody comes here and imagines a moment where somebody who runs a studio, who’s famous and powerful, tells you to your face that you’re a genius. When it happens, it flips switches in you you didn’t realize you had. Then later, boy when you fall down or when they throw you down, boy does it hurt. When I watch that, I’m like, oh man, I know exactly how that feels. I’ve been in that meeting. I’ve been in both of those meetings. The berating of the underling is something incredibly familiar to me as well.

**Megana:** Oof, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, oof.

**Megana:** We need an episode that’s a guide of how to deal with that narcissistic charm, because it is…

**Craig:** Oh boy. Yeah. We do. There’ll be a lot of therapy in that episode. A lot, because ultimately, you can’t do anything about them. You can’t. All you can do is identify the breaks in your own system that they are sneaking through.

**Megana:** Correct.

**Craig:** In this way, they illuminate for you. They give you a little bit of a gift. They shine a light on things that need to be fixed. You just need to know when it’s happening.

**Megana:** It’s like a pressure test of…

**Craig:** It’s a pressure test, because they are there to find their way in through the breaks and gaps and lean on the parts of you that hate yourself and need approval. They find them. They’re so good at finding them. You don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. Each time it happens you get a little bit smarter, you get a little bit better.

**Megana:** Are you ready to get into the 20 questions?

**Craig:** Yeah. The deal is I got to answer all 20 of these, right?

**Megana:** Oh gosh, I haven’t thought of what the alternative would be.

**Craig:** I’m going to do it. You know what? I’m going to do it.

**Megana:** You’re going to do it.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. We’re going to do it.

**Megana:** Our first question came from Julien, who asked, “My script’s been professionally read a couple of times and is heavily based on true events. However, the notes say I should weave real moments throughout the script, which I already did, a lot. How do I notate reality? Is it kosher to have an explanation page at the end, or footnotes?”

**Craig:** What Julien’s saying is that people don’t seem to be recognizing the real moments throughout his script, which I think is not going to be helped by an explanation page or perhaps Julien saying, “No, but I did.” The whole thing with notes is they’re just being the audience. If people in the audience don’t get that you are being real, it doesn’t matter if you’re being real. You actually have to be aware how that’s coming across.

What I would say probably is, “Okay, thank you for that note. Here are a number of real moments. Did they feel real? Did you think they weren’t real? That’s something that we can address or talk about, where are we losing a sense of authenticity.” It could be possible that they just don’t know at all. If you put it in the form of a question, you’ll be better off. If you say, “Dear idiots, here are 12 places I put true events,” you’re probably not going to last. If you say, “Okay, that’s really valuable. Here are 12 places where there were real events, but it seems like it’s not coming across as real events, so let’s have that discussion and figure out maybe how we could do better at that together,” because they may go, “Oh, good lord, we didn’t know. Okay, thank you.”

I’m not sure what the story is. Sometimes when real stories have very wild elements, you have to be aware of that and figure out how to ground them so that people actually believe it could possibly be true. Sounds like you just need to have another conversation with people. When it’s been professionally read, I’m just wondering who are these professionals, what does that mean, and can you get some follow-up from them.

**Megana:** With Chernobyl, you had a podcast where you did notate reality. You were talking about the events that were real. Most of them were the decisions that you made behind that. I guess I’m curious, is that something that you wanted to do so that people would buy into the show more?

**Craig:** No, the opposite. I wanted to make sure people knew what we had made up. I remember having this discussion with HBO, because at first they were like, “A podcast? Why? What are you talking about?” They thought I meant a marketing thing. I was like, “This has nothing to do with marketing,” because of course nobody was going to watch Chernobyl or listen to the podcast. I really was like, “This is just because we live in a time when everyone scrutinizes everything. I know they’re going to be scrutinizing this show. If we put stuff out there and don’t acknowledge that we’ve made certain changes to history, people are going to point their fingers back at us and say, ‘You guys made a show about lies and you lied,'” which would be true. If you can be transparent about where you had to dramatize or adjust to fit years of reality into five hours, then it’s much harder for people to point fingers at you, which is why I insisted that each episode of the podcast appear literally 12 seconds after each episode initially aired, so there was no gap. It was like, there you go, no waiting.

There were a lot of moments when I was writing Chernobyl where I was concerned that people just would think, “That’s not real. You just made that up,” because people made crazy decisions that were hard to understand. It was important to me that I present them in a way where the audience could at least say, “Okay, I kind of understand.”

There’s a moment in the first episode where Dyatlov is thinking, and then he’s just like, “The tank. That tank. It’s big enough to have caused this explosion,” because he’s come up with a theory of why it exploded. It felt like I needed a moment where I saw him convincing himself, because otherwise I would be wondering, why would a person just leap to that conclusion and then never question it in any way. There’s moments like that to just help people understand the reality of the human foibles behind the bad decisions.

**Megana:** That’s so interesting. I’m watching The Dropout that’s about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I find myself asking, because there’s a lot of really specific beautiful details that are in there, and I’m constantly asking was that real, where did that come from. I just don’t know if that’s a helpful question for me to be asking as an audience member.

**Craig:** Probably not. I think if you’re watching a documentary, it’s always a good thing to ask, what is the perspective involved here, is there an agenda, because editing is a wonderful, powerful thing. Documentaries are questionable, should be questioned, should be interrogated and held to task if they distort. Drama is drama. The point of drama, even when it’s based on reality, is not to journal, but rather to instruct in some manner of humanity. Dramatic instruction. What are we going to learn from the character? What are we going to learn about human behavior and nature? It is not there to be a full book report on a nonfiction event. Some events I think it’s best to be as accurate as you can be. I tried to be with Chernobyl, because I thought actually the beauty was in the specifics, and in a way in the journalism of it.

There’s been a terrific documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, so probably not much of a need to be perfectly documentarian again with the drama. Can you do the voice, by the way? Can you do the voice? Can you do it?

**Megana:** We’re hoping to change the world.

**Craig:** That’s great. That was great. Wow. Someone said once that–

**Megana:** There you go, that’s it.

**Craig:** That Elizabeth Holmes’s voice was just the voice that women do when they’re doing an impression of a dumb man.

**Megana:** You know what? That does feel right, because as I accessed it, I was like, this feels familiar, this feels like a pathway that I’ve used before.

**Craig:** Maybe it was Aline who said that. I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it was Aline. I just thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Anyway, great job. That character should come back, like Sexy Craig, every now and again. Theranos Megana.

**Megana:** That’s really helpful advice just for writers, dramatizing real events, that you’re not writing a documentary.

**Craig:** You’re not doing a book report. You get to decide how close or how far you want to be.

**Megana:** Next question. Andreas writes, “I wanted to ask how you approach writing jobs where you’re brought in quite late and asked to make the dialog funnier, touch up specific storylines, scenes, characters, or make cultural references more specific, etc. How do you curb your writerly instincts that you yourself would tell the story in an entirely different way and just focus on the job at hand? How much feedback on the overall story is expected of you?”

**Craig:** That’s a great question. So far I have not been called in for cultural references, weirdly. They made a whole movie about Staten Island, never called me. I was shocked. I do get called in from time to time, quite late, later than you would ever imagine, to make dialog funnier or touch up specific storylines, scenes, or characters. Yes, this happens all the time. It takes a certain kind of writer to do it. Not everybody can do that, because you are in a very different mode. You’re in a problem solving mode.

You need to understand production. I think that’s really important, because that’s what you’re writing for at that point, production, almost always. That means you need to understand scheduling, you need to understand who the actors are. Oftentimes you’re being put on the phone with them, because they’re upset about things. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat and been a therapist for famous people because they’re unhappy with the script. Partly, I have to just listen and hear what they need and then come back to everybody else and say, “Look, whether you agree or not, this is what they need. They can’t do it unless they get what they need. I’m going to give them what they need, but I now have to do it in a way that also gives you what you need,” because what they need is more action, or this scene needs to be better.

Sometimes what I suggest is that they have put their fingers on the exact right problem, all of their solutions are wrong. We should not do any of those things. I’m not going to do the seven things you asked me to do. I’m going to do these four things I think you ought to do instead. Oftentimes, and I’m not patting myself on the back as much as just pointing out that I have a job to do and they have their job to do, I’m right, because that’s my job. That’s what I do. Their job is different. In a good way, they’re trying. They’re trying to say, look, we know what a problem is and we have a suggestion of how to fix it, but they are not going to think of the things outside the box. Sometimes, you have to just go outside of what exists and say what we need is actually an entirely different scene in a different spot that is going to solve these 12 problems in one fell swoop.

You have to be a problem solver. You need a lot of experience. It takes time. Nobody who is a fairly new writer to business is going to be pulled in for stuff like that or relied on in that kind of way because they just haven’t done it enough. It’s very specific work. Very specific work.

**Megana:** Getting back to our screenwriting RPG framework, that seems like a very specific instance where you need a lot of wisdom and confidence.

**Craig:** Yeah, you need a tremendous amount of wisdom there, because there’s no way to survive that whole thing. Everyone is upset. When you walk into those situations, there’s tension. Everyone’s scared. They’re scared not only because they’re in a scary situation. They’re also scared of you, because they don’t know what you’re going to do. Everyone is quietly lobbying you to not mess everything up, meaning we’re going to call you in here and we’re going to tell you that we have some problems. Please do not tell us that we have 29 problems. Please do not tell us that we actually have six other problems that we don’t think are problems. Please don’t make our director leave. Please don’t make our actors angry. Please don’t make us upset.

You just have to listen really carefully and then understand that what everyone wants, what they’re dreaming of is that you’re going to sit down and go, “I have the solution. The solution will not upturn the apple card. It’s going to answer everyone’s questions. It’s not going to upset anyone. It’s not going to set you back in a huge way. We’re not going to tear all the stuff down. we’re just going to do this fairly easy series of things, and it will be much, much better.” That’s what they want and that’s in fact exactly what you have to deliver. It has to be effective. Not easy, but they do pay you a lot, so there’s that. Best money in Hollywood. Weekly production rewrites.

**Megana:** Speaking of money, I think this is going to be a question you’ll like, Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School wrote in and said, “I’m 23 and wrote my first screenplay in 2020 and got good scores on the Blacklist and met a director hoping to make it. He’s been taking the script around trying to get us a deal. He’s had it read by Paramount, HBO, etc. The most exciting news he told me was that Paramount liked it so much that they recommended it to their team.

“With my very first script already having made it as far as it has, it’s given me a lot more confidence in my ability to turn this passion into something real. Now, the problem is, I haven’t written a second script. I have the idea. I’ve slowly been mapping it out, but working part-time and going to school full-time has left me with virtually zero space to fit in my just-for-fun hobby. Obviously, I can’t quit working, but at this point it’s starting to feel like school not only isn’t benefiting me anymore, but that it’s actually holding me back from jump-starting my career. On the other hand, I’m four years into it, and I would only have about two terms left to finish my degree. It feels like either option I choose results in a waste of my time, either finish the degree and waste the next year of my life getting something that I don’t think will help me instead of actually writing, or I drop out and have the last four years of my effort and money be for nothing.”

**Craig:** Sunken costs fallacy here, writ large. It comes down to this. We struggle with the notion that we’ve wasted time and money. We struggle with it so much that we insist on finishing something that is a waste of time and money, which means spending some more time and money. What will that degree get you? I don’t know. As far as I can tell, nothing. We were on set just yesterday and I turned to Bo and I said, “Did you learn any of this at NYU, any of this?” She said no in such a hard way. It was the hardest no I’ve ever heard.

**Megana:** I don’t know that Bo has any soft no’s though.

**Craig:** This was one of the harder… It was like a no and not even close. It was sort of like she went to school and she was supposed to study how to make television and movies, and then when she arrived in Hollywood and saw how we made television and movies, it seemed like what she had really been studying was veterinary medicine and they just called it television and film studies because it had nothing to do with what we do. Nothing.

If Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School is 23, he’s already young, he’s getting some interest, he’s just starting. 23 is a fantastic age to be starting, because you have lots of energy. You have lots of enthusiasm. Everything is still exciting. You have lots of scripts ahead of you. You don’t theoretically have a family. As John and I pointed out, children are not zapping your life away. You can really make inroads.

As he points out, he’s just languishing in this school to get a piece of paper that no one will ever ask for. Ever. The only paper anyone’s ever going to ask to see is a script, if that’s what he wants to do. Furthermore, the degree will not get him anything anywhere else. In fact, all it’ll get him, and I think this is something else Bo and I were talking about, is that he will qualify to teach at film schools. That’s what those degrees give you, as far as I can tell.

He can finish it another time. It’s not like they go, “All that time is gone.” You can always come back and finish, I think. Take a year off. Take two years off. You don’t have to decide right now whether or not you’re going to flush the prior four years. Take a couple years off. Work on your career. If it happens, don’t go back. If it doesn’t happen, and you want to go back and complete it to get the paper and do something else, do it. Seems to me like you don’t have to make this choice right now. You can punt. I would punt. I would take the two years. I would take some time off, write some scripts, get some work, and see how this actually functions instead of whatever film school is teaching you.

**Megana:** I do agree with a lot of that, but I just worry that that piece of paper would get him a foot in the door or some entry level jobs and it would help him as his resume is being screened through a job at a big agency or something, that he has a completed degree. Not that I agree with that, but I wonder if that would help him to have that.

**Craig:** I don’t know where he’s going to film school. If he’s not going to NYU or USC, I’m not sure what networking there is available. Film schools are barfing out humans at a remarkable rate every year. They’re not all getting jobs because they went to a film school. What if he just went to a temp agency and got placed and started working at a company somewhere? Paramount’s looking for people to be assistants. You don’t need to have a film school degree to get those jobs, do you?

**Megana:** I think that you might. That’s what I’m worried about is I feel like even those jobs are so competitive. I’m very bad at rationalizing with the sunk cost fallacy, so I know this is a weak point of mine. He’s so close.

**Craig:** I think we’re getting to the real of it. I can hear your parents talking through you.

**Megana:** It’s like just do the two more terms and then do whatever you want. Become the doctor and then become a writer.

**Craig:** Become the doctor and then become the writer. This is your parents, and by the way, a useful voice to have. The internalized parental voices are important to an extent. We don’t want to nourish them too much. If we don’t have them at all, then we theoretically might head down sociopath lane. Don’t you agree, or perhaps I shouldn’t lead the question, do you agree that he can take a break, see how it goes, and then come back?

**Megana:** Yes, I do think that he can take a break. I am a huge advocate for taking time off before or during while you’re getting higher education, because it is such a privilege to be able to take classes and to spend time learning. I think you want to set yourself up in a way that you are getting the most from that experience that you can.

**Craig:** I think it’s a privilege to not go to film school. Anyway. Sounds like at least we agree on this. You can take some time, punt on the decision, see what happens. If it doesn’t work out, then you got an option to finish it and do what Megana’s parents would want you to do.

**Megana:** Correct. I hope Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School writes back and lets us know what he does do.

**Craig:** Yes, please. Yes, please do, Please.

**Megana:** No Context asks, “What tools do you use to keep track of notes and ideas that happen when you’re not at your desk, visual or analog?”

**Craig:** Here’s where John and I probably diverge. I have no doubt that John has an entire team of people working on a perfected software application to do precisely this. In the meantime he has six or seven different integrated processes.

Here’s what I do. I email myself. That’s it. It’s pathetic. On a given day of writing, I will typically think about what I’m writing that day in the morning, walk around, take a long shower, whatever it is, and then I know what it is. I don’t need to write it down. It’s in my head. It’s the scene of the day. I can do it. Sometimes when I’m thinking ahead about things that are coming or moments, as I walk around I will stop and go, “Okay, there’s actually a specific way I just said that line of dialog in my head that I want to make sure for this flow of lines that this leads to this leads to this interesting twist of line. I’m going to just quickly tap this out to an email to myself,” and I send it and then I have it and then I refer to it. That is as analog as digital gets, I suspect.

**Megana:** John’s answer was actually surprisingly more analog. He just uses index cards.

**Craig:** What?

**Megana:** He has stacks of index cards around the house.

**Craig:** What? When you say index cards, you mean individual miniature iPads of his own manufacture that are in the shape of an index card, that synchronize to some Cloud-based–

**Megana:** No, I mean paper and pens, pens with ink. I don’t know. Who’s the robot here?

**Craig:** Megana, I feel like I’m going to cry. Oh my god, never meet your heroes. Never meet your heroes. Oh, man. Wow. You rocked my world there.

**Megana:** Paul asks, “Will Zoom pitches still play a big role in post-pandemic life or will this all go back to in the room?”

**Craig:** Zoom pitches are here to stay. It’s not that we will eschew the room completely, as we did when we were in lockdown. Of course there will be in-room meetings. Inevitably, the Zoom pitch is here to stay because people’s schedules are tight, because they are all over the place. They’re traveling all the time. They’re in different spots, because of convenience, because a lot of people now have home offices that are just as comfortable and obviously more convenient than the at-office offices. While I don’t think the room is gone, the Zoom room I do believe is here to stay. What do you think?

**Megana:** It makes so many of the logistics of my life easier that I imagine that that’s probably true for everyone.

**Craig:** Certainly if you’re the kind of person who is going to a meeting as opposed to a person who’s receiving a meeting, way easier to do Zoom. When I started working on The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann, we had a series of early story sessions. Because he was still hard at work on The Last of Us 2, I would go to the Naughty Dog offices in Santa Monica. Driving to Santa Monica for me is–

**Megana:** From Pasadena?

**Craig:** That’s right. Essentially I said, “I can meet you roughly between 11:30 and then I’m leaving by 2. That’s it. I’m going to be nowhere near the edges of the day.” We would never do that now. We talk to each other all the time. I’m in Canada right now. He’s in Santa Monica. By the way, not that much further than Pasadena. It may actually be faster, because I could fly and land at LAX and get to Santa Monica faster.

**Megana:** 100%.

**Craig:** We Zoom all the time, and we will continue to, and we’ve all become incredibly used to it. If one thing the pandemic achieved, other than a horrifying death toll, is it normalized video conferencing, which prior to the pandemic, people forget, everyone was like, “Eh.” Even Google couldn’t get us to do it. We were like, “Eh. FaceTime, ew.” Then suddenly–

**Megana:** Google had Google Meet, but yes.

**Craig:** They had it, but nobody liked it.

**Megana:** Yes, but coming from working at Google, I used it all the time.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course. That’s like, “Coming from a cattle prod factory, I did occasionally use a cattle prod. I didn’t like the feeling of being cattle prodded.” It was not and continues to be not a good solution. Google does a lot of things brilliantly well. Google’s social, what was it called, Google Circles or something?

**Megana:** Oh gosh. Google Plus.

**Craig:** Google Plus. Google Minus.

**Megana:** That was tough. Speaking of The Last of Us, Matt asks, “When you have a project to write where you’re the main stakeholder, do you subconsciously change your style? John and Craig talked before about Ryan Johnson’s scripts being for himself to direct, so he can do what he likes with regard to the rules. Basically I’m wondering if Craig has so much to write for The Last of Us in such a short amount of time that he’s going gonzo freestyle.”

**Craig:** Oh no, I don’t have a gonzo freestyle. Hopefully, people don’t think that I wrote all The Last of Us in a short time. The Last of Us, which is entirely written and we just have a little bit more to shoot, was written over the course of essentially two years. I’m a very deliberate writer. For the scripts that I was writing while we were still in production early on, because the production of this is rather lengthy, they were so well outlined and thought through. I mean thoroughly outlined. I’m not praising myself. The writing of the script was not ever going to be anything approaching gonzo freestyle. I don’t know how to write gonzo freestyle. The only things I write gonzo freestyle are birthday cards. Even those sometimes I deliberate.

The fact that I am over-empowered and have too much authority has not made me any less fastidious or nervous, because ultimately, you can say you’re the main stakeholder, you’re in charge, you’re the boss, the audience is waiting. If there’s one thing that people who wrote comedy features know, it’s that they’re out there with their knives and you are going to have to face the music sooner or later, so do what you can to get it right and never just think, “Oh, I’m in charge. I can do whatever I want.” You’re not in charge. The audience is in charge.

**Megana:** There are so many other departments that you have to communicate with. It’s not just about shorthand between you and the director.

**Craig:** Oh, certainly. In this case it’s me and the directors, because we have quite a few, because there are 10 episodes. You’re putting your finger on something huge. Every department has 4,000 questions. You are accountable to them as well. The one thing I can never do is say to our special effects team or our costume team, “Oh, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ever. I am not allowed to say that. I have to know. I can’t make it up in the moment either. I have to pre-know what I mean and what I want, because they will say… Look, in good ways, they want to make sure that I’m getting what I want. They will say, “Here’s what we’re planning for this.” Sometimes I go, “Oh my god, nailed it, perfect.” Sometimes I say, “180 from what I want. That’s okay. I see why you did that. Here’s what I want instead.” What I can’t do is go, “Oh. Huh. Maybe.” They’re like, “What would you want different?” “Hm. Oh, I don’t know. Do other things and let me see them,” which maybe other people get away with, but we have too much to do.

I am accountable to everybody that’s working around me. They need fast answers because we’re on a schedule over here. This train don’t stop. I am accountable to HBO. I am accountable to my creative partners, my other producers. I’m accountable to my actors, because on the day, if they go, “What does this mean?” and I go, “I don’t know,” that’s not good.

Then ultimately, I’m accountable to the audience, which is why editors are a good early punch in the face. Editors represent the audience. They advocate for the audience. They don’t know how hard it was to write that line or how hard it was to get that day shooting. They don’t know about the weather. They don’t know if the actor is cranky. They don’t care. They just look at the footage and they’re like, “This is bad, so I think I’ll do this instead.” They don’t care. That’s actually quite refreshing, because once shooting is over, you get to shake it off like a wet dog, take a breath, and then say, all of the creation, the raw creation, is completed. This is what we have. Now, let us begin the final act of creation, which is narrowed into this world of finite possibilities, as opposed to that world of infinite possibilities. No gonzo freestyle for me. Sorry, Matt, or you’re welcome, Matt, if you’re not a gonzo freestyle guy.

**Megana:** Sort of a follow-up question to that, because how you got to where you are now, Cat asks, “How did you find your voice and what are some steps to produce your own if you’re having a hard time finding it?”

**Craig:** I have no idea. There you go. I have to gonzo freestyle that one. I don’t know. Someone, maybe it was Scott Frank, he said he doesn’t like to delve too deep into the how did you get your voice question out of terrible fear that it will make him self-conscious about something he didn’t realize was just his voice. It’s a little bit like if somebody ever says back to you, they’re like, “Oh my god, you have this interesting vocal affectation that you say this thing all the time.” You’ll suddenly realize that you say it all the time and you’ll say it less.

Neil Druckmann, the other day, not the other day, it was a couple months ago, I asked him a question and he went, “Correct.” He went, “By the way, that’s what you say all the time. You know that?” I said, “What?” He goes, “Yeah. Instead of saying yes, you go, ‘Correct,’ just like that. ‘Correct.'” He’s like, “Correct.” I’m like, “Oh.” Then I was like, “I don’t know if I do that.” Then seven minutes later I heard myself do it and I went, “Oh, no.” Now I don’t do it as much because he ruined it.

I don’t want to stare too much at this other than to say I don’t know, but that is a metaphor. Don’t get too tripped up, because I think maybe voice is just a small word for confidence in your own mind’s organization of words, thoughts, and feelings. You have a point of view. You have thoughts. You have a way of saying things. Whether you realize it or not, you have your own quirky bits. If you become confident that your quirky bits and your way of presenting things are interesting to other people and you continue to invest in that, other people might point at it and say that’s your voice. Thinking about what your voice is and trying to find it is counterproductive, because that’s calculated and it will never work. You want other people to tell you afterwards about it. What’s your voice?

**Megana:** That’s really helpful. If you define it too much, then you also somehow limit yourself and limit the potential of what it could be.

**Craig:** You can’t hear it. You can’t hear your own voice the way other people do. Even the sound of your own voice physically sounds different. Really what you’re saying is how did you find the way to do things that create the following impression in other people and how can I do that. I don’t know. Megana, you have a voice. You have a very specific way of thinking and talking and presenting things. If I heard 12 people and all the voices physically were turned into the same pitch, I think I could still pick you out.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Because it’s about your mind.

**Megana:** Friendship.

**Craig:** It’s about the way your mind works. Friendship. Is that a millennial thing to just go, “Friendship.”

**Megana:** No, that’s just me.

**Craig:** That’s just you. See, you have a voice. You have a voice.

**Megana:** Oh gosh. We can’t talk about it too much, because then it’ll go away.

**Craig:** I know. I’m ruining it. I’m ruining it. Next question.

**Megana:** We’re going to do some quick ones. Christopher asks, “What’s the best way to format a quick flash of memory three seconds long or a quick image? Do you simply write it in description or add a CUT TO?”

**Craig:** Oh, easy. I usually will just, in an action line, all caps, say FLASH TO: colon and then return and then write the little bit that I’m flashing to or even keep it on the same line with the colon. I might put the stuff that I’m flashing to in Italics. I may say FLASH BACK TO: or MEMORY FLASH: or something like that. I don’t add CUT TO’s. I just write it into description and then flow. Basically, I’m just including it the way you would experience it watching the movie.

**Megana:** Another craft question. Brilland asks, “Purposeful pauses, beats. When should silence carry a scene?”

**Craig:** Constantly. Constantly. Here’s a quirk of mine. Okay, Cat, I’ll give you a little piece of the voice. I know, because I feel myself doing it and I don’t care, I write the following thing, I don’t know, at least 12 times a script: “They sit quietly, then,” or, “There’s a moment, then.” I’m writing that all the time, because I believe that people pause. There are moments when people stop because they don’t know what to say. The importance of those moments is that they inform how the next line must be, because when you break a silence, you break it in a certain way. You don’t break it without deliberation. What you say next has been considered, because that’s what was happening in the wait. Somebody didn’t want to say something, made a choice to say it, thought about how to say it, and then they said it. I think this is incredibly valuable, because most of the time when we’re talking it’s extemporaneous, it’s flowing, it is impulsive. We make mistakes. It’s clumsy. It’s not well thought of.

I like movies where people speak brilliantly and quickly, like Sorkin or Tarantino, but it is mannered. It is not meant to be a reflection of how humans actually speak with each other. They don’t do it that way. That is more of a stylized presentation of reality, which is wonderful. Those guys are excellent at it. It’s not my jam. I’m not excellent at that. I like clumsiness. I guess I just dig a little bit more in drama work into the authenticity of how people speak to each other. Pauses are a huge part of it. Do not be afraid of silence. Embrace the silence, for in the silence is great opportunity. Just like we just had.

**Megana:** I was trying to hold for silence for a bit, but I am conscious of your time.

**Craig:** We did it. We did it.

**Megana:** Hannah from Minneapolis asks, “How important do you think reading classics/popular literature is for both improving your writing and for social capital and respect within the TV/film writing industry? Do other writers expect that of you?”

**Craig:** This is such a good question, Hannah. When I first started, I would go on these meetings, and for whatever reason, I don’t know what it was at the time, but in 1994 when I was having these meetings initially with producers and so forth, and I was working in comedy, they would reference the Peter Sellers film The Party all the time. They would talk about The Party. I had never seen The Party. I had seen The Pink Panther. That was when I was a kid, because my dad made me. I hadn’t seen The Party. I would just go, “Oh yeah,” because they would never say, “Have you ever seen The Party?” They would be like, “It’s like The Party. If we can aim for The Party but do this or this or this.” I’m like, “Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that’s great.”

The funny thing is, in 1994 watching a movie that was slightly obscure was actually hard to do. You had to find it somewhere and rent it. I was just like, “I got to go and rent The Party at some point.” I finally did and I watched it and I was like, no offense to Party fans, like, “Wah? Wah?” I guess when I was done, I thought like, oh, I think what they mean is cheap. I think they mean a comedy that’s mostly in one building that there’s a party in. That’s the whole movie. I don’t know.

Anyway, it is a little important. Try and keep up as best you can. At some point, it will be impossible, and that’s okay, because you’ll be old, Hannah. When you’re old, nobody expects you to know anything other than old stuff. They think it’s adorable when you know new stuff. When you are young, yeah, you do need to be plugged into what’s going around. You should be, because that’s the time of your life when you would be. It is helpful to know what the hell is out there, and look, too much for everybody to watch. Do you feel a pressure, Megana, to keep up?

**Megana:** I do feel a pressure. It’s also a desire. I want to see what’s out there and what’s going on. I love television and film, so that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Her question asks, “Reading classic/popular literature, how important is it for improving your writing and for social capital?” I think that a lot of the writers that I talk to, I’m not talking to them about classic literature. I think that’s something that they probably have read. A lot of my writer friends have lots of references, whether that’s a very random nonfiction interest that they have or a specific genre of television shows that they watch or types of books that they like.

**Craig:** By the way, you don’t have to be. You could also be just really into what you’re into, and people know that one of your quirks/voice is that you don’t know what the hell is on TV right now, but you are a master of 1960s action films, and that’s okay, as long as there’s apparently some interest.

What will happen, Hannah, is if you start doing well in this business, then the reference that you’re most familiar with, the TV show or the film that you’re most familiar with is the one you’re making. Then that’s the only one in the world. There’s only one television show I really care about right now, and that’s The Last of Us. That’s all I work on. That’s all I think about. That’s my job. The fact that I haven’t seen 12 other things that have come out in the last month, no problem, because no one needs me to. They just need me to make the thing that they want me to make, and hopefully they’re happy with it. Then in the in-betweens I catch up a little bit, as best I can with some things, but the truth is, I feel like it’s more important when you’re in your early stage, your young years in the business.

**Megana:** I agree with that. I also think agents and producers tend to be really plugged in. It’s incredibly important for them, with good reason.

**Craig:** That’s their deal is they need to know everybody and everything, because that’s their trade. They’re not sitting down and writing stuff. They’re watching and reading, watching, reading, watching, reading. They have to know everything. I could certainly see where your fancy boss mentioned something and you haven’t heard of it, then they’ll throw a stapler at your head.

**Megana:** The classic Hollywood punishment.

**Craig:** Classic.

**Megana:** Anders asks, “What are some important questions to ask oneself during the pre-writing phase?”

**Craig:** What is this about? What is the point? Why would anyone care? Would anyone want to watch this? Why would they want to watch this? If I create it in such a way that they feel compelled to watch it, why will they keep watching it? How will they feel at the end? What is the purpose and point of all of this? Then get into the rest of the stuff. I think that people forget to ask that first. Why? Why should this exist? There’s a lot of television. There are a lot of movies. There are a lot of books. There are a lot of songs. Why should this one exist and why would people care? It’s not about being cruel to yourself. It’s just about, again, respecting your ultimate boss, the audience.

**Megana:** I guess going back to what Hannah’s question, what you were saying about that, is that it is important to be plugged in culturally so that your writing is responding to the moment.

**Craig:** Yes, and not only to the moment as you see it, but the audience consists of people much younger than you, when you are old. When you’re young, it doesn’t, unless you’re writing for children’s television. If you’re in your 20s and your 30s, you’re probably writing comfortably for people in their 20s and 30s, and that’s no problem. Most stuff is aimed in that, whatever, 18 to 45. That’s the big classic TV demo. If you’re in your 30s, yeah, of course you’re writing for people between the ages of 18 and 45. You are between the ages of 18 and 45.

As you get older, you may forget or discount what 20-year-olds might be interested in, and you will certainly, certainly, you will overestimate how important things that are important to you are to others. In Hollywood right now, I’m sure there are people that are trying to remake things that people really enjoyed in the ’80s, but no one in their 20s cares because the ’80s is 5,000 years ago to them. When I started out early on, so again, let’s go back to 1994, and Disney was attempting to do a film adaptation of My Favorite Martian. Have you ever heard of My Favorite Martian?

**Megana:** I have.

**Craig:** What is your awareness of it?

**Megana:** I think it’s a show.

**Craig:** Go on.

**Megana:** Was it on Nick At Nite or Turner Classic Media?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll get you off the hook. They did make a movie. They did it. They made a movie. I did not write it. They made it in 1999. The movie My Favorite Martian was based on a television show that aired on CBS from September 29th, 1963 to May 1st, 1966. Now you can imagine that I, who had been born in 1971, and who felt that things from the early ’60s were essentially from the Stone Age, how I felt hearing that Disney wanted to make a live-action movie of this that no one would care about, because they were overestimating how beloved the things that were beloved to them were, because the people who made it were children who watched that show and loved it. Right now there are things that children are watching and loving that eventually they’re going to want to make a movie of and people are going to be like, eh, because we don’t care. We just don’t care.

Part of this whole thing is just making sure that… Just ask yourself, okay, what would people not like me think? What would people who are not my race, my gender, my age, my orientation, what would people not like me think of this? Are they going to roll their eyes hard? Because man, in 1999 when they put My Favorite Martian out, I’m sure a lot of people went, “Okay, whatever,” but they did it to themselves. Everyone’s going to do it online right now and in your face and they’re going to make fun of you. Just interrogate yourself before you start writing.

**Megana:** Fair. Leah asks, “Do you have tips on simplifying a complex world for an audience? Any other exemplary scenes like Minority Report’s PreCrime Unit or Chernobyl’s courtroom reactor explanation?”

**Craig:** Thank you for putting me in there with Scott Frank’s excellent script. The tips are that you need to be a teacher. Again, you’re thinking about other people. You don’t want to bore people. No one likes homework. No one likes sitting in a classroom. Whatever it is about your complex world that thrills you, that makes you passionate, that excites you, hold onto those bits and relay those bits and build your case carefully and always with an eye at keeping them interested. Take breaks.

You notice the courtroom, one of the reasons I structured that the way it was was, A, I just didn’t want to do the usual, okay, episode 1 is a sunny day and then it ends with something exploding. The other reason was because I knew that when it was time to walk people through what happened and solve the mystery, that I wanted to give them breaks. Otherwise, it would’ve just been awful. You may enjoy those scenes as they exist, but if it was just 40 minutes straight of that stuff, you would pass out, because you just can’t. You’re stuck in a room for too long. Give them breaks. Structure it. Make it interesting. Teach them carefully and use what makes you excited as a signifier for where you ought to put your sign posts along the way.

**Megana:** Super helpful. We’re going to do another little lightning round. Adrian asks, “In what part of writing the script do you think about music? Not like the movie Yesterday where the plot revolves around the music. I’m particularly curious about music rights you don’t own.”

**Craig:** I don’t think about it much, only when I think to myself, oh, a song would really add something here, hearing vocals and pulling people out of the reality for a bit and hearing something. Then I think about it. Then I do a little research. I also remind myself, I don’t need to solve that now unless I’m literally seeing somebody singing it on screen. Yes, I think if you’re making Baby Driver and you’re Edgar Wright, it’s incredibly important to think about that. That would be more like the movie Yesterday. The plot revolves around it, but also I think somebody like Edgar also really does key in how he writes and creates scenes to pre-imagine songs that have to go there and function like that. I don’t, for what I do. I would say just listen to yourself and ask that question. Don’t get too bogged down in it if it’s not crucial to what you’re doing.

**Megana:** David asks, “Should the writer acknowledge in a note that they are aware that something a character says is insensitive or ignorant if that detail will be confronted later in the series?”

**Craig:** Oh wow, that’s a really interesting thought. It’s a pretty rare circumstance, I would imagine, where you’re writing something that’s going to be in a series. Maybe if it’s a pilot, then yes. I think if it’s a pilot, so that script exists on its own, and if somebody says something like that, I think it’s fair to acknowledge on page 38 someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant and upsetting, it will be confronted later in the series, to let people know you are aware of that, so you don’t just get this note back like, “What’s wrong with you? Do you not live in the world right now? Do you not see how people are functioning?” Yeah, that’s perfectly reasonable to do.

If you are in a flow of a season, that means the show’s already running. There’s probably a room or at least there’s a showrunner or other people, so people will be able to just pick up the phone and discuss it. When I say pick up the phone, I mean text each other. I guess if you were doing a pilot where that would be coming back around, and you don’t have the opportunity to address it right then and there, it’s not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.

**Megana:** I wasn’t expecting you to say that.

**Craig:** Oh, what’d you think I was going to say? “No! Wrong!”

**Megana:** No, just to have good faith that it would be resolved or addressed later.

**Craig:** I don’t have that faith. I got to be honest. People surprise me all the time. They really do. They surprise me, because when you’re like, “Do you not know how that’s going to… You don’t get how that’s going to come off, really? You’re not on Twitter? You don’t read?” Let’s put it this way. If I saw that in a pilot script, I would not go, “I hate that.” I would think that’s reasonable, you’re taking care of me.

I wouldn’t spell it out, other than to say there is a moment. You don’t even have to say on what page, because they might flip right to that page. You might just say there is a moment in the script where someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant, it will be confronted later in the series. Perfectly fine. Smart.

**Megana:** Cool. Tom in LA asks, “I have a script that’s been optioned and reoptioned, two times, different 18-month options. During that time I was paid to do a rewrite. Then another writer was brought on to do a pass. The option has just lapsed, and I was wondering what happens now. My agent says that it’s not as simple as just getting my original script back, since the production company did spend money on development. I’ve had many producers hit me up for the rights, but my agent said any new producer might have to repay the original producer. My hope is to get rid of all the changes and start with a script that I originally had.”

**Craig:** Here’s what I think is happening. Tom writes a screenplay. It is optioned and reoptioned. It is not purchased outright. The rights to the screenplay belong to Tom. The producers have paid him some money to have the exclusive right to develop that at this point, meaning he can’t sell it to someone else. They then pay him to do a rewrite. Kind of curious why they didn’t just buy the script at this point, but okay. They pay him to do a rewrite. Now what that means is that’s a work for hire. The rewrite is something they do own.

Now, at this point I’m very confused, because I as Tom’s agent never would’ve allowed this. The reason why is, they’ve created… I don’t know how this works. In their agreement, they must have created them in such a way where they own this, regardless of whether or not they own the underlying rights, because he’s granted them the… I don’t understand how this functions, because essentially, they’re… If they don’t have the ability to properly own that rewrite, which they would, as work for hire, because he says it’s WGA, once the option lapses, that rewrite doesn’t have any value to them at all. Meanwhile, Tom’s problem is, if he goes to sell the script that has reverted [unclear 00:57:50] the original script to somebody else, he obviously can’t sell those rewrites, because somebody else owns the rewrites. What his agent is pointing out is, anybody else buying this thing knows that the other company’s out there with the rewrites. Any rewrites they ask for, if they come even close to what was in the rewrites the other company owns, they’re going to have to buy those out from the other company or they’re going to get sued.

This is a mess. I don’t see why this went down this way. I would say you can say your hope is to get rid of all the changes, Tom, but the problem is, other people might ask for the same damn changes. Now what do you do? Do you write them? Do you say, “Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t do that change because I did it once before for someone else, or I can do it, but I can’t do it the way I would normally do it.” It’s a mess. If this is going to go somewhere else, I suspect your agent’s right about this, new producer would just have to repay the original producer and then some to buy out those things. Why was this done this way? I don’t know.

If you’re going to option something, you’re holding back the big, valuable thing, which is copyright. If they want you to do a rewrite, don’t sell it. You do the rewrite and it’s for you. You’re doing it for you. It’s your rewrite too. You own that also. It’s like I own a house, but I’m going to let you come and own the first floor. I will own the foundation and the second floor. What am I supposed to do with the foundation and the second floor, without the first floor? It doesn’t function. Confused about how this went down. Would not recommend that method. Yes, I think your agent is right that it is not as simple as just getting the original script back.

**Megana:** Oh man, that’s so tricky. Poor Tom probably hasn’t been paid. Two times 18-month options for three years on this?

**Craig:** He got paid to do a rewrite, so he was paid. That’s the problem. In a way, you just have to understand, if you’re going to sell it, sell it. There’s nothing wrong with selling. That’s what we do. We’re professional writers. Brush off anyone that calls you a sellout, because that’s a feature, not a bug. You’re a professional. You get paid. If you’re going to sell out, sell out. Don’t rent out and sell out at the same time. You’re going to do worse than you would’ve otherwise. Otherwise, you took a little bit of short-term money and you, I think, muddied the water on something that could’ve been more valuable if it had been kept intact.

**Megana:** Got it. I guess I feel for Tom, because I can understand how in his position he would want to get paid, but your advice is…

**Craig:** Absolutely, without question. This is why I’m just wondering where his agent was on this one, because I would just say, look, if you guys want to develop this, let’s do it right. Now, if they were like, “No, we just want to pay WGA minimum for a rewrite, I smell a rat. They’re making a very low commitment for something that’s valuable and disruptive to the chain of title and I would just advise my client to say, no, hold out, let’s sell this. If they have a plan for how they want to develop it, convince a studio that they have a plan, and then have the studio buy the script and finance the development of this property. That’s the way we do it, or in the network or the television production company. I agree with you. I commiserate with Tom completely.

**Megana:** Richard asks about another project that hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped. He says, “I’ve recently finished my first film, a short on a very low budget, and it stinks. I tried so hard, put everything into it, but it’s rubbish. I’m not too disappointed, as it’s my first attempt and I only had 10,000 to work with. It made me wonder what it’s like to make a flop when the budget is 10 million as opposed to 10,000. More specifically, when do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings, opening weekends, or way before? Secondly, how do industry people dress it up? Are they honest and admit that it’s a turkey or do they wrap it up in ‘maybe it will have a second life on DVD’ sort of rhetoric? Thirdly, what’s the follow-up for the writer specifically? Do you lose work? Do people start answering your calls? Is there resentment from the people who took a chance on you, or is it understood that some films just sink without a trace?”

**Craig:** Oh, man. Richard, I’m sorry. For what it’s wroth, we’ve all been there, except for Lord and Miller. I don’t know, Chris and Phil have never tasted the… No, I take it back. They have. They have. Every time I say this to them, they’re like, “Ah, [unclear 01:02:36].” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, right.” You got fired before any… Okay, you were fired, but you didn’t have a bomb under your name, see, so your track record is 100%. I still hold them up as the rarest of rare unicorns.

For the rest of us humans, it happens. It often happens early on. It is devastating. It is particularly devastating the first time, Richard. Yes, it’s your first attempt. Yes, you only had $10,000 to work with. This was going to be a small thing. I’m sure you also were thinking to yourself as you were making it, people have done things with $10,000 before and made big, wonderful things. You know it. This one hurts. It hurts more than it will ever hurt again, because you have nothing else to compare it to. You are currently oh for one. Oh for one is rough. When you have one victory under your belt, it buys you at least a certain amount of emotional ability to withstand another flop or two, because you feel like, okay, I’m not just Ed Wood, but most normal people are walking around nervous that they’re Ed Wood as they’re trying to do something good. Feel your feelings.

I’ll tell you that the difference when the budget… Budget’s irrelevant, to me. I think for producers and network and studio people, that’s a huge part of it. They don’t care. Oh, whatever. They’re looking at budget cheats and they’re looking at what they’re accountable for. As an artist, humiliation is humiliation, and failure is failure, no matter what the budget is. Sometimes the only factor is how much you cared. If you care a lot about the thing that cost $10,000 and you cared sort of a little about the thing that cost 10 million, the $10,000 failure will hurt more.

When do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings are definitely a big indication. There’s no question about that. A bad opening weekend, unless you are one of the .01% of movies that somehow just keep on trucking and build and build and build, that’s a pretty good indication. The first time you watch it, you may think it’s… If you just watch it and you go, “That’s just absolutely unsalvagable,” then it’s unsalvagable.

How do industry people dress it up? There’s a certain layer of people in our business that are paid to lie and will do so. The way they dress it up is just by announcing that everything’s fine and it’s great. They use that to get their next thing. I think the non-creators, the business folks, when they sense a flop is coming, they just work hard to make sure that they’re protected and already have the next thing working, so that they can’t be fired and ended permanently. For the rest of us, not so easy.

What is the fallout for the writer specifically? Depends. If you have created a television show, you are the showrunner and it fails spectacularly, that is on you. I do think there’s going to be a bit of a work your way back in process. If you are a writer in feature films, generally speaking you are not going to be blamed. People will blame the director. It is the only upside to a system where the writer is demeaned and deprived of any positive credit whatsoever. It’s that when there is a disaster, they just blame the director. Is there resentment from people who take a chance on you? Only if you fought them tooth and nail every step of the way and told them they were idiots and insisted on things and wouldn’t change things and then it failed and then, yes, they will absolutely resent you.

Do you lose work? Not if you already had work ahead of time. Always keep the treadmill going. Do people stop answering your calls? No. It doesn’t really function that way. People weirdly love to talk to you when something has just failed. It makes them feel better about themselves. Is it understood that some films just sink without a trace? Yes. Sinking without a trace, vastly preferable to being noticed while you sink. Lots of boats sank, but everyone remembers the Titanic. Be one of the boats that quietly sank that no one talks about.

**Megana:** Gosh. John is so good at segues. I’m really appreciating that skill level now.

**Craig:** You’re missing segue man.

**Megana:** I’m missing segue man.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting point. The thing that you just said has nothing to do with the next question. So-and-so asks…

**Megana:** Speaking of films…

**Craig:** Segue lady.

**Megana:** Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instructions come in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get taught in film programs?”

**Craig:** Oh my god. Of the last how many years?

**Megana:** 20 years, so 2002.

**Craig:** I’m the worst person to ask this question of, because I don’t know. Taught in schools?

**Megana:** Taught in film programs, your favorite institutions.

**Craig:** None of them. None of them, because it doesn’t matter what they teach you. There are things that are instructed to me that don’t mean anything to anyone else. There are things that other people seize on that just blow their minds and make them be in love again with movies. The answer is what blows your mind. The premise is flawed. Indeed, it is the premise upon which these programs are constructed, which is to say there are objectively valuable, wonderful films that if you study and dissect all the way down to the atomic level, you too will be able to create. You will not. The people who created them created them. You’re going to create what you create. There’s no Codex.

What are the movies that film schools obsess over? We all know that they have an unhealthy obsession with 1970s and particularly with Spielberg and Scorsese and Coppola, but also then they like to go to the Italians of the earlier years, ’60s and ’50s, Sica and Fellini, and they should. They’re wonderful movies. Also, what are we looking at there? Those guys all sound alike. They all look alike. A lot of the movies come from certain schools of thought and ways of being. All those men came out of the years they were born, in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. Now when we talk about the movies that come out now, all those people were born in certain years and they did certain things and it doesn’t matter. You just like what you like. If you don’t like The Godfather and you don’t like Reservoir Dogs and you don’t like Casino and you don’t like The Bicycle Thief, that’s okay. You don’t like them. That’s fine.

What do you like? Why love it? Some of these movies, you watch them and something sings in you, starts singing. Listen to the thing that starts singing in you. In the end, these schools and all of the thousands of para-academic discussions that happen around films, on Reddit and everywhere else, are just people being critics, not in a boo I hate it or yay love it way, but rather in an analysis way. People are critiquing films. They’re analyzing films. They’re discussing them. They’re breaking them down. What they’re not doing is creating anything. They’re just contributing to the howling tornado of film opinion. In that howling tornado, there are about three or four people I’ve ever listened to where I thought, oh, I’d like to listen to them more talk about movies. I’d like to listen to them more talk about television. My answer is, the ones that make you sing. Those are the ones.

I don’t care what they choose to teach in film school, at all. In fact, I almost feel like don’t watch those movies. Go find other ones, because all you’ll end up doing is you’re in a camp where they’re all teaching you how to play Kumbaya. Then you leave and you start writing Kumbaya-like songs. Just go listen to your own music. Do your own thing. Do I sound like a hippie or do I sound like… I don’t know.

**Megana:** It also relates to the thing you were saying about My Favorite Martian. If you were going to an institution where someone was teaching you something, they’re teaching you the things that were important or meaningful to them, but those references have changed because you are a different age than them. You are a different person than them. I feel like there’s a lot of parallels to what you were saying earlier on that too.

**Craig:** I just feel like I’m on an island sometimes. I feel like I’m alone.

**Megana:** I guess you are your own sort of little cult leader, like, “Do what makes your heart sing.” I don’t know what you would call your acolytes, your followers, the Mazinites?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t have any. I would say that that’s already disqualifying. You fail to be a Mazinite if you’re following me.

**Megana:** That wouldn’t stop them.

**Craig:** Really what I’m saying is be your own cult leader and make sure that your cult is a cult of one person, which is you, and show us something new, or just show us something you. Why do we care what six grouches in a conference room that smells like bad coffee think we should watch? Bicycle Thieves, by the way, not The Bicycle Thief. I’m an idiot.

**Megana:** We’re almost done with the 20 questions. We have one more.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** Spencer asks, “I’ve heard from a few different sources that one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity over perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts. However, no one talks about the point at which one should put that script down, after just one draft, after two or three. While I feel comfortable putting a script down when I feel like it’s good, what is the point at which the learning stops and I should start a new project?”

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it be nice, Spencer, if there were a graph, we could just go, draft amount quality increase, chart it, hit the sweet spot, and stop there? I don’t know if one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity. Focusing on quantity is a weird way to start. Over-perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts, here’s the uncomfortable truth. If you want to be a professional writer and continue to work and have a lengthy career, you need to both focus on quality and perfecting a project over the course of several drafts, and quantity. You have to do it a lot.

I think sometimes when it’s early, you think, is it better to write eight different scripts or is it better to write eight different drafts. The answer is, write 400 drafts. That’s the answer. You can say that those 400 drafts are over three movies or they’re over 58 movies. Doesn’t matter. You just have to write way more than you think. Way more. If you’re worried now about whether you should be doing two or three drafts a script or should you be doing five drafts a script, those numbers are not different. They’re the same number, as far as I’m concerned. Quantity of scripts will create a lot of pdfs. Nobody cares. You want to talk about a quantity of scripts, the collective screenwriting humanity has written a massive quantity of scripts. You are competing against the rest of the world. You’re not going to hit their output, which is four million bad scripts a day. I would try and write one good one. How about that? You know what? There we go, Spencer. Just start and say you are allowed to write and focus on quantity when you’ve written one good one.

Now when people say you learn more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity, I have no idea how that functions. It could be that if you write lots and people give you lots and lots of feedback and each one gets better, then yes. I wouldn’t call that quantity as much as evolution and improvement. At some point you need to be able to write good enough to be a professional screenwriter.

Is it better to perfect one pitch or learn five pitches? Doesn’t matter, if you’re never going to be a Major League Baseball pitcher. Probably a false dichotomy. Most of these questions I just end up disputing the premise and then saying a lot of things that must cause tremendous discomfort in people, because what I do is I sow uncertainty. I sow uncertainty because indeed it is uncertain.

**Megana:** We all have to be more comfortable with it. I think you’re doing us a service, all of us Mazinites.

**Craig:** Dammit. I don’t want anyone in this church. Get out. That’s how all my sermons begin, with, “Get out.” All right, well, if you’re not going to get out…

**Megana:** You can’t help but speak in slogans. Like you said, what did you say, be you, be…

**Craig:** See how bad that slogan was?

**Megana:** No, you had a really good rhyme. I wish I could rewind this and go back.

**Craig:** You’ll be able to later. I have perhaps the trappings of a cult leader, without any of the ambition.

**Megana:** What is the line?

**Craig:** They always say you want to elect someone who does not want to be president. That’s the person you want to elect as president. I do not want to be a cult leader.

**Megana:** It will inevitably happen precisely because you don’t want to be a cult leader.

**Craig:** I can’t wait to just disappoint people on a weekly basis as I refuse for us all to live in one compound, and I insist that we do not randomly murder people to make a point.

**Megana:** The cult is wondering, Craig, what is your One Cool Thing for this week?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing for this week, so everyone is caught up in Wordle, of course, Wordle Qordle Septidurdle Schmurdle Fertile Framle Lamle. That’s exciting. As somebody who is an avid solver and loves puzzles of all kinds, I love it when everybody nerds out over puzzles. I wasn’t surprised to see the New York Times, of course, bought them, and we discussed this before. I wanted to call out a little bit of old-school New York Times variety, since people are interested now in what I would call a variety puzzle. It’s not a crossword, for instance. The New York Times also features variety puzzles. If you have a subscription to their puzzle service, which is not too expensive, and I think much worth it, they have the typical things like Sudoku and so forth. They have, every Sunday, in addition to the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, there is a variety puzzle.

There’s a kind of puzzle called Split Decisions, where there’s pathways of letters that then split and then resume. There might be three letters in a row, and then it splits, and on either side there’s two letters, and then it resumes with another four letters. There are words where the only difference between them are those two letters in the middle. As you fill them through and they cross each other, you’re able to fill the whole grid. It’s fun. I think one of the more venerable forms is the acrostic. Have you ever done an acrostic, Megana?

**Megana:** I’m Googling it now. Is this just a crossword puzzle?

**Craig:** It is not at all. An acrostic is, in its traditional form, is a quote, some sort of pithy quote. Maybe it’s 20 words long. It is presented to you in grid format, just straight across, white squares, black squares separating the words. Then you are given a list of clues below. They’re not for the words in the quote. They’re their own things. As you fill those in, under each letter is a number. All of the letters in the quote have a number. You’re answering one kind of clue and then assigning those letters to various spots in the quote above. As you begin to fill in the quote above, you can start figuring out some of the clues below. As you figure out the clues below, you can figure out the quotes above. It is a really interesting way of doing things.

There is a lovely reveal at the end, because you get a really interesting answer and all of the letters, the first letters of these things will ultimately also spell out the name of the author and the book or source from which the quote comes. It’s all very clever. It’s well done. You can do it online, which is the best way to do it. When you do it on paper, it is tedious. “Okay, so this letter goes to, oh, here. This one goes to this.” Online it’s super easy to do.

I believe they’re a husband and wife team, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, have been doing the New York Times acrostic for as long as I can remember. Every two weeks, without fail, they deliver. It’s wonderful. It’s like a mystery. It resolves itself a little bit like a mystery. It’s fun to watch it all come together. If you love puzzles and you do have a New York Times crossword puzzle subscription, definitely on every other Sunday online check out under variety puzzles right there the acrostic by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

**Megana:** Very cool.

**Craig:** How about you?

**Megana:** My One Cool Thing for this week is a podcast called Not Past It. It’s produced by Gimlet and hosted by Simone Polanen, who is one of my dear college friends. That’s why it’s also not weird if I say that if honey could speak, it would sound like Simone.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**Megana:** She has a lovely speaking voice. She’s very smart and very talented. The premise of the podcast is each week they look at something that happened that week in history and provide more cultural context and history around it. She has a lovely episode called The Last Queen of Hawaii. Spoiler alert, the US government does not look good in this story.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**Megana:** Yeah, I know, shocking.

**Craig:** We’re the greatest country on Earth.

**Megana:** I know. She has another episode called World’s Most Famous Virgins. It’s spectacular. In 30 minutes she goes from the Virgin Mary to the Jonas Brothers and George Bush purity politics.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**Megana:** Lots of fun episodes. Really bold swings. Give it a listen. It’s called Not Past It.

**Craig:** I love that you’ve referenced in the notes here Mary’s immaculate conception. Even Catholics a lot of times will mistakenly believe that the concept of the immaculate conception refers to the conception of Jesus, but it does not. It refers to the conception of Mary herself.

**Megana:** This is so fascinating to me. The biological mechanisms that they traced sin with are so interesting. Something she talks about is how I guess the Catholic Church determined that original sin from them taking this bite of the forbidden apple was then solidified or manifested in Adam’s sperm, so all of us who are the product of sexual relations are burdened with–

**Craig:** We’re tainted.

**Megana:** We’re tainted. We’re tainted.

**Craig:** We’re tainted. Something had to break that line, and they had to break it when Mary was born.

**Megana:** Mary could not have been a product of sin because then she wouldn’t have been pure, but then what about Mary’s mom?

**Craig:** Mary’s mom was sinful and that’s the miracle is that somehow Mary was born without sin. You could say, hey, Catholic Church, if you can just stop it wherever you want, just stop with Jesus, or what about Mary’s grandma, whatever, the rest? That’s when you realize that all of modern religion in this fashion is as if 8,000 years from now people discovered this ancient record called The Simpsons, believed it was true, and then built an entire series of laws and moral determinations around it. There was no Garden of Eden. It’s so stupid, but it’s very organized.

**Megana:** It’s the power of storytelling, Craig.

**Craig:** I know, cult. It is a cult. That’s what it is, just all cults.

**Megana:** That’s our episode for this week.

**Craig:** Who’s Scriptnotes produced by?

**Megana:** Megana Rao.

**Craig:** What? Who’s it edited by?

**Megana:** Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Our outro is by whom?

**Megana:** Let’s just go ahead and say Matthew Chilelli. We haven’t picked one out yet.

**Craig:** If you at home have an outro, to whom or to where should you send a link?

**Megana:** To ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Oh. That must also be a place where they can send longer questions, but for shorter questions on Twitter–

**Megana:** Where are you at, Craig?

**Craig:** I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust. We must have T-shirts. They’re surely great. They’re from Cotton Bureau. Megana, where can we find the show notes for this episode and all episodes?

**Megana:** At johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

**Craig:** That’s all great and fine, but what if I want to sign up to become a Premium Member? Where do I go?

**Megana:** You can sign up at scriptnotes.net, which is also where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record.

**Craig:** Right now. Megana, that was a joy. Honestly, if people at home aren’t clamoring for you and I to do this every day, there’s something wrong with them.

**Megana:** You guys can request more content with hashtag #craigana.

**Craig:** Yes! Hashtag #craigana. Thank you, Megana. That was fantastic.

**Megana:** That was fun. Thanks for a fun episode, Craig.

[Bonus Segment]

**Craig:** What should we talk about today on our Bonus Segment for these fine folk?

**Megana:** I think that it’s time for us to face on issues of millennials.

**Craig:** It’s happened. I’ve been clamoring for this for a while as well. Megana is a millennial extraordinaire. Unlike a lot of my grouchy generational cohort, I love millennials. I think they’re great. Millennials are better at a lot of things than we were. Also, millennials, as they get into their dotered ages, the dotage, as they arrive at dotage, meaning they’re in their 30s and 40s, they’re going to be running this business. I’m going to need a job. I need millennials to take care of me. I think it’s time for us to dig in a little bit more into this generation that a lot has been said about, but probably quite a few misconceptions have been formed about, and who are indeed going to be shortly assuming the mantle of being in charge of this whole place. Megana, it hasn’t happened yet. Millennials have not yet taken over Hollywood, but surely it’s coming.

**Megana:** I think I would argue that it is happening. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a millennial, Greta Gerwig, Michaela Coel, Chloe Zhao. I think that there are a lot of millennials who are doing exciting things in Hollywood right now.

**Craig:** There are a lot of exciting millennial artists. The question is, where are the millennials who are in charge? I think about Hollywood, and Hollywood has always been very good at exploiting the young. They practically invented the art of it. When it comes to running things, I do remember when I started out, most of the people that were running things were white men who were seemingly between 50 and 60. Right now the people that seem to be running things seem to largely be white men and women between 50 and 60. Is that always going to be the thing? Are millennials going to get there a little faster? It certainly seems like the one thing that your generation is not patient about is changing stuff.

**Megana:** Are you saying in terms of studio heads and executive leadership?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m saying why haven’t you stormed the Bastille yet and taken over? In I think it was the ’80s, CAA was swarmed from a bunch of, they called them the Young Turks, but I think they were all in their 30s. They were the millennials of their time and broke away from the old, frumpy agencies and began their own thing. It seems like that some sort of millennial revolution is going to happen sooner or later. There are some things that are built in to the way life functions right now that might make it a little bit more difficult for them than it was say for Baby Boomers in the ’80s, specifically the fact that our world is falling apart, slightly.

**Megana:** I don’t know. I wonder if there’s some economic reasons why it would be tougher for millennials and the industry to assume that sort of risk.

**Craig:** Oh, really? You seem to be suggesting that perhaps there have been some sort of multi-year pandemic and shutdown and that housing costs were at an all-time high and that the entertainment industry itself had undergone some sort of minor upheaval, like the disappearance of the theatrical film business. Things are changing too damn fast. It’s hard to get a hold on it.

**Megana:** Also, things aren’t changing fast enough. As we’ve talked about with the Pay Up Hollywood stuff, the cost of living in LA is increasing very quickly, but other things like wages are not matching that.

**Craig:** Millennials found themselves trapped in between two things. The business is transforming, but on the other side all this other stuff isn’t transforming, but just continuing, including, I think probably, as much as Hollywood likes to pat itself on the back, diversity at the higher levels of things probably is not where it ought to be. I think we can say for sure. I don’t know, from my point of view, as Oldie Olderson, to seem rather hopeful, I will say from my longer point of view, things are definitely better now in lots of ways than they were back then. Shall I count the ways or will it be depressing?

**Megana:** No, I’d like to hear it.

**Craig:** For one, the consciousness around diversity didn’t exist. I’m not going to say that it’s higher now. It literally did not exist at all. No one talked about it. If you were to say something like, “Oh, that’s weird, everyone in this room is a man,” then somebody would be like, “Whatever. Shut up.” No one would care. Much less, “There’s no one in here who is a person of color.” No one cared about anything. It just was not a topic at all. That has changed dramatically, and certainly for the better. The ability to make yourself known to the world was a zero back then.

Now everyone has a megaphone to the planet. What we do with the megaphone, certainly there are toxic impacts. Everyone does have a megaphone to the planet. The amount of material that’s made now is I believe larger than it was then. We can say, “Hold on, they made lots and lots of movies back then.” Yeah, true, but there were essentially three networks, and now there are streamers that put out so much context. Netflix alone I think makes more stuff in a year than everybody combined made in 1994. There is more stuff, but I suspect that you’re going to tell me, there are some areas where things are worse or have not improved at all.

**Megana:** I think with more content and the more shows that we’re getting from streamers and places like Netflix, we’re also seeing shorter season orders and smaller rooms, and so whereas on a network show in the ’90s you would have, what, a 22-episode season?

**Craig:** Yeah, or 26 episodes, something like that, something nuts.

**Megana:** If you were a staff writer on that show, there’d be so many opportunities for you to write an episode or go to set, because there’s just more material to be written and to be worked on. Now it seems like you have to elbow your way in to get one out of six or eight episodes on a streamer.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. That’s a great point. The streaming business has introduced a slight McDonaldsization to how we employ people. The people who are always going to get squeezed by that are the people who are on the younger end of things. In your cohort, is there any sense that at least you’re no longer the rookies, that it’s Generation Z are in the rookie zone, and you guys have a little bit of seasoning, picking up a little bit of authority as you progress through this business?

**Megana:** Gosh, I don’t know, it’s hard because right now the mood feels so like we’re all sort of coming out of this sluggish, depressive few years. I talked to so many millennials who have been assistants for sometimes over 10 years and I don’t think that that’s something that older generations necessarily dealt with. I would imagine that it’s more like welcome to the bottom.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Welcome to the bottom, that’s a decent title for… That’s depressing.

**Megana:** Not for all millennials. I don’t know whether that’s because the idea of pursuing film and television as a career has become more popular, so the people who are pursuing this, the pool has expanded. I don’t know, I’m curious what you think about that.

**Craig:** Everyone talks about everything more, so yes, it’s possible that everybody wants to do this. I think there is more of a sense that everybody can do anything they want, because access in a way became both worse and better at the same time. I guess when everybody has a megaphone, nobody’s listening to anyone, so there is that problem. I’m part of the weirdest generation, Generation X. We don’t know what the hell we are. We never considered ourself really generational. Nobody likes Baby Boomers. I think we can all agree on that. They’re the worst. Even they agree. They know. They know they’re the worst. I don’t think we ever thought of ourselves as a cohort in a really weird way. I just didn’t. Is there a sense among millennials and/or Generation Z that Generation X is the problem, that we’re the ones that are blocking the path up or creating that kind of permanent bottom?

**Megana:** No. I think we should just continue to blame everything on the Boomers.

**Craig:** Great. Thank God.

**Megana:** Do you think it’s Generation X that is the problem? I don’t think it is. Generation X, let’s define terms, that’s 45 to 55?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s about right. Let’s see, Generation X is born between 1965 and 1980, so I’m a younger Generation X kind of person. It seem like actually you can go even up to 62 kind of thing. Oh no, 1965 is just 57. Then 1980 is young. Now we’re talking about 42. 42 to 57. Let’s just call it 40s and 50s. That seems reasonable. The 40s and 50s people, we are mostly in charge of this business. There are definitely some Baby Boomers sitting on boards and thing, but not too many that are still in charge, I think. It seems like we’re the ones that are in charge. I don’t know, I hope that we would be doing better than our Boomer people before us.

For a generation that has been labeled as soft and afraid and fragile, it’s endured quite a bit. I don’t see that as a reality. I worry about this permanent bottom thing. That’s bad news. There’s something that happened, I noticed, in the feature business, where studios empowered producers, and producers became incredibly abusive of screenwriters, and it got to the point where essentially we were running out of screenwriters, because everyone just left. Nobody wanted to do it. Either they never got a chance to get good because they were replaced constantly and treated like widgets, or they fled to television. We were running out of feature writers.

Towards the end of my feature career, because I started really concentrating on TV, I was getting a stupid amount of calls for work, to the point where I’m like, “I am not this good. I don’t deserve this number of phone calls. No one’s left. This means no one’s left.” When I say no one’s left, no one’s left who has 20 years of experience. No one was allowed to become experienced. Everybody who wasn’t allowed to become experienced was punished for their inexperience, and so all that was left were the few people from my generation that had been allowed to become experienced, who essentially had been allowed to fail, because they kept making movies. They were doing things. We were taught.

There’s no system for teaching. I’m worried that the same thing is happening everywhere, that no one is allowed to learn and be taught, and so we run out of people to come and refresh the troops, to be the new A-list people of tomorrow. For all the lip service that we pay to bringing new kinds of people in, it doesn’t matter if we don’t teach and nourish the next group. This is nerve-wracking to me. Actually, I’m shooketh, as millennials say. I’m shooketh.

**Megana:** I have a question for you, because I think feature films are interesting, because I had a friend who also pointed out that a part of this problem with trying to have a career as a feature writer as a younger person is that the mid-range studio films don’t really exist anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Megana:** It’s very hard, and reflective of what we’re seeing is that it’s almost impossible to go from being someone who’s making these low-budget indies to then being granted the reins to a major studio tent pole. To your point about teaching, who taught you? What was your process like? Do you think that it was the opportunity to make some of those mid-tier movies?

**Craig:** Yes, which is all I made for a while, because the movies that I made, generally speaking, cost between $18 million and $50 million. That was the meat and potatoes of our business, movies that weren’t tent poles, that weren’t massive budget items, that were producable and shootable and makable and releasable. If they failed, they failed. If they hit, they really hit. That was great. Everybody loved that. That was where you learned. There was a lot of it. Then there were rewrites and there’d be other rewrites, but you learned, because there was stuff to move around in between. Then it all just went away. Who do people hire? When they don’t have a lot of stuff to make, they hire the most experienced, quote unquote, best writers they can find who are available, because there’s not that much stuff. Then what happens? Those people age up.

As we get older, we start to lose touch. Our goodness becomes more narrowed to certain areas and we are less good in other areas. Comedy, notably. I’m not being ageist. I’m just being factual, that people who are in their 60s cannot possibly be plugged into what is culturally relevant to people in their 20s in the way the people in their 20s are. Just factually impossible. There was nobody then left to turn to, because so few people had been trained, because there was nothing to train them with.

It was like if you get rid of the Minor Leagues in baseball and you just go, look, everybody has to just come from high school and then we’re going to throw you into the Major Leagues and you’re good or you’re not good. No one’s trained. You just keep going, okay, well let’s just trade for the people who have been trained in the Minor Leagues when they existed. Then those people all get old and then what do you do?

I’m worried that the same thing is happening in television because of the way, like you say, the shorter season orders, the mini rooms, how fast things go. People don’t get trained. They cannot grow up with this system. They start carping at each other and blaming each other for things, because when there’s scarce resources, people start to hurt each other in their attempt to get those scarce resources. It’s a mess. Basically, what I’m saying is I’m worried about your generation, especially when I’m saying, okay, people have been an assistant for 10 years. Some people want to be assistants. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you don’t, and you’re on your 10th year, that’s problematic.

**Megana:** Last question for you, I see the benefits of what you’re saying and how it would grow the next generation of writers, creators, directors, executives, people to move up into leadership roles. Do you think that there are business benefits towards doing that, because I don’t think that it would necessarily change unless there was an economic impact that studios would also see.

**Craig:** A massive benefit for studios. It’s research and development. Other industries understand this inherently, but in Hollywood, everyone is so focused on what you just did and are you making money right now that they don’t have time to think about sowing a field for the future. As far as they’re concerned, they’re going to get fired soon anyway also. What are they doing? Growing the next generation of brilliant writers to benefit the person that knocked them off the perch? This is the issue. I’ve said as much to people who run studios, that ultimately somebody is going to be left without a chair in the musical chairs game, and they’re not going to have people who are any good to write these things, because they’re not being trained properly at all and they don’t care. They don’t care, because that’s going to be somebody else’s problem.

If I were the chairman of one of these corporations, not just the person running the studio, chairman of one of these corporations, the answer is pretty simple. Look, there’s certainly plenty of good in what they call their training programs, which are almost exclusively focused at increasing diversity in the hiring pool. Those are fine, but they’re not the same thing as getting hired and working. The experience of being hired and working in the real situation, not a simulation, but the real deal, live fire on the battlefield, there’s nothing like it. That’s how you learn. That and that alone is really how you learn. They are not going to get, they meaning the businesses, are not going to get the people they need at the level they want unless they start increasing those opportunities and that means paying people and keeping them on longer so that they can live and afford a home and can have a family and learn and get better. We had this for, I don’t know, 100 years, and then we just suddenly went, meh.

**Megana:** That’s really helpful. I’m also interested to hear what other people have to say and would love for people to write in with their experiences.

**Craig:** Yes, and as always, tell me I’m wrong. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’m worried.

**Megana:** Unshake Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want to be an optimist. I do. I think every pessimist wants to be an optimist. This is not a rosy picture. The fact that my generation’s cranky about your generation isn’t going to help. Tell me I’m wrong or tell me I’m not even right enough. That’s my other favorite kind, like, “You weren’t angry enough.” Sorry.

**Megana:** As always, do what makes your heart sing.

**Craig:** Do what makes your heart sing.

Links:

* [Logitech K860 has Bluetooth!](https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k860-split-ergonomic.920-009166.html)
* [Take this typing test -](https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=2&textfile=benchmark.txt) Craig got a 110 wpm!
* [Barton Fink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink)
* [Chernobyl](https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl), [Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981) and [The Dropout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dropout)
* [60 Seconds With Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/crosswords/who-made-my-puzzle-cox-rathvon.html) and puzzle [here](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/27/acrostic)
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* [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

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