Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 570 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a followupisode.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** We’re taking a look at several of the big industry problems we’ve discussed over the past few years and examining what progress had been made. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to tell a heartwarming story just for Craig about firing your managers.

**Craig:** Don’t go further. We have to talk about followupisode.

**John:** Isn’t that so adorable?

**Craig:** It’s adorable. Did you just invent that?

**John:** As I was typing it up yesterday in the show notes, I decided that’s what it is. It’s followupisode.

**Craig:** Followupisode. I’m actually angry about how many people are going to steal that. I’m angry at them, and I’m angry for you about it. Wonderful.

**John:** I don’t know that I actually invented it. I bet if we did a Google search, we could find someone else who’d said it before. It feels right for our show.

**Craig:** Then I’m going to get angry at you. Here’s the point. I’m going to get angry.

**John:** Craig, there are no original thoughts. Just like you can’t be angry at somebody for stealing your idea for a movie about tennis players, you can’t be upset about-

**Craig:** Followupisode. It’s a followupisode. I love this.

**John:** To help us with our followupisode, we have not one but two special guests. Liz Alper is a writer/producer who’s worked on Chicago Fire, Hawaii Five-0, The Rookie, and Day of the Dead. She co-founded the Hollywood Pay Up movement and serves on the WGA board. Liz Alper, welcome back.

**Liz Alper:** It’s so nice to be back.

**Craig:** Hi.

**Liz:** Hello. It’s so nice to hear your voices.

**Craig:** Likewise.

**John:** Yay.

**Liz:** Yay.

**John:** Brittani Nichols is a comedy writer, actress, and organizer known for Suicide Kale, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and the Emmy Award-winning Abbott Elementary, on which she’s also a producer. Welcome, Brittani.

**Brittani Nichols:** Hello, and thank you for having me again.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** Now, Brittani, apparently we are pulling you out of the Abbott Elementary room. I feel like it’s maybe our responsibility to give you some pitches to take back into the room. Guys, let’s help her out here. What could Brittani pitch when she goes back in there?

**Craig:** That’s what she was hoping for, randoms pitching her ideas on her show, because that never happens.

**John:** I’ve not seen any comic runners about the classroom pets. Sometimes there’s hermit crabs. There can be gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters. One hamster always eats the other hamster.

**Liz:** They always escape. They’re always infesting the school. They’re somewhere. It’s a treasure hunt for them.

**Brittani:** That’s good. Stealing that. Please cut this out so no one can trace it back to this podcast.

**John:** I also have really distinct memories of when it’d be rainy and so we couldn’t go out for recess, how we did recess in the classroom, and thumbs up, seven up. Do you remember thumbs up, seven up?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Brittani:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You don’t see that very often.

**Craig:** Terrible game.

**John:** I remember the way my desk would smell. I could smell the cleaner on my desk when you lay your head down for thumbs up, seven up.

**Craig:** I remember that smell. My parents were public school teachers, so the stories that I could share would just be… I don’t know, you guys run for what, is it 24 minutes?

**Brittani:** 21.

**Craig:** 21 minutes of heavy Jewish sighing. I think that would be a very accurate episode. To my parents.

**Liz:** Craig, I had a similar experience growing up, but one of my parents is Asian. It was just a melding of cultures in one sigh. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful coming together.

**Craig:** Heavy Asian sighing is also-

**Liz:** The disappointment translates to any language.

**Craig:** Oh my god, Megana, tell us about heavy Indian sighing, would you? It’s a thing. It’s just a thing.

**Megana:** It’s an art form.

**Craig:** It is an art form of just disappointment, giving up.

**Megana:** With an Asian sigh, the disappointment manages to carry the entire immigrant experience in that one sigh.

**Craig:** All of it, yes, the whole thing.

**Megana:** The burden.

**Craig:** That’s the generational trauma.

**Liz:** It’s an ancestral sigh. You feel the weight of your ancestors coming out in that disappointment.

**Craig:** That’s right. There are ghosts in that sigh. That’s 21 minutes, for sure.

**John:** I just had the WASPy sort of eh. There was no special pressure on my side.

**Craig:** No, WASPs are not like that. They don’t have it. They don’t have the sigh.

**John:** We got nothing. Generational power but nothing else, I’ll say.

**Craig:** You probably came out better than we did just all around. It’s exciting to have both of you on, because we do have quite a bit of follow-up. John had a really good point that we do these shows and we dig into these movements that happen. There have been quite a few movements over the last five years. It is good to take stock as you go, because it’s very easy to fall into the trap of promoting stuff when it’s exciting and hot and new and everyone is focused on it, because it’s fresh injury. Then we can forget. We don’t want to forget.

**John:** Craig, we have two live shows coming up. Do you want to remind our listeners when our live shows our?

**Craig:** I do. Our first live show, they’re almost back to back, it’s on October 19th here in Los Angeles. It is sold out, because we are the Jon Bon Jovi/Bon Jovi band of podcasts. You can still get tickets for the livestream.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** You can not only see the show, but also you will see all the things that ultimately we ask Matthew to take out. That’s when you’ll realize that each podcast recording is 19 hours long.

**John:** He cuts it down to a tight little over an hour.

**Craig:** A tight hour.

**John:** It’s a lot going into that.

**Craig:** Seven hours of just crying. We will also be doing two, not one, but two live shows at the Austin Film Festival. One of them will be a live Three Page Challenge. The other one will be a good old-fashioned, slightly drunk live show.

**John:** I think it’s a 10 p.m. start on that. It’s going to be fun.

**Craig:** You know when I say slightly drunk I mean medium to seriously drunk. If you’re going to be at the Austin Film Festival and you want to be considered for that Three Page Challenge, we’ve added a new checkbox on the submission form, and when I say we, I mean John and Megana have, at johnaugust.com/threepage. That’s the word three and page.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Megana, I guess we also have some follow-up from our previous episode about our going to Austin Film Festival. What did Melissa have to say?

**Megana:** Melissa wrote in and said, “In a recent episode, Craig and John discuss their initial hesitation to return to the Austin Film Festival this year due to the atrocious political policies in Texas, specifically towards women. As a writer born and raised in Texas, I also feel conflicted whenever I go back there, but ultimately decided to attend AFF again as well. I put together a list of local female-owned restaurants and bars within two miles from the conference center so that at the very least we can spend our vacation money at places that support the women that are stuck in the Texas hellscape.”

**Craig:** That’s a really useful thing to have. Thank you, Melissa, because in all fairness, John and I are returning to Austin with some conflict in our hearts. This is a nice way to help. I like this. We will be doing some other things, I’m sure.

**John:** If you want to follow through, there’s a link in the show notes. It goes to a Google doc that she’s put together. It’s great and talks through some really great restaurants and places that I wouldn’t have considered, I didn’t know existed. Now I will go there and support some local restaurants, some local female restaurateurs.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here. The reason why we all assembled today is to talk about what progress has been made on some social issues, some issues facing this industry. I thought we’d do it in chronological order. We’re going to look at Me Too, assistant pay, policing/cop shows, and abortion rights. I suspect we’ll find common themes between them is that it’s very easy to focus on a thing when it’s new and right in front of you, but it’s hard to keep up that pressure, and that things tend to revert to a mean, and also that the pandemic changed things. I think there was some momentum on some stuff that got derailed by the pandemic. We’ll see whether we can get that back or what is the next step on that. Let’s jump into it.

Let’s start with Me Too. Hashtag Me Too apparently goes back to 2006, but it’s really in 2017 when we first had the Harvey Weinstein articles. There was the Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey article. There was also the Ronan Farrow piece. I think we had a great villain in Harvey Weinstein at the start. We have a movement focused on holding men accountable for terrible things they were doing in the industry and outside of the industry.

**Craig:** We are at the five-year point. When you listen to this, it’ll just be a few days after, but we’re recording this, so essentially the day before the five-year anniversary of Me Too. In my lifetime, I can’t think of too many movements that caught fire and had as much fast impact as the Me Too movement. That is not to say it is complete impact. I think we can all look around and see that there is a line. There was before that, and there’s after that. The after that does look quite different. I guess we should dig into how different and what’s gone well and where do we still need to do work.

**John:** Liz, can you help us out by thinking back to five years ago and as this story broke, what was surprising to you about it at the moment? What did you see happening right away? What impact did you feel immediately, and what were the ripples after that?

**Liz:** It’s interesting that you guys brought up the five-year mark, because I think that was such a crucial point for so many of these movements that we see that took off. Bringing that up at the beginning, because Me Too has been so much more than just holding abusers accountable.

There was a shift when the Me Too movement came on the scene, especially for women like me, who at the time of the Me Too movement, I was basically in my late 20s, early 30s, and was realizing that all of these things that I had been told to normalize – the fact that I would be sexually harassed on set, and I had been sexually harassed on set for many, many years – that that was not okay.

Before, there was this idea of, this is part of paying my dues as a young woman in Hollywood. When Me Too burst on the scene, it shifted this view of what dues meant in Hollywood and the fact that because I was a woman, I was expected to pay a price that was so much higher than my male counterparts, or most of my male counterparts, because Me Too does affect a lot of men, as we’ve heard the stories. I don’t want to ostracize those victims either. I think it really did immediately change how we had viewed the culture of Hollywood. Suddenly, it wasn’t something to be glorified. It was something to be deemed toxic and needed fixing.

I think immediately, when all of this happened, and especially with Harvey being held responsible, it really did feel like, “Wow, maybe these awful feelings that I have, maybe these aren’t my fault. Maybe this isn’t my fault that I feel bad when this supervisor touches my rear when I’m on set or says gross, sexualized things to me when no one else is around. Maybe that really isn’t okay.” It wasn’t.

I think now, we are hopefully helping a new generation of Hollywood newbies come in and say, “You should be be protected.” It’s no longer a, “You won’t be protected. This is an open secret. This is just what you have to do in order to show that you belong here.” Now, it’s, “No, you’re absolutely right. You deserve to be respected, and you deserve to be protected, and you deserve to feel safe in your workplace.” I do feel like that feeling has permeated the Hollywood culture. That’s nice to see.

**John:** Brittani, I’m curious, what was your initial reaction to the Me Too movement, and how has it progressed or changed in your mind? What is your feeling about the impact that calling these people out and calling out this culture has had in the industry?

**Brittani:** When Liz was talking, I was thinking about what I was doing when this first happened. I remembered just how everyone was talking about it, people that weren’t in entertainment. I was still on Facebook at the time, unfortunately, and seeing people there talk about it.

I remember this pressure to share, which was I think another side of it that doesn’t get talked about a lot, because it was really nice to witness people having the freedom to finally tell these stories and feel like they were being heard. Just in my own mind, I was like, “If I don’t do this, if I don’t use this hashtag, do people think that nothing bad has ever happened to me?” I was like, “Am I now hurting by not saying yes, here is another voice, here is another identity that you might think might not be impacted by these things? If I’m not speaking up, do people think it’s happening to less people?” I just remember having that internal battle of, “Do I have to say something now or am I letting someone down by not saying something?” Grappling with that was my feelings I think at the initial moment.

Going forward, I have the same feelings that I think I have about every movement or moment, which is just it’s so hard to keep momentum going. Keeping the conversation going and talking to people about it in your everyday life feels like the stickiest way to make it present and to make it felt is to just keep having conversations with people even when this national moment or the media attention goes away, just letting people know that you haven’t forgotten, that you still are there, is how I think it still crops up for me personally.

**Craig:** I feel like as far as these movements go that sometimes flame up and then disappear a little bit, Me Too has been incredibly successful from just looking at the way it has turned into a steady cultural norm as opposed to a movement. New social morays were established that should’ve been there from the start and unfortunately weren’t. Now, they seem like they’re there. That’s not to say that bad things don’t continue to happen. They don’t continue to happen inside of a culture that nods, quietly approves, passively approves. It does seem like there has been real change in that regard. It’s nice to see.

I think that in a strange way, it also affirmed how many good people there were, in a nice way, because after all these things came to light, there were still so many women who were still working happily hand in hand with men. There were so many men that were still working happily hand in hand with women and continue to. There are men and women, lots, most, I believe most, who are capable of working together in a way that is respectful of each other. Maybe I’m a Pollyanna, but I feel like we did illuminate perhaps some of the better angels of our nature. Am I a Pollyanna?

**John:** I don’t know. Let’s look at what has been achieved, because I think if you’re looking for the good things that have happened out of this, there was accountability for some really terrible people who did some terrible things, and so Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby.

**Craig:** Les Moonves.

**John:** Les Moonves. We had other showrunners who are no longer running their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Maybe a good thing. Also some big misses, like Donald Trump still got elected after doing clear sexual harassment. I would agree with you that this notion – let’s use the term open secret – this idea that we would just look the other way at people who were doing this stuff, that probably has changed over the past five years, that we recognize, “Oh, you cannot be doing that. He cannot be doing that. This is a problem.” I think we’re more likely to believe a woman who says that a thing happened from the start. Actually, this might be a good time to bring out a listener question here, because Megana had a person, Stay Or Go, who was talking about a project that has a known harasser involved with it. Do you want to read us through this question?

**Megana:** Stay Or Go wrote in and said, “Recently, I was in talks for a project when the producer mentioned he had an actor with a proven in court of law history of abuse in mind to play the lead. I’d worked for this producer before, and in the past, he’d been quick to call out abusers. I was surprised and asked if he was aware of this person’s checkered past. He said he was aware, but then segued into a lecture saying there are two sides to every story, Me Too was a good thing in theory but had gone too far, and so on. I politely passed, and the project moved forward with another writer and the actor in question. Then a week later, I found out a different producer that I was currently working for also decided to hire this very same actor.

“I work in the low-budget genre space, and no matter the producer, well-documented abusers always seem to find their way onto the list of casting suggestions and are usually defended any time I try to steer the conversation away from them. I understand getting any movie made is hard. These names still trigger financing. They’re looking to work. No one wants to be reduced to their worst moments for all their days. Yet very few have faced real consequences or shown remorse beyond the customary apologetic press release. That’s not even getting into alleged abusers. Given that a no-name like myself has little influence on who may come aboard later in the process, is this simply a reality one has to begrudgingly learn to live with?”

**Craig:** That’s a tricky one.

**John:** That’s a tricky one, because I think it actually speaks to this moment that we’re in, is that maybe we’ve knocked out some of the worst, biggest offenders, but there’s people we know have some history we don’t feel great about. We’re like, “What are we going to do about this?” We’ve had the conversation about John Lasseter, who was let go from Pixar for his issues. People have the decision whether they’re going to work for him at his new animation company. Liz, when you see Stay Or Go’s letter here, what’s your instinct? Could Stay Or Go choose to not work on a project that might have a bad person involved on it? What’s your instinct?

**Liz:** When I hear that letter, she’s absolutely right, because the people who have seen the consequences of Me Too have been the ones with the highest profile, because they have the most to lose, because what they really value is their public image. Their public image is what gets them work, what gets them jobs. If you are flying below the radar, you are essentially escaping any sort of significant consequence. That’s something that we’ve seen not just for sexual harassers and the Me Too movement but also for chronic emotional, mental, sometimes even physical abusers and bullies in the industry who maybe have no history of sexual abuse or harassment but are harassers of a different nature. I think asking those questions and demanding an answer is exactly what she should be doing. I think to continue doing that, she’s going to be able to find the people whose values align with hers.

At this point in our industry, if you can say no, say no, if you can say no. Don’t ever feel like you are less than or you are condoning something if you are in a position where you have to take the work. That’s the thing that I feel a lot of people in the industry struggle with, because how do you feel like you are a morally righteous person if you are agreeing to work on a project that has a known abuser attached to it? Quite honestly, the reason is because you have to fight another day. You have to be able to be here to fight another day, because you have to be the one that others hook up with in order to actually enact that change. If you’re not here for us to bring into the next phase of justice in this industry, then we’re worse for it.

Really, it comes down to can you take the work, do you think you can forgive yourself for taking the work, knowing that it’s so you can have the money to survive in this industry for long enough to bring about HR reform or any sort of workplace reform that is necessary to ensure that people like that don’t get jobs and that there are actual solid consequences to the actions of those who are flying under the radar. That’s something that you will have to decide.

You should also know that you should be able to forgive yourself if you find yourself in a position that you have to say yes, because that’s usually what happens is that people are in a position where they cannot say no and feel as though they are part of the problem when they’ve been put in that position, they haven’t been given a choice. I think what she’s asking is really, “What do I do in order to survive this?” which is something that I’m asking every single day. There’s no good answer to it. It’s just take it case by case and see what your tolerance for it is.

**John:** Brittani, I remember at the start of all this, we would have workshops, we’d have panels, groups would come together to try to figure out what it was that we were going to do as an industry to grapple with this. There was always talk. There was a special committee formed. Anita Hill was leading a thing. There was going to be anonymous reporting lines. None of that structure seems like it really happened. There’s the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, but there’s not a hotline you call for sexual harassment or for the issues that Me Too was grappling with.

When you encounter a situation like this or your friends encounter a situation like this, what is your advice to do when you’re either facing abuse or dealing with a person who is taking unfair advantage of situations? What is your advice to writers facing these situations?

**Brittani:** Be loud about it to the people that you trust I think is unfortunately where we’ve landed with all this. I think that the things you’re talking about, things that Liz just mentioned, so much of it is about accountability. What I always say when people talk about accountability is that when you’re asking for accountability, something bad has already happened.

We’re not putting in enough effort, I think, into prevention, into how does this stuff trickle down. We’re always having these very high-minded, high-level conversations about bad shit. So much of our energy is put into that, when so often there are just warning signs, red flags left and right about the way that these people interact and the way that they treat people. That’s not the only bad thing they’re doing. That might be the only bad thing that people think rises to some level in which it needs to be addressed. That’s why I think we’re going… When people are weird, you should very openly be able to talk about people behaving weirdly. That is usually a sign that something more nefarious is going on.

I think until, as writers especially, we have an established norm for rooms where even low-level abuse is just not allowed, we’re always going to be dealing with what do we do in the aftermath instead of what can we be doing to make sure that these black dots on the white page, that we pay attention to them and that we don’t just ignore them.

**Craig:** That goes to who actually does carry out the work, because in the early days of these things, there are organizations and there are panels and blue ribbon commissions and so forth, but ultimately, it’s just everybody doing the work. It’s all of us, day to day, who work with other people, trying our best to treat each other better. That part, again I’ll just be a bit of a Pollyanna about it, does seem to have improved somewhat. I think that people are thinking more about each other. It just feels like even if they’re dragged into it kicking and screaming that empathy and putting yourself in other people’s shoes and asking yourself how would this feel to another person does seem like more of a thing.

When I started in this business in the ’90s, the culture was… I don’t know if this was left over from the ’80s and whatever amount of cocaine was still just exogenously in the air, but it was aggressive. It was very competitive. It was all very cutthroat. It doesn’t seem as much that way anymore.

I never want to downplay what a movement has done positively, because we can lead to despair. I think that even though our business is still very imperfect and there are still people that have yet to be exposed, there are more and more people who are being exposed. That’s 2% of the situation. Then 98% of the situation is just the day-to-day business of working with each other, which seems to have improved somewhat. Progress, but not perfection.

**John:** I would agree with you there. I think as I look back to the conversations we had on Scriptnotes early on in Me Too about writers coming and talking about their experiences, I don’t envision those writers having the same experiences five years later that they did then. I think the norms have changed enough about what people can get away with, that the most egregious things have not been happening, and that some better conversations have been happening about how to do stuff. Liz, Brittani, how much progress do you think we’ve made on Me Too over the last five years? It doesn’t have to be a report card, but some progress, a little progress, a lot of progress? What’s your feeling?

**Liz:** Yeah, some progress. This is my opinion. I think it’s possibly going to be an unpopular one. We’re five years into a movement that’s attempting to undue attitudes towards women that have existed for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. The fact that women in I believe it was the 1960s or the 1970s still couldn’t get a credit card without their husband’s approval and signature… This is the very, very beginning of progress. Yes, some progress. Please keep it coming. Also understanding that five years I don’t think can solve what hundreds and hundreds of years of this sort of misogynistic-based culture that we live in in this country has brought. I think we’re trying.

**John:** Brittani, no progress, some progress, lots of progress? What’s your feeling on Me Too?

**Brittani:** I think there’s been some progress. I think that if we think that the progress is going to happen via systems that have always failed us, as Liz has mentioned, we’re never going to get where we want to be. I think Craig is right in that so much of this is about personal responsibility and people reckoning with their own behavior. I think in that letter, it really came down to one dude saying, “No, but this one is different,” until people realize that that’s what everyone thinks. There are a thousand people saying that, “This time, this friend, this person that I know, this was the exception to the rule. I get it, but this one doesn’t count.”

Until people really are willing to be uncomfortable and willing to make other people uncomfortable and really willing to deal with a high level of discomfort themselves, we’re never going to get where we’re trying to go, because we can’t rely on any structure or any corporate entity to inject morality into an inherently evil business, which is everything. Capitalism is evil. We’ll never figure it out if we’re depending on the people whose entire goal is to just make money, and they don’t care about us.

**John:** Fast forward to September 2019, so Episode 419, we reflected on Me Too and asked what other issues we are not addressing in our industry. Listeners wrote in about assistant pay. That was the first episode where we started talking about assistant pay. Megana Rao got so many emails about assistant pay and stories stacking up and stacking up. As we started telling those stories and started getting outraged on people’s behalves, Liz Alper stepped into the fore and helped start up the Pay Up Hollywood movement, where you’re surveying and talking about how much assistant staff in Hollywood were getting paid and how egregiously low it was. Liz, talk us through those early days of Pay Up Hollywood and this discussion, what happened, and where we are now, if you can, the overview of Pay Up Hollywood.

**Liz:** At the very beginning of Pay Up Hollywood, it was, for me at least, very akin to when Me Too exploded onto Twitter, because again, it was this curtain being pulled back, where all of a sudden, all of this anger and these abuses and this entire industry-long history of abuse and culture of taking advantage of people at the very beginning of their careers was really outed as being the awful, demoralizing, corrupt, and just cowardly thing that was happening in our industry. It was this wild time of everyone feeling like they could share their horror stories without fearing repercussion for once. They could share these publicly.

As Brittani mentioned, there was also this pressure of feeling like you had to share your stories whether you were comfortable doing so or not, because you were worried that if people weren’t really coming out and sharing the worst of their experiences, then the worst of their experiences would be swept under the rug, or people would look at the state of the industry and go, “This isn’t so bad.”

It really became this moment in time where assistants felt, I don’t want to say completely a hundred percent felt safe to share these stories of the awful things that happened to them. I don’t think anyone ever feels truly safe sharing that. I think for once, assistants realized how much they deserve to be better treated and better paid and that they’re worth that, when they had spent years and even decades in Hollywood being told that they have to earn that. It was a dangling carrot that just kept being pulled higher and higher and higher. It was crazy. It was a big, empowering moment that happened when we first exploded on the scene.

**John:** One of the big differences between Me Too and Pay Up is that we actually had numbers here, because we can actually ask, “How much are you getting paid? What is your weekly take home pay?” and see that that is not going to actually be able to afford an apartment in Los Angeles. It was more concrete in a way that what we could have with Me Too.

**Liz:** I think the other thing is this really was born… I’m sure you guys heard a lot about this at the time too, is that assistants felt very left out of the Me Too movement, and rightfully so, because for them, the people who had really in their minds seen a lot of progress with the Me Too movement were people who were higher up the food chain, people with larger profiles, who were saying, “If this could happen to me, imagine what’s going on for other people.” Assistants were the other people. It was something that we were able to get concrete information for, because we realized that concrete information had not been gathered necessarily for me too in seeing which pockets of the industry were being left out of the conversation.

**Craig:** I think there’s a nice intersectionality, if you will, when we help people who are at the assistant level while we are also as an industry making an effort to bring in more women and more people of color. You start to hit a lot of different sectors, because that’s where everyone’s coming in. We have this big lobby for our business. Forever until whenever, we’re talking about three years ago or so, forever, the point of the lobby was you’re getting hazed. That was basically it. You’re getting hazed. It was celebrated. It was funny. It was laughed at. There were articles in the LA Times giggling over how Scott Rudin abused his employees. It was part of our culture, the way that frat culture does that stuff. The idea was you’ll pay your dues and this is how it is and then you become an employer and now you continue the cycle of abuse, lol, ha ha ha.

That more than anything I think has been the thing that has been examined. I know that still there are people who mistreat assistants all the time. Even though we did get some big wins with the agencies raising their payments and just some general attitudes, it’s always going to be an issue. I do think that at least we no longer celebrate a culture of abusing assistants. That’s huge. It’s sad, but it’s huge.

**Liz:** I remember, and I’m sure you guys have experiences like this, and Brittani, I think you may have some experiences like this too, but being assistants and almost comparing war stories of who is getting the most crap at work, who had something thrown at them. There was this survivalist mentality, where it was, “Because I’m able to take all of this abuse, this must mean I’m meant for greatness, because look how much I can handle.” There are assistants now who have talked about the worst abuse that they have gotten is coming from some former assistants who had internalized this idea that this is what it’s supposed to be, this is how you become a great contributor to Hollywood. I don’t think anyone has that attitude anymore. That’s great.

**Craig:** That is great.

**Liz:** That is great because that’s normalizing toxicity in a way that Me Too shone a light on as well. It’s huge.

**Craig:** I do think that a lot of us who come to this business have had, let’s just call it complicated childhoods. Not everyone, but many of us. We are already vulnerable. We are already seeking approval and love. We probably, a lot of us, already have some experience doing exactly what you described, which is essentially winning the battle between yourself and a person who’s attempting to drive you insane. I had definitely had experience like that myself here in this business, where simply because I was able to withstand the madness, I withstood the madness. I’m so glad that this is changing, that that is no longer seen as the test of success, because it shouldn’t be. What for? How about we just get rid of the people who create the madness? There’s a thought. Then we can just do our jobs somewhat happily. It’s hard enough without all the rest of it.

I know people complain all the time, because I see them on Twitter complaining about woke woke woke woke woke woke. If I have to see the word woke one more effing time and how, “Oh, the costs… ” It’s the telling of the costs of just going out of your way to be thoughtful. I’m not getting into policies or anything. I’m just saying generally, what is our individual burden when it come to Pay Up Hollywood or Me Too? Take a moment to just be a little bit thoughtful. You will fail. You’ll have your moments. Everybody isn’t perfect. Everybody will mess up. When you mess up, own it and apologize. Make amends. Move on. I think the more you make empathy and considering other people part of the way you go through it, in theory, the more it will come back to you. God, you know what? I’m very positive today.

**John:** You’re very positive.

**Craig:** It’s disturbing.

**John:** Someone check his medications here.

**Craig:** This is really weird.

**Brittani:** If I could just hop in, because I think Liz named me as someone who possibly had assistant experience. I just want to go on record and say I was not privileged to be an abused assistant. I didn’t have a car for the first three years that I was in LA, and so I couldn’t be an assistant. I think that that is also a part of the conversation that sometimes gets left out when we’re talking about this low-level pay, about the people that can’t even afford to have that low-level pay, to get into these entry-level positions. I don’t have the numbers specifically. I don’t think this is a thing anyone is keeping track of.

I see it in the support staff of the shows that I’ve been on. Sometimes, a lot of the times, actually, the room is more diverse than our support staff, because people just can’t afford to be support staff. They don’t have the support system to be able to be paid $17 or whatever it used to be for 6 years and then maybe get a script if someone’s being kind, and you get 22 episodes in year 7. It’s just cutting out so many people.

The people that are getting pushed out of those spaces because they can’t withstand that abuse of pay and emotionally, they never get to make it to the next level, because they don’t have the resources to withstand what is expected of people that are at the, quote unquote, entry-level position, which oftentimes is not an entry-level position.

**Craig:** I think that’s so important. One of the things that we all hoped – I know, Liz, we talked about this quite a bit in the early days of Pay Up Hollywood – was really that we would try, and by improving the entry, improving the starting position, that you would make it possible for people who otherwise could not afford to take on these terrible jobs, that other people could afford it. Otherwise, we were going to get a lot of kids whose moms and dads were paying for their apartment and their car and their insurance, and not a lot of kids who didn’t have that available.

There is absolutely nothing stopping any of the large institutions in Hollywood or even individual, fabulously wealthy showrunners from, for instance, purchasing a car that could be used for an assistant. People are so much richer than they ought to be. There’s this stinginess. By the way, that is also part of our culture. That’s not Hollywood culture. That’s American culture, that poverty’s good for you, and if I give you stuff, then you’ll be lazy. This goes back to the Puritans. It’s very Calvinistic. We behave as if the crucible is what proves merit. We’ll come back around to this when I get to my One Cool Thing today. The crucible doesn’t prove merit at all. At all.

**John:** All it does is burn things. I have some real life follow-up from last night. I was at the Simpsons premier party at Universal, which was tremendously fun. It was the Halloween episode. I highly recommend the Halloween episode.

We were waiting for it to start, and a young woman came up to me, and she introduced herself saying that she was one of the people who wrote in early on in Pay Up Hollywood. The name she used for that was Christian. Hello, Christian. I asked, “What happened after that time?” because I almost vaguely remembered who she was when she wrote in originally. She said she ended up quitting her last assistant job and just focusing on writing, because she came to this town to become a writer. She had realized that for two years as an assistant, she hadn’t written anything. Basically, she had no capacity left to write when she came home. She had these depression piles around her apartment and couldn’t get focused on anything new.

She felt like some progress had been made, at least in terms of having the conversation about Pay Up Hollywood. She was getting originally minimum wage, $13 an hour for this work that she was doing, incredibly long hours. Sony wouldn’t pay for her cellphone usage. She was supposed to have a stipend for cellphone usage for using her own cellphone. She both wanted me to know she was thankful for us having the conversation, but also that things hadn’t turned out so great.

I asked her, “What advice would you give to somebody who’s moving to town to become a writer and wants one of these writer assistant jobs that always get lauded as being the thing to do?” She said she would recommend to get on one show and be an assistant learn as much as you can on that one show, meet as many people as you can, and then get a job as a receptionist at a law firm, where you can actually make some decent money and actually have brain space to write. That’s her perspective on this.

I think it’s worth thinking about that maybe we are so glamorizing the support staff role as how you’re going to get started in the industry that we’re forgetting that it’s not just the money, it’s the time and the brain space and everything else, that we may be over-hyping what these roles need to be and how foundational they should be for a person coming into the industry.

**Liz:** It’s really hard, because what Pay Up Hollywood does… I honestly can’t sum up what we do better than what Brittani said we needed, because our entire mission has been trying to bring a spotlight to the low pay and the fact that this creates a barrier for a lot of people to get into Hollywood, the fact that Hollywood is not a meritocracy, it’s a pay-to-play industry. If you cannot afford to be here, then it doesn’t matter how well you can write. It doesn’t matter how talented of a director or how good of an agent you could be if you can’t even afford to get onto these apprentice traps. Ultimately, it’s going to be a lot harder for you to break in. I think she’s right that you absolutely need the brain space to be able to write. You need to have the emotional and mental health to be able to write.

The one thing that I have to disagree with and the thing that I hate disagreeing is that you really do have to make sure that you’re networking all the time, because it really does come down to who do you know, who are the people that can represent you. I think you guys have talked about this on the podcast before too. When you get signed by an agent or a manager, the first thing that they ask you is, “Who do you know that we could put you in front of right now and they’ll staff you on their show immediately?” That plays a huge role in who’s getting signed nowadays. I think that’s more of an asterisk to her advice, because it’s great advice.

I just want to make sure that this part of it isn’t glossed over because unfortunately, is the assistant track glamorized? Yeah, because there’s this idea that it’s all upward trajectory, just like with movements. With Pay Up Hollywood and from Me Too and everything that we’re doing, there’s this idea that in order to be successful, it always has to be upward momentum. The truth of the matter is it is jagged. It is signs and cosigns. It is all over the place. Sometimes it is flat-lining, and then you’re revived. It’s just about being able to keep going forward. If you can’t afford to keep going forward, then it’s game over, so yeah, it’s hard.

**John:** Liz, unlike a lot of the things we talk about on the show today, there is an ongoing structure behind this. Payuphollywood.com, people can go there. It’s now an official organization that you are helping to run. You have funding from Women in Film. There’s some ongoing work here. That ongoing work is you’re continuing to do this survey to figure out what their real life conditions are on the ground. Obviously, at the start of the pandemic, Craig and I and a bunch of other people tried to raise money for emergency relief for folks who were out of work because of the shutdowns. What should a person do who wants to learn more about Pay Up Hollywood right now? What’s the next step for them?

**Liz:** First, I’m not going to let you gloss over the emergency fund that you two especially helped raise half a million dollars for, because that was massive. That honestly helped a lot of people who really, really needed it at the time that the pandemic hit. It’s important for us too, because it really shone a light with how few protections there are for the support staff and honestly how few resources, how few financial resources, how few mental health resources there are. If you’re in that position, you don’t know where to go.

We’ve just launched our website. We’ve just received funding from Women in Film. That’s huge, because as a grassroots movement, the work has been done mostly by a group of three. Three people trying to change a living wage in this industry, making sure that people are aware of the fact that people cannot afford to work in Hollywood and are going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, most likely, in many instances.

For us, we realize that this structure is going to let us expand. I think a lot of the bulk of our wins have been with what we’re looking at as more administrative assistants, so writers’ assistants, script coordinators, people who tend to work in office buildings, who have set hours, who have more structure in their jobs than assistants on set, like set PAs, hair and makeup PAs, any production PAs. This structure’s going to help us expand our exposure to those people.

It’s also giving us time to hire a couple… Hopefully, if we can raise the donations, we’ll be able to hire someone whose full-time job is going to be figuring out solutions and helping us make connections to expand our influence throughout the industry, in different parts of the industry than the ones that I’ve had immediate access to. Being a writer and producer, it’s easier for me to know how to reach people in the writing world rather than people who work in reality television.

It’s upward momentum. It’s slow upward momentum. Hopefully, with this expansion, we’re going to be able to talk to a lot more people, not just in agencies and in writers’ rooms and with showrunners, but people at the DGA, people who are onset line producers, mail room heads, people who are also suffering from being woefully underpaid, working in parts of the industry that are crucial to the creative process and not even remotely compensated for it, and also areas that people are saying we need to see more diversity, we need to see more women, we need to see more people from historically under-served groups who are also coming from a background that can’t normally afford to work in these positions. We need their presence. We’re just not willing to pay for it. We’re hoping that we can get them to say we need their presence, and we are now willing to pay for it, because we understand how crucial this is to the process.

All of this structure is letting us get that message out and reach more people who feel the same way we do and just didn’t have an outlet to express it. We’re the outlet. We’re the ones who are gathering all of the resources from the Entertainment Community Fund to JHRTS, all of the organizations, SELA, who can help with financial resources, mental health resources, Legal Aid in case you’re in a situation where you feel like you’re being subjected workplace abuse and you don’t know where to turn.

We’re hoping we can be a hub for support staffers in this industry to turn to if you have a question or you need to be pointed in a direction or you’re looking to contribute to the data and to the picture that we’re building, to show really how bad it is, but also how we can fix it, how we can course-correct, to ensure that we’re not just looking at things that are going to fix the current state, but preventative measures.

We’ve always been campaigning for a 3% increase in salary for every support staffer and really every worker from assistant to coordinator to even manager, because a lot of those people are taking on assistant duties in order to just have a better title, just making sure that we are looking at the sort of measures that are going to keep us from being in this situation again, because we really are coming to a head.

It’s what Craig said. We’re looking at a homogenized industry where the next generation of decision makers are all going to be cut from the same background, and there will be no diversity in storytelling, there will be no diversity in thought, because the people who are in those roles are all the same. That’s really sad.

**John:** Payuphollywood.com is the place where you’re going to go to start with that. Liz, again, thank you for everything you’ve done to keep that fire burning. Let’s go on to a listener question from Gabe. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabe wrote in and said, “Post the George Floyd uprisings, I expected some kind of change in our industry that perpetuates the myth of the hero cop, not huge changes at first. The police procedural industrial complex is too big and lucrative to dismantle immediately, but I expected to see less new copaganda shows and movies.”

**Craig:** That’s a great term.

**Megana:** “The tide of new cop shows getting announced hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s grown, often with showrunners and casts from historically marginalized backgrounds, to show how inclusive copaganda can be. Why aren’t there a flood of shows about private investigators, defense attorneys, and restorative justice? Perry Mason was in production before George Floyd, but it shows that you can make commercial procedurals without making cops and prosecutors the heroes. In fact, our industry used to do it a lot. Are they being pitched but no one is buying?”

**John:** Brittani Nichols, based on your Twitter feed, I think you have strong opinions about policing in America. How do you feel about what’s happened on television in terms of our fictional portrayals of policing on the screen?

**Brittani:** I hate it. I can’t even really speak to it intelligently, because I refuse to watch it. I have a friend actually who is going to be directing an episode of the new Rookie spin-off with Niecy Nash. She’s like, “Oh yeah, and Niecy’s character’s dad, who’s formerly incarcerated, and so there’s this really interesting conversation that they’re having.” I’m like, “Yeah, they’re having the conversation embedded in a show that is still largely about how even if it’s not that cops are good, it’s that this one cop is good.” I’m waiting for the show where it’s just plainly, “No, there’s no good cop. This is what’s happening. This is how this is insidious, and you are complicit, even if you think you are good,” and showing the realities of bad cops. What was the show based on-

**John:** The Shield, Michael Chiklis.

**Brittani:** The Shield, sure.

**John:** Reaching way back for that.

**Brittani:** The Shield. I was watching it with my girlfriend, who is a journalist who focuses on police accountability in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Watching it, she was like, “This is satire, right?” I was like, “No, I don’t think that it is.” I’m not really old enough to have been watching it live and only have looked at Wikipedia and articles to be like, no, I think this was a very well-regarded show that just simply because it was a slightly more interesting, greedy look at sometimes cops are bad, that was enough. Just the bar is on the floor when it comes to these shows. I don’t think they should exist.

**Craig:** They continue to exist. My guess is they will not stop making them, because procedurals, they’re easy generators. When you have to make all these shows, you know that a process is going to get us lots of these shows. Copaganda always is heroes. The problem with portraying reality… This is a really interesting question. Let’s say I’m wandering away from the world of the limited series and I’m talking about an ongoing series that is going to show the reality of how police function. That’s going to be a very frustrating show to watch, because basically, every week, the bad guys win. That’s a hard show to write. That’s a hard to show to write. It’s a hard show to watch. I don’t know how I would approach it in a way where I wouldn’t feel beaten down by it. That’s a challenge more than anything. I think I would do it. I would do it if I could figure out how to do it.

**John:** Liz, you wrote on some of these shows.

**Liz:** I did, yeah. I wrote on The Rookie.

**John:** You are a copagandist.

**Craig:** Yeah, you copagandist.

**John:** You must still know people who are writing on these shows. Tell us about the conversations you’re having with them or they’re having in their rooms.

**Liz:** It’s hard. It’s hard. I also want to point out that the script that I wrote that got me on these copaganda shows was a high-concept sci-fi take on Treasure Island. Someone was like, “This is a great cop show writer. This is someone who can write grounded shit really well.” This is not my fault. That said, I have a lot of people on these shows that I love and respect. I know that they’re struggling with exactly this topic, because they feel culpable. They feel responsible putting this on the air. The question is how do we do this show responsibly, because if I don’t, someone who doesn’t give a shit will come in and do it any way that they want.

**John:** Isn’t that people who worked in Donald Trump’s office, that same idea of like, “Oh, it’s going to be someone worse if it’s not me.” It gets back to some pretty fundamental problems. The problem is the structure of the show itself. It’s what you’re doing. I need to credit Megana here, because she actually did a list of all the shows that are on the air right now. It’s staggering. Craig, help me read through this list, because you forget how many shows there are.

**Craig:** It’s extensive. CSI: Las Vegas, Blue Bloods, Law and Order, Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order: Organized Crime, Chicago PD, Chicago FBI, The Equalizer, NCIS: Los Angeles, SWAT, NCIS, NCIS: Hawaii, FBI, FBI: International, FBI: Most Wanted, Cops, and then there’s police-adjacent.

**John:** These are lawyer shows.

**Craig:** Lawyer shows. We’ve got So Help Me Todd, SEAL Team, Jack Ryan, 911, and Your Honor. Then there are new shows coming, Reasonable Doubt, The Calling, East New York, The Rookie: Feds, Criminal Minds: Evolution, and The Recruit. If you are interested in watching some shows about police officers and the prosecution of citizens, you have a choice. You have a choice. Look, we have friends who work on these shows. My thing is, ideally, the shows begin to slowly incorporate a sense of reality. That would be good. I’m honest. I don’t watch most of these.

**Brittani:** I just want to hop in and say they won’t. They’re not going to do that.

**Craig:** They’re not going to do it.

**Brittani:** There are so many of them for a reason. It’s not an accident. It’s not, “Oops, the procedurals are great.” No, the cops want these shows to exist, because they want people to think that they are good people. I would like to challenge that, doing a show that is realistic and does show that these systems suck and that the people that are policing are often the scum of the earth and doing things that are unimaginably terrible in ways that people watching television have absolutely no idea about.

We watch shows about bad white men all the time. People get on board. Mad Men. Breaking Bad. Succession. All these shows, they’re not critically going, “Yes, I understand that they are evil, and I’m conflicted about enjoying this television show.” No, everyone just cheers for the bad guy. I don’t think that that would be an actual barrier, because Americans love cheering for bad white dudes.

**Craig:** Yes, but Americans are also authoritarian. I believe this, that there is this incredibly strong authoritarian streak throughout a lot of white America in particular. They love to, quote unquote, back the blue. They like the badge. They like that stuff. They don’t mind police brutality. I’ve always said that there’s a huge segment of this country that doesn’t protest when Black people are brutalized by the police. They also don’t protest when white people are brutalized by the police. They don’t care. They like it. That’s where some of the audience is here, I think.

I think people like antiheroes or they like rooting for white guy villains like Tony Soprano and Walter White. When you put the uniform on, suddenly it’s this different thing. There’s just something that happens where I think people want to see those people being the dark, vengeful father that protects us. There must be something in our bones, because look how many of these shows there are. It’s hitting some dopamine, right?

**John:** Craig, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this article that Megana found from Vox called How 70 Years of Cop Shows Taught Us to Valorize the Police. One thing the article points out really clearly is that cop shows weren’t always this way. Cops used to be bungling cops. They used to be fools. It was really the rise of the police procedural and the need to actually use the police as consultants and everything else and to shoot in Los Angeles that the police became more noble and more noble and more noble and infallible.

The film and TV industry, there’s some of the responsibility for the current state of policing in America based on it’s assumed that the police know right. We’ve talked before on the show about the CSI effect. We just assume if they’re showing this proof, then that proof is proof, and those bite marks really must’ve come from this person, because we’ve seen it on TV. I’m frustrated. I don’t see a solution here. Brittani, do you see a solution? We take them all off the air. How do you fix this?

**Craig:** They’re not coming off the air, so what do we do to counter this?

**Brittani:** I would love to see anything. These shows are the greatest works of fiction that exist in entertainment. Anything that just realistically counters these narratives I think would be valuable, because yeah, I think you’re right, they’re not just all going to disappear overnight. Having a show that does show what cops are actually like and what they’re actually doing and does not balk at how people will respond, I would like to see that. I would like to see someone actually try.

**John:** I think it’s safe to just summarize that we’re feeling that little to no progress has been made on copaganda since the George Floyd protest. Is that fair?

**Craig:** I don’t see any. I detect no progress.

**John:** Let’s wrap up this topic by something that’s almost brand new. This is showrunners for abortion rights. We have 1,500 of the top showrunners, creators, directors, signing a letter asking the studios for what they are going to do to help safeguard abortion rights for crews who are working in states that are now limiting abortions after the fall of Roe versus Wade. This is new. This is fresh. As we’re recording this, new stuff may have come out. As we’re recording this, no specific plans have come out of any of these studios for what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Shocking.

**John:** Shocking. My question for the group though is, based on the conversation we’ve had about these previous topics, where do we see this going in the next few years? Obviously, thing could change, the legal landscape. We don’t know what’s going to happen there. This movement for safeguarding reproductive rights for people working in these states, what happens? Is there going to be enough of a structure? Is it going to revert to a meme? Are we going to forget about this? Are we going to still be talking about this five years from now? Brittani, what’s your instinct? Do you think this is going to be a thing we’re still grappling with five years from now? This letter from the showrunners, will this still be a part of the conversation?

**Brittani:** Pass.

**John:** Pass.

**Brittani:** It’s just annoying. Whenever I see 1,500 showrunners do anything, I know that absolutely nothing is going to happen.

**Craig:** Nothing will happen. Oh my god, I love you so much. I’m one of them.

**John:** Craig and I signed it.

**Craig:** You’re right. We have to try. I love an open letter. It’s absolutely true. The people behind the open letter have been doing things, which is really nice. Whatever you call the steering committee, there’s a group of women at the core of this who have been trying quite hard. I think getting the list of 1,500… First of all, there is not such a thing as 1,500 top anything in our business. That already is giggly worthy. I sense from you what I feel in myself, which is it’s a good effort but we are still coming hat in hand to the employers and saying, “What are you going to do?” What I think the employers are going to do is nothing. That’s what I think they’re going to do. I think they’re going to put some window dressing up. They don’t want to stop shooting in Georgia. They don’t want to stop, and they’re not going to.

**John:** Liz, do you have any instinct about what’s going to be happening five years from now? Will we still be talking about this letter five years from now, the same way we’re talking about the Time’s Up articles?

**Liz:** Do I think the letter is going to make people at the studios do anything that’s right? Not all of them. I think that what they’re going to see is a financial risk. When we’re talking about the studios, they talk in terms of profits. Right now, Craig, I know you said we’re never going to stop shooting in Georgia.

**Craig:** They won’t stop.

**Liz:** I actually wonder what would happen is that they use it as a smokescreen, like, “We’re not shooting in Georgia because it’s the right thing to do,” but really it’s because Georgia’s getting more and more expensive to shoot in, because I’ve worked on a couple of shows right now where I’ve said, “We could shoot this in Georgia,” and they’re going, “Georgia’s too expensive.” I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens.

**Craig:** They’re still going to be shooting in Louisiana. That’s the thing. There are too many of these places where they want to go. It’s easy for them to say, “Hey, we shot our show in Canada. If we do it again, we will shoot it again in Canada.” That makes me comfortable. I individually refuse to, say, work on a show in a state that does not guarantee reproductive health rights for women. I won’t do it personally, but I’m rich. That’s no skin off my back. I’m not a hero.

The people who are in the situation where it’s like, “Hey, you’re getting a show for the first time. You’re going to make a show for the first time. This is going to be your career. You will go on. We’re shooting it in New Orleans.” There’s a choice. The only people that can prevent that from happening are the studios, and they’re not going to. What they will do is probably guarantee individual employees some sort of payment and assistance.

Look, there are a bunch of things that our industry does that I just shake my head at and laugh. Any time our industry talks about how progressive they are, sometimes I want to barf, because of the people that so many of these studios are in bed with financially and the way that they will go on. They will host Democratic candidates in their mansions, and then they will turn around as the people who run the studios and go ahead and pump more money into states that won’t guarantee the safety of their own employees. They may be waiting to see if Georgia changes, but that’s not going to stop them from shooting in New Orleans. New Orleans isn’t changing. Louisiana’s Louisiana. It ain’t happening there.

It makes me really angry. I’m just blown away that they couldn’t even just do something. They couldn’t even be bothered with window dressing. I don’t think it’s because they’re locked up in a hundred committee meetings sweating over this. I think that they just go, “Oh look, if we wait three weeks, something will happen. Someone is going to send a dick pic to the wrong person, and that’s what everyone’s going to talk about, and everyone will forget about this.” To some extent, they’re right, because no one’s holding their feet to the fire on this, no matter what we do.

**Liz:** I will say just one last thing about that letter though, because I know you and John both signed it. I have talked to a lot of assistants, as I normally do, who were very happy to at least see the letter, because they felt it was a show of solidarity. That’s what I feel that letter did best is show solidarity with a lot of people who right now don’t necessarily have the access to each other like we do, who felt, “Okay, I feel like if I worked for those people, I could be safe. This is someone who actually values my safety, and that means something to me.”

**Craig:** I love that. By the way, the real percentage is probably 80%. If you worked for 80% of these people, you would be safe. I always think at least 20% of these people are absolutely shameless hypocrites, but at least 80%, I think… Again, I want to credit the women that put it together. They’re really doing the work. All we did was we sent money and we signed a thing. They put it together. They’re pushing the agenda. They’re trying to make stuff happen. What they’re doing is the real work.

**John:** We know how hard the real work is, because early on in Pay Up Hollywood, we were doing the real work. I remember being on calls with Liz. We were trying to talk to this agency boss about raising their minimums. We all know how hard that is. I think if we want to wrap up this whole segment, just say that the things we’ve learned is that it’s very easy to focus on one flashpoint moment. It’s very easy to focus on, “Oh shit, this decision came down, and abortion is now up for grabs.” It’s easy to build up a lot of energy around that. It’s hard to keep it going. I’ll be curious whether showrunners for abortion rights will have the structure to keep things going or if it needs a structure to keep things going. Copaganda, there was no force behind that, so it’s hard to make any of those changes happen. Wow, the follow-up is that it’s tough. It’s tough to do these things, man.

**Craig:** Things are happening.

**John:** Things are happening. Some progress has been made. It’s not like we’ve gone backwards on everything.

**Craig:** In the last 5 years, there has been more progress in our industry over all of these issues than there has been in all the other 25 years now, I think, I’ve been doing this. That’s something. At least because I’m old, I have the perspective of time. There was nothing. Nothing at all happened with any of this for about 25 years. Of course, nothing happened with any of it in all the time before I showed up. Really, I think there is room for hope here. Even as we struggle and fall down in some areas, there’s room for hope. There has been a lot of positive change.

**John:** It’s been a long episode. We’ve gotten through so much. I think we deserve some fun. I think it’s time for some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** I will do my One Cool Thing first, which is a New Yorker article by Leslie Jamison on the history of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was going to save this for a How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually just a good article to read independently, the history of how these two men came to form Choose Your Own Adventure and then went to a publisher, took it away from the publisher to defend their brand, how they figured out the algorithm for Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were a really important part of my literary life for about three years in elementary school. I just loved them. I think if you’re a person who read Choose Your Own Adventure books, you will enjoy this article on the history of the Choose Your Own Adventure brand.

**Craig:** I love those books. They’re wonderful.

**John:** Craig, what you got for us?

**Craig:** I have an article. This is an article in Current Affairs, which is a somewhat thinky internet publication, a magazine of politics and culture. It’s wonderful. It goes right to something that I’m very passionate about. It’s written by Aravind “Vinny” Byju. It is called Why You Hate Your Job. It is an investigation. He says, “A theory on the function of bullshit jobs: to maintain the illusion of meritocracy and to provide status and prestige for elites.” Oh, does this go right to my happy place. He draws a distinction between bullshit jobs, which are jobs that they don’t do anything, but they are hard to get, there’s a competition for them, and they signify your elite status, as opposed to shit jobs, which are jobs that are underpaid, where people are treated poorly, but the job itself is perfectly noble, like for instance teaching or being a janitor.

It’s rather long, but it’s brilliantly written. It’s just a gorgeous exploration of how we create a competition system for elitism, and we keep putting velvet ropes in front of things and making people fight over them. When you do that, they will. Then on the other side of the velvet rope is a bunch of bullshit. Well worth reading because I think the entire higher education system is a nightmare in this country. Why You Hate Your Job by Aravind “Vinny” Byju.

**John:** Fantastic. Brittani, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our listeners?

**Brittani:** I sure do. My One Cool Thing is a little off the beaten path, I guess. It’s my girlfriend.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** My heart. We’re in trouble, because I don’t think we’ve ever done… John’s never done his husband. I’ve never done my wife. This is really bad. Go ahead, ruin everything for us. I don’t care.

**Brittani:** Her name is Cerise Castle. I’ve mentioned that she’s a journalist. She has done this thing called A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is a 15-part investigative series. She also just did a study on copaganda for Color of Change. I don’t think it’s out yet. She just has worked on so many of the things specifically surrounding television actually and police. I hope people just go check her out. She has a podcast about it that’s going to be coming out October 19th called A Tradition of Violence. It’s going to hit on just so many of the things that we talked about today. She’s @cerisecastle on Twitter. She’s very cool.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Excellent. Cerise Castle, a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Amazing and romantic.

**John:** It is. I like it so much. Liz, how about a One Cool Thing for us?

**Liz:** It’s not going to be nearly as good as Brittani’s. I’m obsessed with tallowtok. If you watch TikTok, there is a wonderful creator named Mirenda Rosenberg. She lives in Ireland. She’s an expat. She is very much into sustainable living. She lives on a budget, so one of the things that she does is she makes soap with tallow, which is cut off beef fat. She gets it cheap from her local butcher. She walks you through the process of how to make soap. She’ll also walk you through her small homestead in the Irish countryside. It’s really relaxing. It’s something that I watch almost daily, because she’s just a very giving and very generous person when it comes to her knowledge and how she gardens, how she makes soap, all of the different processes.

Her entire philosophy is, “I’m going to teach you how to be zero waste in an easy and affordable way, because I’m broke, you’re probably broke, let’s be broke together, and we can still do good things for the environment.” It’s tallowtok. If you just follow that hashtag on Twitter, it’s easy to find. It is genuinely some of the greatest mental hugs you can give yourself right now.

**John:** Love it. That was our show for this week. Thank you, Liz and Brittani, so much. Reminder, it’s a last call for Writer Emergency Pack XL on Kickstarter. If you want to get a Writer Emergency Pack XL, you can get that now on Kickstarter. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long wait until we get them back into stores. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Holly Overton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Liz, where are you on Twitter?

**Liz:** I am at @lizalps.

**John:** Brittani?

**Brittani:** @bishilarious.

**John:** B is hilarious, it’s true. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. You can ign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record just for Craig about the success of firing your reps. Brittani, Liz, thank you so, so much for joining us on this incredibly detailed followupisode. You’re the best.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Liz:** Thank you guys. Thank you very much.

**Brittani:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This happened. I swear this happened in real life. I’m trying to think the best way to get into this. About eight months ago, I had a phone call with a TV writer, a colleague. He’d been a staff writer on a couple shows, actually I think some copaganda shows, but was finding it really hard to get his next job and wanted some advice. We did the normal things that Craig and I would do. We talked about what he was writing, what new samples he was working on, what shows he was going out for. He was making really smart choices, but he was really concerned that he was just never going to get hired again. This is also pandemicy times, so everything was up in the air. I channeled that inner Craig, and I said, “Maybe the problem is your reps.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** He said he really liked his reps but yeah, maybe that was part of the issue. He wrote me back the next week and told me he’d fired them and was going to sign at a new place. Fast forward a year. He and I exchanged emails this week. I asked if I could share his experience. Craig, I think maybe you could read the bold parts here, because this is what you want to hear.

**Craig:** This is what I came for. “I just wanted to check in with another update. Thankfully, the switch to new reps has continued to pay off. Frankly, it’s been downright miraculous. I’m several weeks into a staff job on another show and will be heading out of town next year to produce it. In the last few months, I’ve also sold a pilot and a scripted podcast. It’s felt like a complete 180 from the doldrums of the pandemic, my reps, and the lack of anxiety that having bad reps caused has been a huge part of the turnaround. Thanks for the good advice.”

**John:** I wrote him back and said, “What is it about this new reps that is so much better? Are they doing more? Are they positioning you better? Is there something else?” He wrote back.

**Craig:** “It seems to be mostly about relationships. Even though it’s a boutique management company, everyone in television seems to know them, love them, and hold them in high esteem. That patina seems to get transferred to me as a client. It’s also a strategy. They’re very targeted in their approach and push hard for things that are good fits, and they ignore everything else. They’ve been very up front about the fact that they don’t put clients up for jobs or send them on pitches unless they think there’s a 50% or higher chance that it will end with success. I think part of it, frankly, is that I’ve been able to be a better client, because I’m not so constantly panicked about trying to manage my own reps.” Exactly.

“I feel the wind at my back in a way I haven’t in a long time, and it’s made my work better and my approach to everything that much more confident. I didn’t realize how much my lack of faith in my team was affecting my ability to sell myself.”

**John:** Craig, are you misting up a little bit? I’m honestly a little emotional.

**Craig:** I’m horny. I’m horny. This is not sad. I love it. The reason that we say fire your manager, fire your agent, it’s not blithe. I think a lot of times, we are so cultured to think that if you get an agent or a manager, you’ve somehow broken through and made something happen. They are the first people to say to you, “You could be a professional.” That psychological bond is very powerful. It is so powerful, not only can it withstand their poor performance, it often just masks it completely. You just don’t realize that they’re not special, they are not anointing you with any authority that is objectively relevant, and in trusting them to do things for you, you’re actually worse off than you were when you were afraid and doing it yourself.

If things aren’t working, there’s really no point in clinging to that raft. The raft is not there to make you feel good. It’s not there to make you feel like you’re a represented writer. It’s there to get you a job. If it doesn’t get you a job, move on to a different raft.

**John:** Now Brittani, you are in a writers’ room, so you get to talk with writers all the time about what they’re doing, what they’re working on. I bet reps come up a fair amount. Is this the kind of conversation you’ve had with people in your rooms?

**Brittani:** Yeah, I famously enjoy fake firing people. I just tell people to fire people all the time. I don’t currently have agents. A lot of people in our room actually don’t. I tell them just don’t do it unless you really feel like you have a solid reason to do so.

**Craig:** You have a manager?

**Brittani:** I have a manager, yeah.

**Craig:** And a lawyer?

**Brittani:** And a lawyer, yes.

**Craig:** I feel like if you have 15% going out the door, that’s nothing, whether it’s an agent or a lawyer, manager and a lawyer. I know some people have both. My guess is they’re overpaying. Sometimes the combination works well. I continue to have strong feelings for you, Brittani, because I just like your style.

**John:** My role on the podcast is to introduce Craig to people who he’s obsessed with suddenly. Brittani, I’m sorry. This is what happens to you next. Liz, what’s your feeling as you’re listening to this letter? Is this an experience that you could understand or relate to?

**Liz:** Oh yeah, good for that person. I fired a manager and reps before. I’m very happy with my people. Right now, I have an agent and a manager. My agent is someone who has terrorized business affairs until I get the white boy money is what we call it. I’ve gotten paid more with her than I ever had. I’ve known her for 10 years. She’s the only Middle Eastern agent in the game right now. She has absolutely no tolerance for anybody that doesn’t show respect to her BIPOC clients as they do to her white clients. She is my lioness. I love her. I love her to death. It’s a good match.

**John:** Nice. We’ll leave it on that. We’re not telling everyone they need to fire their reps immediately. I guess we’re saying hey, if there’s a problem, don’t hold onto your reps because you think you’re not going to get another one. You’re probably better off without those reps. Brittani doesn’t even have an agent right now, and look, she’s producing Abbott Elementary. You can do it.

**Craig:** You can do it.

**John:** Thanks, all.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Liz:** Bye.

Links:

* [Liz Alper](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3225554/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lizalps)
* [Brittani Nichols](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4575382/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BisHilarious)
* Buy Tickets for our first Live Show post-pandemic – [Dynasty Typewriter Livestream](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/scriptnotes-live-tickets-412411342427?aff=ebdsoporgprofile) October 19 at 7:30pm PT
* Are you going to Austin Film Festival? Submit to the AFF [Three Page Challenge](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)!
* [List of Female Run Restaurants in Austin, TX](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wo4lV2vUacQb7QhcmBEkZD1jSz8k2HOjcAlLmnfyt1A/edit) from Melissa
* [Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html) by Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey and [Alyssa Milano’s Tweet](https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/919659438700670976?s=20&t=k-vvSWG6CmgL6NbP3GeJ2A) and [From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories) by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
* [#MeToo, Five Years Later: Accusers Reflect](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/me-too-five-years-later-1235228665/) by THR Staff
* [#MeToo, Five Years Later: No One’s Fully Returned From “Cancellation”](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/metoo-five-years-later-cancellation-comebacks-1235228191/) by Gary Baum for THR
* [Check out the new survey results at the brand new #PAYUPHOLLYWOOD website](https://www.payuphollywood.com/)
* Read the [full update](https://johnaugust.com/2022/payuphollywood-progress-an-update-from-christian) from ‘Christian’
* [How 70 Years of Cop Shows Taught Us to Valorize the Police](https://www.vox.com/culture/22375412/police-show-procedurals-hollywood-history-dragnet-keystone-cops-brooklyn-nine-nine-wire-blue-bloods) by Constance Grady for Vox
* [Studio Response to Showrunners for Abortion Rights](https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/showrunners-group-studios-abortion-safety-variety-ad-1235381785/)
* [The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-allure-of-choose-your-own-adventure-books) by Leslie Jamison for The New Yorker
* [Why Your Hate Your Job](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/why-you-hate-your-job) by Aravind “Vinny” Byju
* Follow journalist [Cerise Castle](https://cerisecastle.me/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/cerisecastle)
* Checkout [Tallowtalk](https://www.instagram.com/tallowtalk/?hl=en) soaps on [Etsy!](https://www.etsy.com/shop/TallowTalkSoapCo)
* [Support the Writer Emergency Pack XL Campaign on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnaugust/writer-emergency-pack-xl/posts)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Holly Overton ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/570standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 569 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you sit down to write? We’ll discuss inspiration versus motivation both for your characters and for you as a writer. We’ll also talk about the phenomenon of showrunners as promotional vehicles for their shows. Does this elevate the writer/creator or amount to unpaid labor? In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, insects. Why do we have insects?

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yeah. First, right before we started recording, I apparently changed your life. In case we have other people out there listening, talk through the problem and solution, and people’s lives will be better.

**Craig:** I am shooketh. For the last all of my life, while I’ve been drinking coffee out of cups like Starbucks, Coffee Bean, whatever, every now and again, I would say half the time… Because I drink an Americano. I’m a straight up black coffee kind of dude. Two shots. Two shots, John, small size. About half the time, the fricking lid is like a dribble cup. There’s just these drips that come out, and they hit me on my shirt or my pants. It’s really annoying and hot. I was just complaining about it, and you said… What did you say to me, John?

**John:** I said, “Craig, is the lid of the cup lined up to the seam?” You were confused by what I meant. Then as you examined your cup, you saw that the plastic lid is on top of the paper cup. The paper cup has a seam on it. If the hole in the lid is lined up to the seam, it will dribble on you.

**Craig:** Yes, it will. I just put the lid back on so that the hole was not over the seam, and it didn’t dribble on me, and I love you.

**John:** Aw, thank you.

**Craig:** I love you, and I’m also very angry, because why… In their training at Starbucks University, I don’t know what… By the way, what is Starbucks’s training university called? What do you think it’s called, Espresso College or something?

**John:** I bet it’s Starbucks University, something like that.

**Craig:** You think it’s just straight up Starbucks University?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At Starbucks U, this should be the first and last lesson. Just don’t put the hole over the thing where the cup seams together. Here’s the thing. I’m drinking coffee without fear. I’m not afraid that it’s going to burn me.

**John:** Megana, you were aware of this life hack, correct?

**Megana Rao:** I was not, and I had to look it up on the internet-

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** … to verify that this is true.

**Craig:** So Millennial.

**Megana:** A lot of forums agree with this knowledge. There’s a conspiracy out there that baristas do this on purpose.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Oh yeah, so people they hate. It’s like, “Oh, that Craig.”

**Craig:** Why would it be half the time the seam is… I don’t know how many… What do you call those, degrees?

**John:** Yeah, degrees, radians. I’m not sure what the math is.

**Craig:** The quantity of radians of that seam is maybe like 3 out of 360. This should be happening 1 in every 120 times I get a coffee.

**John:** The hole doesn’t have to line up exactly, because if you think about when you tilt the cup up-

**Craig:** True.

**John:** … you’re putting the coffee against that whole side of the thing. Really, you just need the hole-

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** … directly opposite the seam.

**Craig:** Really? Okay.

**John:** Yeah. That’s your safe spot.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what. I’m never going to have this problem again. Never.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** Never. I’ll tell you another thing, John. You just earned yourself grace. Do you know what I mean by this? One day you’re going to do something. I’m going to get angry. Then you’re going to say, “Craig, I would like to use my grace.” I will say-

**John:** It’s like real life DnD inspiration, like I get to roll an extra D20.

**Craig:** No, you just say, “Grace.” Now, the grace will get used. It’s not a permanent grace, of course, but you possess grace.

**John:** Love it. While we’re talking about Millennials manifesting things, I would actually like to try to manifest something here on this podcast. I would like to make a Van Halen biopic. I think there’s a great biopic to be made of Van Halen. I’ve done some work to try to figure out who would control the rights to this, what are the complications here, does any producer control some part of the story. What I’ve run into is basically it seems like it’s impossible to do at this point because there’s such disagreement between the Van Halen people and David Lee Roth’s people and that it’s going to be a mess.

There are complicated things to put together to make this movie happen. Obviously, you need all the rights to all the music, not the permission, but the blessing of Eddie Van Halen’s family, whatever representational things you want to get for David Lee Roth. There’s a fricking great movie to make from Van Halen. If you are a listener who has some access to some part of this complicated mess, reach out to me, because I really think there’s a great musical biopic to make of Van Halen.

**Craig:** Pasadena’s own Van Halen. A lot of people don’t know that Eddie and Alex Van Halen are biracial.

**John:** They’re also international. They’re born in Europe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They’re genuine prodigies. They were in several bands before Van Halen. The whole backstory before that is great. The actual story of being in Van Halen and the conflicts within Van Halen and overcoming those conflicts to some degree, they replaced him with Sammy Hagar, all of that is great and fascinating and could make a really amazing biopic.

**Craig:** I don’t know their story well enough, but I feel like Michael Anthony, the bassist for Van Halen, had a very privileged position of just sitting quietly, watching everyone fight around him. He’s just like, “Guys, when you’re done, I’m here, ready to play.”

**John:** I saw Van Halen play at Iowa State University. It was an amazing show. There was a very long drum solo in it. That was appropriate, because that’s what you wanted in that era. You wanted a long drum solo.

**Craig:** Also, Alex Van Halen, incredibly good drummer.

**John:** Yeah, therefore he should have a solo.

**Craig:** Stupidly good drummer. Originally, I think when the parents got them instruments, Eddie was given the drum set, and Alex was given the guitar.

**John:** They both were started on piano, because that’s [crosstalk 00:06:10].

**Craig:** Of course. They are. They’re prodigies. I believe they played a concert at La Cañada High School back in… That’s a scene.

**John:** I’m not sure that’s going to make it into the picture, Craig.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** It could. You never know. It could happen.

**Craig:** (sings)

**John:** If you are a person with the power to manifest a Van Halen movie, know that I want to write this movie. I figured I might as well put that out there and stake my claim in it to some degree.

**Craig:** Maybe Alex Van Halen is a podcast fan.

**John:** Yeah. We have some follow-up. Megana, help us out. What did Andrew have to say?

**Megana:** Andrew wrote in and said, “I appreciated the discussion of casting stars, as it’s a question I have thought about a lot. However, you focused a lot on casting for film, and I’d like to know about the difference for television. Are there different factors involved? I’m thinking of the recently premiered Monarch, in which Susan Sarandon plays a dying woman at the head of a celebrity country music family, or Cobra Kai, where they’ve gotten many actors from the original movie series to come back, but the focus is clearly on the younger characters. I’ve thought about writing a show where the main character’s played by an unknown actor, but have more established actors in a parent or advisor character role. How should writers think about something like that?”

**John:** In television in general, you’re not as star-focused, but also who is a star changes a lot of television. Scott Bakula is a television star. If he agrees to be on your CSI spin-off, then he’s going to be the centerpiece star of that. He’ll be paid really well for that. Television is not generally as star-driven. It makes stars rather than casting stars. Is that your experience, Craig?

**Craig:** I think that that’s been the way it’s been. It has changed to an extent over the last 10 years with the rise of the limited series. The limited series are different. The reason that television stars were traditionally different, separate from movie stars, is because television stars had to make these long-term commitments to one thing. If you are let’s say Tom Hanks, you don’t have to do that, because you don’t want to be stuck on one thing, because Steven Spielberg wants to come and do this movie and someone brilliant over here wants to do this movie, and so you get to pick and choose. You don’t want to tie yourself down, whereas Mariska Hargitay has made this brilliant career but on one show.

Lately, with the rise of the shorter seasons, a lot of television series running between 6 and 12 episodes, and sometimes just once, actors, what we would call traditional movie stars are less concerned and are okay with tying themselves down for a stretch, because they know it’s not permanent. They aren’t going to be stuck on this thing for 10 seasons, 22 episodes a year. That does make quite a difference. You see a lot of people… Matthew McConaughey doing True Detective was a sign.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** There’s been fuzzying of the lines. In terms of how you think about this, Andrew, just don’t worry about it. You write for who you want. For whom you want. How dare I?

**John:** How dare you?

**Craig:** How dare I?

**John:** His second question there is what if you cast an unknown actor in that main role but a more established, better known actor in those supporting roles? That can be tricky. Definitely it’s possible, but think about that as an audience member. If you have no idea who that central person is, and yet you recognize those other people, you are going to expect those other people are going to have really big, significant things coming up. There’s just a weird expectation game that happens. It can totally work. Just be aware that there could be some bump for your audience there if they don’t recognize your central person but they do recognize the people around them.

**Craig:** That too I think has gotten a little bit worse because of the amount of television. Let’s go back once more into the way back machine and think about Game of Thrones. They had Sean Bean. Sean Bean was somebody that people knew, but I don’t think, at least in America, he was what we would call a star. Nobody was building movies around Sean Bean. He was the bad guy in Golden Eye. Spoiler, by the way. You think he dies, and he doesn’t. He’s the bad guy. He’s Trevelyan. Other than that, a lot of people we didn’t know, and Dinklage. Even Dinklage, I have to say, was-

**John:** He was in an indie film that people liked that was-

**Craig:** Exactly. He was in The Station Agent, which is a wonderful movie. He’d been around, but again, not somebody that people were building movies around. Everybody was okay with it because we learned new people. It’s a little trickier now also looking at the new Game of Thrones show, House of the Dragon.

**John:** You kind of recognize Rhys Ifans, but there’s not a lot of-

**Craig:** There’s Paddy Considine.

**John:** Paddy Considine, yeah.

**Craig:** Doctor Who.

**Megana:** Matt Smith.

**John:** Matt Smith, of course.

**Craig:** Matt Smith, right. There are some, but again, for Americans, not these people that anyone’s building a movie around. You can still do it. I think, Andrew, cast who you want in your head, and then we’ll deal with it later when life starts happening.

**John:** I think we’ve talked about this on the show before. I’m a big caster in my head before I start writing. I like to see that there’s at least one actor out there who could play the role. Is that the person who’s going to play the role ultimately? Almost never, but it does help me to be thinking about that in my head. If you feel like you need a person with giant movie star charisma in that central role, cast that that way, but know that other factors are going to determine whether it is a movie star, TV star, or an unknown in that slot. Last bit of follow-up here. We got a lot of emails about burials and cremations and such.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I want to say that we are not going to talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** There’s clearly a market for a burial podcast. If you’re thinking, “I really want to start a podcast, but what should my podcast topic be?” the topic of burials and cremations and what do you do with dead bodies seems to be fascinating to a huge subset of our listenership.

**Craig:** You got to find that small Venn diagram intersection between knows a lot about burying people and interesting. If you can find that person, I’m down.

**John:** Something like internment and interesting, I feel like there’s a thing that can go together there. There’s something about that. People are obsessed with death, because they’re obsessed with murder podcasts. There’s going to be something about dead bodies.

**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead.

**John:** Universal experience.

**Craig:** We’re all going to be dead, even you, Megana.

**Megana:** Never. No.

**Craig:** It’s happening. What, do you think you’re eternal?

**Megana:** I’m knocking on wood so it doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** You’re knocking on wood. Knocking on wood doesn’t even work for things that are forestallable. You’re knocking on wood against death?

**John:** I want to defend knocking on wood, just as a tradition of saying, “Listen, I recognize that what I just said could potentially come back to haunt me.” It’s a public way of doing it. I would never knock on wood privately, but I might do it publicly.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Megana:** Interesting.

**Craig:** Do you think Megana’s really starting to think about her own mortality for the first time right now?

**John:** Based on our previous insect discussion, I think she was already a little bit worried for our own lives.

**Craig:** She was halfway there. We’ll get to that in the Bonus Segment, but first, we have a marquee topic.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s talk about inspiration versus motivation. The idea behind this came from a recent issue of Inneresting, the newsletter we do. Chris Sont, our editor, linked to this blog post by John Scalzi, who is a very good writer of science fiction and other things. He has this blog post called Find the Time or Don’t. Basically, people ask him questions like, “How do I find the time to write?” His point is either you find the time or you don’t do it.

I’ll just read one little quote here. He says, “The answer to the first of these is simple and unsatisfying: I keep inspired to write because if I don’t then the mortgage company will be inspired to foreclose on my house. And I’d prefer not to have that happen. This answer is simple because it’s true — hey, this is my job, I don’t have another — and it’s unsatisfying because writers, and I suppose particularly authors of fiction, are assumed to have some other, more esoteric inspiration.”

I like the post, but I would like to separate out the idea of inspiration and motivation, because I think they get conflated and confused. For our discussion, Craig, if we can talk about inspiration being that desire to write the specific thing and that flash of genius, like, “Oh, this is the thing I’m called to write,” versus motivation, which is what gets you in the chair every day to write, which is getting you to get the work finished.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great distinction to make.

**John:** Both are really important, but they don’t always happen at the same time.

**Craig:** No. One needs to happen all the time, and one sometimes happens when it feels like it. Inspiration does not adhere to a timetable. You can’t plan it and you can’t force it. That’s why it’s inspiration. If it weren’t, if you could just say, “Oh, I’m going to be inspired in 10 minutes,” then it wouldn’t be very inspiring. Also, people talk about the spark of creativity. Sparks last a millisecond, and then they’re gone. They’re just meant to ignite. Then the rest of it, honestly, all the rest of it is motivation.

**John:** Let’s go back to your spark thing, because what I really like about that idea is, as a person who builds fires with flint and steel, yes, you had that one little moment, but then it’s all the work and careful work, diligence of just like, “Okay, now I’m going to get it in the tinder. I’m going to slowly add the kindling and slowly build it up into a thing.” That’s the whole work. It’s not the striking at the flint and steel. It’s the actual building of the fire. That’s what a lot of people don’t do. You see people who wander around saying, “I have this great idea for a movie. I have this great idea for a book.” They have inspiration, but a lot of times they don’t actually have the motivation to actually get a thing done.

On the contrary, sometimes in movies we’ll see this cliché scene of the guy sitting at the typewriter, and he’s like, “I can’t get any words out.” He’s just waiting around for inspiration. That’s not necessarily the case for most people. Really, it’s that they kind of have the idea, they kind of know what they want to do, but they cannot physically get themselves to sit at that typewriter and try to work on a thing. They’d rather do anything else. That’s procrastination. That’s perfectionism. It’s all the other reasons why they’re not willing to sit down to write.

**Craig:** You do hear the dog, right?

**Megana:** Yeah, so cute.

**John:** The dog barking in the background?

**Craig:** It’s not just me.

**John:** That dog is my dog Lambert, who’s sleeping and dreaming in the background.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** I’ll take a picture and I’ll post it on-

**Craig:** Lambert.

**John:** … my Instagram so everyone can see how cute he is as I’m recording this.

**Craig:** Everything you said is spot-on. The marketplace of creative romance overvalues inspiration. By the way, inspiration sometimes is wrong. Sometimes you get so excited. You’re like, “That’s it. I figured it out, this brilliant, wonderful idea. All I have to do now is the easy part of just unraveling it.” Then you realize that you were inspired stupidly, that the inspiration did not stand up to the test of what motivation has to deliver, which is execution and work. You’re allowed to be falsely inspired. Don’t overvalue your aha moments. They’re aha moments if they pan out. If they don’t, they’re not. Simple as that.

**John:** I often say on this podcast that we are our own main characters in our own stories. Let’s think about how characters relate to motivation and inspiration. Inspiration in a movie, that classic call to adventure, there’s a thing that happens early on that’s like, oh, this is the thing that you are destined to do. You can choose to follow that path or not follow that path. Something is going to change in your life, or you have characters who fall in love at first sight. That inspiration in movies tends to be the enduring quest. That’s a thing that they are called to do. That’s not them actually leaving home and doing the work. It’s a siren song, but it’s not the actual plot and story and work of the movie. That’s generally motivation, because the motivation is what’s getting them from this scene to that scene, what’s getting them to say the next line, what’s getting them to move and take some actions.

**Craig:** Sometimes the causal flows in the direction opposite from what we would imagine. Sometimes you are uninspired, and you just have to do stuff. In our own lives, this is true. We don’t want to do a thing. We’re forced to do a thing. We start to do a thing, and lo and behold, something happens while we’re doing it that then feeds into a kind of inspiration. The idea of waiting to be inspired is a trap.

Dennis Palumbo of Episode 99, his big prescription for writer’s block is start writing something, even if it’s nonsense. If you are a writer typer, start typing stuff. Start typing about how you can’t write. Start typing anything. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a pen and paper guy, start pen and papering. Move your hands or fingers in a writing motion. Then, lo and behold, you may find suddenly you are in the groove and inspiration occurs.

**John:** Let’s talk about motivation for writers, motivation actually for characters as well. We’ve talked about this on the show before. You can have intrinsic motivation, which is something that is about who you are. It’s generated from inside. It could be about your self-perception, your self-worth, this vision of who you are as a person. Calling yourself, “I am a writer,” that’s an intrinsic motivation to do the writing because you’ve perceived yourself as being a writer. It can also be negative intrinsic motivation, like shame or guilt, that’s pushing you to do that.

**Craig:** That’s what I have.

**John:** We’ve got those. Those could be the things that are motivating you to do this creative writing or to literally show up and do the work on that day. There’s also extrinsic motivations, as Scalzi’s saying, like, “I have to pay the bills. I have a deadline that I’m required to meet.” Sometimes it’s good to have a balance of the things that you were doing because it’s a part of who you are, the intrinsic things. Also, setting deadlines is a way of external accountability. That’s also motivating you to write.

**Craig:** I wish that our motivations were all positive. I wish that we were all motivated by a sense of self-worth and value. I wish that I could wake up in the morning and think, “I should write today, because I’m good, and people are interested.” That’s not what happens. What happens with me is that I wake up in the morning and I think, “I need to write today.” I’m already in trouble. I just start off the day, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble. I’m behind. I’m bad. The best I could do is try and write my way to just get my nose above the waterline so that I don’t drown in my own shame and misery.

Now, that’s an anti-romanticism. I don’t recommend it. I don’t think it’s good. It is so common that I suppose the reason I’m talking about it is because I don’t want people to feel like that is bad with a capital B. It’s bad with a lowercase B. So many of us have it that if it gets us writing and it makes the work happen, as long as we can somehow find ways to hug ourselves afterwards, and I really do try, then I think it’s okay. It’s okay. I just don’t want people to beat themselves up for beating themselves up, if that makes sense.

**John:** Definitely. I’ve had moments in my career where I could not wait to write. That combination of inspiration and motivation were happening at just the right dose at just the right times, where it was like, “I’m going to leave this party and go home and write this scene, because I just know exactly what this scene is.” There’s been projects where for two weeks at a time, all I wanted to do is write the project, but that’s rare. I think the career of writing is recognizing that will happen sometimes, but that’s not going to be your normal experience.

Your normal experience is going to be probably some mix of the lowercase B bad motivations to get you there to do the work and recognizing that while you’re doing it, you’re going to have some discoveries, sometimes moments that you might happier about the work at the end of the day than at the start of the day.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you that one remarkable motivation… I’ve never had this before in my life. Working on The Last of Us, I had I think half of the script done by the time we started shooting, with the understanding that I had to write the other half. Neil wrote an episode, but I had to write all the remaining ones, including one with Neil, while we were in production. That’s terrifying, because I don’t have to imagine people waiting. They’re there. I can see them. They come and find me. They’re like, “When are we going to… Can you give me a peak? I would just love to know,” because they have jobs to do.

I made a point of saying, “Look, schedule-wise, I need to deliver a draft of a script to everyone, meaning I’ve already given it to HBO, great, now I can give it to everybody, with two months’ time between them getting it and us shooting it,” which in television, sadly, that’s quite a luxurious amount of time, because there are people that deliver these things the day of.

**John:** Classically on network procedural shows, sometimes they’ll get so backed up, you’re prepping off of an outline, if that. Scripts are being written as they’re shot.

**Craig:** There are showrunners that we’ve spoken to on the show, who I have great admiration for, and they’re notorious for-

**John:** Last minute.

**Craig:** When you show up on the day, you find out what you’re… They’re that behind. It all works for them. I did find that the reality of a machine of human beings needing the pages was remarkably motivating. I guess I didn’t have to draw so much from my bottomless well of self-loathing, so that was nice. Instead, I borrowed from my bottomless well of fear, you see, which is actually preferable, I think, to self-loathing, just terror as opposed to disgust. These are my wells that I get to draw from in the morning. Megana, do you… I know John’s not like me. I know that.

**Megana:** Yeah, we’re shamecore.

**Craig:** Good. Thank you. I just needed to know that there was another shamecore on board here.

**Megana:** Yeah, I feel you.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Megana:** I primarily operate out of fear. Writing is just so fun. What you guys are talking about, I feel like it is really fun, and it is all of the fear that gets in the way of me actually sitting down to write.

**Craig:** Fear.

**John:** Megana, when you’re saying writing is fun, is it fun when you’re in flow or is it fun even when it’s a struggle?

**Megana:** I think it’s fun when you’re in flow. To me, the desire to get back to that state has to outweigh the fear. That is when I sit down to write.

**Craig:** That’s quite perfect. That is a great summation of what’s going on with me. I just need the desire to get into the flow of it to outweigh the fear. That’s just perfect. Chef’s kiss. You know what? You’ve earned grace.

**John:** I changed your life, and she says one nice thing?

**Craig:** I know. It’s hard. It’s hard knowing me.

**John:** This is grace inflation.

**Craig:** I never promised you a rose garden, and I’m not fair. Megana, you have earned grace. Here’s the thing. She’s never going to need it. When is she ever going to do anything where I’m like, “Meh!”

**Megana:** Just you wait.

**Craig:** Not that you do, John. Honestly, John just never does anything either. I’m really handing out grace to people that don’t need it. That’s the God’s honest truth.

**John:** I’ve talked about this before with Arlo Finch. Writing those three books was one of the rare experiences where for two or three months at a time, I was just writing those books. My entire life was just writing Arlo Finch books. I did build up some good routines and habits where I just need to write 1,000, 1,500 words a day, and that the books will get done. Sitting down to do that work and finishing that work was actually a lot easier, because I could sit down knowing this is going to take a couple hours to do, and they’re going to be done, and I’m going to feel really good about it. It was a rare case in my life where the motivation was positive, because I knew I’m going to feel good about having finished that work. I’m not going to finish the whole book today. I’m just going to finish this chapter, and that’s going to be enough.

**Craig:** That’d be so nice, just to feel good.

**John:** Recognizing when enough is enough is good. Actually, this last script I did was a similar situation where… Granted I had really good inspiration going into it. I really wanted to write it. With every scene, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing right now is writing this scene.” Sometimes it does happen.

**Craig:** That sounds so nice.

**John:** Recognize that it’s rare when it does happen. It’s lovely when it happens.

**Craig:** Again, I don’t know if I ever feel good. I just make some of the bad go away. It’s just who I am. I have to accept it. This is the therapy thing. Part of therapy is saying you’re okay as you are, also oh my god, you’re screwed up and you have so many problems.

**John:** It’s a dialectical struggle is that you’re both imperfect and you’re doing your best.

**Craig:** I’m trying to change, and also I’m fine the way I am. I don’t see this going away. I think I’m just making my peace with it. At least I can put it in perspective. There is a difference between thinking I am bad and I feel bad about myself. That’s a very important distinction. By the way, this has turned into a therapy session for me and probably Megana. You’re fine, John, again. I think that’s part of it. I don’t recall a time where I ever wrote something and then sat back and said, “I feel great.” I just feel like I made the bad go away. I guess if that’s how it works for you at home, I’m just saying that’s okay. I’m sticking up for the shamecore people.

**John:** For sure. Let’s wrap this up with a… Let’s a quote from Scalzi which I think puts a good bow on this. He says, “Being a writer isn’t some grand, mystical state of being. It just means you put words to amuse people, most of all yourself. There’s no more shame in not being a writer than there is in not being a painter, a botanist, or a real estate agent, all of which are things I think personally I do not regret not being. It’s a weird thing we put this pressure I think on what a writer identity has to be and what it has to mean. If you take some of that pressure off, that can also be helpful for people.

**Craig:** I love this quote, and I love him for saying it. I think it’s so important to hear good writers, and he is a very good writer, deromanticizing what we do. There’s so much BS out there, so much glowy nonsense from people about writing. Makes me want to barf, always has.

Ted Elliott of Pirates of the Caribbean fame and Shrek and Aladdin, the original, and so many other things, he talks about writers describing receiving inspiration from the heavens and how they suck at the crack in the cosmic egg. It just makes me laugh, because he’s right. It’s just so ridiculous. It’s not romantic.

Most importantly, it’s okay to not be a writer, the way we have always said to people, “Hey, it’s okay to stop.” If it’s not working, if it’s not making you happy, or even not unhappy, as is the case for the shamecore people, you can stop. It is not magical. I can tell you from my own personal experience that you can do really well as a writer, you can be successful, you can have credits and go to premiers and know famous people, and it still is not romantic at all.

Don’t think that there’s some magical thing on the other side of the velvet rope. There isn’t. In fact, that’s how you know you’re a writer, because you get to the other side of the velvet rope, you look around, you go, “Oh my god, it’s the same thing as the other side of the velvet rope, and I still have to write.” That’s it.

Anyone that talks about the cosmic inspiration and being kissed by Jesus and connecting with the grand river of energy that runs through all of us or crystals or any of that, just run, because they’re not real. I just don’t think they’re real. This guy’s real. That Polish lady that said that when you’re successful it feels like failing, she’s real. Those are real writers to me. I love this. Love this. This plus the coffee thing has made my day.

**John:** Let’s see if we can keep your-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … streak going. Let’s talk about creators, showrunners, the responsibility for them being promotional vehicles for their shows, for the things that they create. We’ve talked a little bit about this before. Yesterday as we were recording this was The Last of Us day, so you were tweeting out about the new teaser trailer. You were having little conversations online. That got a great response, which was terrific.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** A thing that has happened over the time we’ve been recording this show is that showrunners and creators are more and more responsible for interacting directly with fans about the things that they are making. Back in the day, you might see Steven Bochco interviewed in the New York Times, but he wasn’t responsible for the day-to-day promotion of his show. Now, because of social media, that is becoming much more of an expectation.

I just want to talk through the pros and cons of that, because I think it is great that the people who are able to make these things can get the popular culture credit for the things that they’ve made, which is terrific. It also just feels like so much work and unpaid work to be doing that I wonder I some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do it, because they are just not social people and they don’t want to have that responsibility.

**Craig:** It’s not a requirement. It’s not like it is for actors. Actors have to promote the show or the movie. They’re not paid to promote the show or the movie. They’re paid to act, and then it’s expected that part of the payment for acting is go promote the show and the movie. By and large, that’s who people want to hear from. We can flatter ourselves and say, “People can’t wait to hear what I, the showrunner, has to say.” There’s some people, and I love that, but it’s not like… Pedro Pascal can say anything on any given day, and it will be viewed by vastly more people than anything I say. It will be viewed with more interest, because that’s the way it ought to be. Famous people are famous.

It is not a requirement. Just to be clear, if you are contemplating being a showrunner, and it’s a real thing, you don’t have to be on Twitter at all. You don’t have to. You don’t have to be on anything. They can’t force you to be on it. If you’re not on it already, they don’t even need you to be on it, meaning if you have a social media presence, they want to leverage it. If you don’t, there’s nothing to leverage anyway. It doesn’t matter.

All you can really do at that point is probably screw up, because what’s going to happen is someone’s going to say something stupid, because believe it or not, people say stupid things on social media, and then people who aren’t accustomed to it or people who are new to it are going to react. Then suddenly, there’s a problem. It is not a requirement.

I will say if you are a showrunner on social media, you have to make sure that you can preserve your own legitimacy and authenticity as a voice, because if you start to sound like a brand or a corporate sloganeer, you just aren’t as interesting. People will see through it instantly. I will say the social media system is… Once you start to see how it all functions on the other side of it, not the way I do it, but just the way that very famous people and brand names and the influencers and all this stuff… It’s reality television, meaning it ain’t reality. It’s all so rigged. It’s incredible how calculated so much social media stuff is.

**John:** I’m thinking about showrunners who left social media. David Lindelof famously left social media after Lost and his frustrations there. Other friends of ours are infrequent tweeters, but then when they have a show, they’ve told me that they feel pressure from the studio or the network to be live tweeting episodes and to be hyping stuff up, in some cases out of fear, because if it doesn’t hit out of the gate, then what’s going to happen? I get the pressure to want to support this thing that I love. I always respect that, because it’s one thing for a novelist to be promoting their stuff. You get that. With a TV show, it is yours, but it’s also everybody else’s. You have to grapple with the internet. All the ugliness of the internet, while trying to make something beautiful, is frustrating.

**Craig:** A network will always ask people to do stuff. That’s what they do. Anybody that can possibly go out there and promote and support the show, they will say, “Hey, can you go and promote and support the show?” That’s their job to do. There is no showrunner on the planet that is essential to a show’s success in terms of social media promotion. None. Shonda Rhimes doesn’t go on Twitter and talk about her shows. She doesn’t need to, because people love her shows.

**John:** She’s also beyond that though.

**Craig:** My point is, if you’re not beyond it, then you’re not in it. You can’t help. There’s no special Goldilocks zone where a showrunner is not beyond it but also can make it a success by tweeting. Either people will like it or they won’t, and they will watch it or they won’t. I can’t imagine a world where a network is like, “Look, that show would’ve worked, but the writer didn’t talk enough on Twitter.” No.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s just not a thing. They’re going to ask, and you’re allowed to say no. If you feel pressure, that’s because you’re being pressured, but only because that’s what they do. They just pressure everybody into doing it. If the actor, the star, if Pedro Pascal is like, “I’m not promoting The Last of Us,” oh my god, there would be lawsuits. That’s a huge deal. He is, by the way. My point is, nobody would be like, “Oh my god, Craig isn’t tweeting about The Last of Us. We have to sue him.” They don’t care. They don’t care. That’s one of the best parts about being a writer.

**John:** I want to circle back then, maybe close on a pro of promoting stuff on social media is that the degree to which you are identified with a show that you create can be helpful with your power vis a vis the studio, the network, and future seasons and future negotiations. If people see that the fan base responds to the show but also responds to you as the showrunner, as the person behind it, it’s a little harder for them to fire you or to do crazy things down the road. We’ve definitely seen situations where people who have been a guest on the show have big fan bases who know them, and so it’s going to be inconceivable for them to be booted off one of their own shows.

**Craig:** I will challenge you on this.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** I think that networks prize showrunners who are delivering. If the showrunner is not delivering, then it’s not happening anymore. It’s rare that there’s a circumstance where the show is fine and doing great, but they have to get rid of the showrunner. When things like that are happening, it’s typically because there is an HR problem.

**John:** Yeah, or drama behind the scenes, a conflict with another producer, another-

**Craig:** A massive conflict with-

**John:** … star.

**Craig:** Most importantly, that showrunner is not indispensable.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Now, if you are not indispensable, it does not matter what your fan base is. You will be dispensed with, because what they know is everybody loves the show. The drama that would happen over the dismissal of that person would last all of the day. Then tomorrow, somebody farted on TV, oh my god, everyone, new story, and that’ll be the end of that, because they like the show. That’s how it works. If somebody else can come and write that show and make it great and run it, people will keep watching it. Look at, what was it, The West Wing.

**John:** West Wing, that’s true, [crosstalk 00:39:21].

**Craig:** Aaron Sorkin was like, “I’m leaving.” They were like, “Okay.” Then John Wells came, and people kept watching. That’s how it is. If they think are you are indispensable… Jesse Armstrong, there’s a good example. Jesse Armstrong is the showrunner of Succession. Jesse Armstrong’s not on Twitter. Nobody hears from Jesse Armstrong. He doesn’t have a podcast. He’s the quietest guy. He is indispensable to that show. If Jesse Armstrong was like, “I don’t want to do it anymore,” it’s over, because he’s indispensable to that show, and everybody knows it.

I guess my point is, just like social media itself… Social media overemphasizes the value of social media. Underneath all of it, there is a reality of who has value and who does not. Yes, there is value, promotional value. There always has been to famous people. That’s why we have always had stars in Hollywood. Beyond the actors, Spielberg doesn’t need to tweet.

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

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We’ll start with Kiefer. Megana, can you help us out with Kiefer’s question?

**Megana:** Kiefer asks, “An acquaintance who’s working on a series for a large streamer just told me they’ve been told to put explicit act breaks in their scripts just in case a streamer decides to launch an ad-supported subscription. Are commercial breaks bad? How do you write both for viewers who will just see a two-second fade to black and those who will be diverted from your perfect, shiny streaming show and besieged with two minutes of Fancy Feast cat food commercials?”

**Craig:** Oh, no, Netflix.

**John:** Kiefer, you’re right. You will notice that some streaming shows really do have act breaks in them. I’m thinking of Only Murders in the Building has things. I guess Hulu actually has ad-supported too already, so I guess it makes sense for that. You’re going to see more of this. I would say be aware of it, because if it feels like it’s a thing that could happen, it’s not the worst idea to plan your show in a way that it could work.

Remember that Mad Men never really did act breaks properly. It just suddenly would stop, and there would be a commercial, and they would just keep going. You can get by without doing the explicit buildup to rising actions and things like that. Classically, in the broadcast model, your acts are really clear, because they have to have some kind of cliffhanger, something that gets you back after the commercial break. We don’t do that in streaming, for good reason, because it’s really artificial. It may be worth thinking about if you were to put a commercial in here, where would it do the least harm, and be thinking about it that way.

**Craig:** I assume that the acquaintance is working for Netflix, because Netflix is talking about putting ads in. What’s going to happen is Netflix is going to offer two tiers of subscription, I believe. One is ad-supported, and one is ad-free. The whole idea is, hey, spend more, and then you don’t have this chopped up thing that’s annoying because Fancy Feast just showed up. By the way, it may not be Netflix. It may be another one. I don’t know. Better not be HBO. All I can say is don’t worry about it yet. One of the things that we were just working on here on our show is we were putting the main credit sequence in and the main titles, the credits in the beginning.

**John:** Craig, I want to stop you and say I thought it was a really bold choice to have it all be like this model of the whole world, and the camera flies over it, and there’s a sun, and there’s little gears and things. I thought it was so innovative, what you’ve chosen to do there.

**Craig:** Shut up. We don’t do that. It’s an interesting choice you make. Episode to episode, it’s a little bit different. Sometimes there’s something that happens, and then we stop, and then we do the thing, and then we return to the episode. Sometimes we just do it, and then we do the episode. It’s basically how we feel it works best.

We do have to suddenly go, “Okay, this thing that we’ve put together, we actually have to now find a spot, stop, talk about a fade, talk about a cut, talk about how it works,” meaning if you have an episode that is designed to run uninterrupted, and someone says, “You have to find three interruption spots,” you can do it. You can do it. It’s annoying, and you don’t like it. I would hate it. I would throw a tantrum. I won’t do it. You can do it, is my point. It’s not going to be a disaster, meaning you don’t have to worry about how to write something that is and is not at the same time this Schrodinger’s episode that can both be ad-supported and not ad-supported. Just deal with it when it happens.

**John:** Another thing to stress is that, Kiefer, this is already happening overseas. Many things that are made for cable-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … and for streaming-

**Craig:** Don’t tell me that.

**John:** … here actually debut internationally on ad-supported.

**Craig:** No. You’re telling me that people are watching Chernobyl out there, and it’s being chopped up with ads?

**John:** Ah, that’s a great question and a thing our listeners will know. If any listeners have seen an ad-supported version of Chernobyl, do let us know.

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** I suspect it could be out there.

**Craig:** Write in and break my heart. Do it. Please. We’ve all gotten very sensitive about this, because, John, you and I have been doing this long enough, so we remember that when we would write a movie, the movie would be in theaters, then it would go to home video, and then eventually it would-

**John:** Go to broadcast TV.

**Craig:** It would go on broadcast TV.

**John:** Charlie’s Angels.

**Craig:** Yes, they would put it on television.

**John:** Charlie’s Angels was a $25 billion deal for ABC.

**Craig:** It was so much money. You would get a lot of residuals for that. Of course, they would chop the movie up. They would chop it up. They would replace language. There was a whole network TV ADR session you had to do. It was a thing.

**John:** We had to do that for The Nines, which to my knowledge has never actually been broadcast, but [inaudible 00:45:03].

**Craig:** We had a bunch of stuff running on TBS, I think, or something. Anyway, point being, they used to do this all the time. We weren’t such babies about it. Now I’m a big baby.

**John:** Now everything has to be exactly frame by frame. Craig is going to go to everyone’s house and turn off motion smoothing.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m the Stanley Kubrick of motion smoothing.

**John:** We don’t have to rant. Everyone knows motion smoothing is terrible. The best thing you can do-

**Craig:** No, not everyone knows.

**John:** While you’re home for the holidays, grab your parents’ remotes and turn off motion smoothing.

**Craig:** Turn off motion smoothing or anything that sounds like motion smoothing. Just go to the Menu. Go to Picture. Look for that stupid setting and turn it off. Next question.

**John:** Let’s go with Peter’s question. Megana, can you tell us what Peter had to say?

**Megana:** Peter asks, “I’ve been curious about this question for years. I’m a screenwriting nut like everyone else here, but in my chill time I love to research the projects of my favorite writers. IMDb never has them all. This I’ve known since the ’90s. I scrounge through trade articles as best I can to find them. For example, I’ve confirmed that Sheldon Turner has set up or been attached to at least 104 projects in film and television as a producer and/or writer. Something like 84 of those were scripts he’s worked on and been paid for since he broke into the biz in 2000. My question is, does the WGA have a database that has a list of every project every writer has been paid for in their careers, specs, rewrites, adaptations, script doctor jobs, and quick onset polishes?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Peter, so Sheldon Turner, a busy screenwriter for sure. He came in really about the same time as me and Craig, so he would have a bunch. I don’t know that I have 104. I have a lot.

**Craig:** I don’t know how many I have.

**John:** The second part of your question is does the WGA have a database of every project? Yeah. If you’ve been paid by somebody, a WGA signatory to do work, yeah, it’s in the database there. That is-

**Craig:** Wait.

**John:** … a record that you worked on that project, but not a public thing. That’s just behind the scenes. If you want to check for yourself, all the checks you’ve… No, there’s not a public-facing thing for that, because those aren’t movies that came out in the world. They’re just development projects.

**Craig:** Also, there’s not a database that shows the things that you’ve just been employed on, because part of the credit system is that we say, “Look, here is the credit for this movie.” Now we’ve started changing it. The point is, there isn’t like, “Oh, and here’s the 80 people that were employed on it.” No, there is not a public database with such a thing. Of course, the Writer’s Guild is aware, because you have to pay dues every time you’re employed, so they know. When it says he’s been set up or been attached to, I don’t even… Been attached to is a weird thing.

**John:** It’s a weird thing. It doesn’t mean anything.

**Craig:** Sometimes I’ll see these articles in the trades where someone’s like a writer’s been attached to something. First of all, I don’t want any article about me ever. Then second of all, I can’t imagine having an article that says I’m attached to something. That’s almost like, “So-and-so has asked this girl out on a date. Did she say yes?”

**John:** I think attached as a writer is a strange thing to me. I’d get I guess if there was a book, and this writer’s attached to do the adaptation. Attached as a director means something, although directors will attach themselves to 19,000 things they’ll never do.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Actors will attach themselves to things they’ll never actually do. Also, you’re saying 104 projects that he’s a producer and/or writer. Some of those producer projects there may not be really a record for, because if he’s just producing a movie and he’s not actually writing on the movie, there’s not going to be a WGA contract. He’s not getting paid as a writer. We won’t know to what degree those things were real.

**Craig:** Do you know how there are words that suddenly pop up in our business that are annoying, but people start to use them all the time in meetings and things?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know what I’m talking about, like little weird metaphors and things?

**John:** Yeah. “At the end of the day,” happened.

**Craig:** Exactly, the blank of it all showed up 10 years ago and never stopped. I don’t know, it must’ve been 70 years ago, someone said, “No, this person hasn’t been hired or anything, but they’re attached to it.” That became this cool, new, hip thing to say. Now we just accept it, like that it’s a thing. It’s not. It’s just dumb words that don’t mean anything. What does that even mean?

**John:** It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like hip-pocket deal or something, like wait.

**Craig:** What does that mean? “This agent hip-pocketed me.” They don’t represent you. That’s what that means. That means they chose to not represent-

**John:** They represent you if you’re getting work but not if you’re not getting work.

**Craig:** Exactly, so you don’t have an agent. That’s what that means. You’re attached to something, so they haven’t paid you? Okay, I’m attached to everything. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything.

**John:** I’m trying to attach myself to the Van Halen movie, which does not exist but I believe should exist.

**Craig:** No, you have attached yourself to it.

**John:** I have attached myself.

**Craig:** You have officially attached yourself to the Van Halen movie.

**John:** It’s in the transcripts. People will be able to Google it, like John August attached to the Van Halen movie.

**Craig:** You’re attached to it, absolutely, completely. I’m attached to Scarlett Johansson.

**John:** Do you know Scarlett? Scarlett’s great.

**Craig:** I don’t know her.

**John:** I like her a lot.

**Craig:** I don’t know her.

**John:** I just saw a clip of her on Kelly Clarkson, and she was [crosstalk 00:50:11].

**Craig:** I’ll tell you this much. I know that she married a guy from Staten Island, so that means I got a chance.

**John:** She also married a guy from Vancouver.

**Craig:** Wow. I’ve been to Vancouver. I don’t know. I’m already married. You know what, Scarlett? How about this? No. I’m turning you down. I’m already married.

**John:** You’re already attached.

**Craig:** We are no longer attached, Scarlett.

**John:** Wow. Good stuff.

**Craig:** Brutal.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see what’s here, and I don’t know what this is. Talk to us about your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** This is an advance. This is a One Cool Thing amuse-bouche for what is almost certainly going to be my next One Cool Thing. My next One Cool Thing, there is a game coming from Rusty Lake. You’ve played the Rusty Lake games, right?

**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve played Rusty Lake games.

**Craig:** They’re amazing. There’s a game forthcoming to Rusty Lake called The Past Within. The Past Within is coming out on November 2nd. That will happen-

**John:** The day before the live-

**Craig:** Oh my goodness, that’s coming. The Past Within, the forthcoming Rusty Lake game, is unique in that it requires two people to play it. The idea is that you are both on the app at the same time. You’re either in the same room or you’re talking over Discord or the phone or whatever. You need to cooperate, because you’re each seeing things on your version of the game as Player 1 or Player 2 that impacts how the other person is going to solve a puzzle. As an amuse-bouche, there is a game that does this very same thing. It is called Tick Tock: A Tale For Two. It’s been out for a bit. Let’s see. It looks like it came out in 2017 actually. It’s lovely. I played it with Melissa. You can play this with Mike. You can play it with Amy. Play it with whomever you want. Not Lambert. He is a dog. He’s stupid.

**John:** He’s sleeping too.

**Craig:** He’s sleeping and he’s dumb. It was quite gorgeous. The puzzles were very good. I thought they implemented the back and forth in a very smart way. It was engaging. What I liked about it was that we never got frustrated with each other. It was more like we really had to cooperate. It’s a short game. I think there’s only three chapters in it, or there’s a prologue and three chapters. It’s quite beautiful. The story makes no sense whatsoever. None. That happens all the time.

**John:** They get a mechanic [crosstalk 00:52:35].

**Craig:** Narrative is hard. I get it. The story is really just, what? Then again, the Rusty Lake folks, their stories make sense, but purposefully also don’t make sense.

**John:** They’re surreal.

**Craig:** They’re fully surreal, so I give them a pass on everything. They’re wonderful. I think Tick Tock: A Tale For Two is a very fun game. It is on literally every possible platform. Check that one out if you have somebody you like playing games with, in a good way, not like head games.

**John:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is Whisper by OpenAI. OpenAI are the people who do Dall-E. They have these giant train models of searching the whole internet to figure out what things are. They’ve been able to make Dall-E. Whisper is their version of a spoken language. Basically, it listens to countless hours of people talking and can understand what they’re saying and can give you transcriptions, and nearly real-time transcriptions of what people are saying. Craig and Megana, I have a link in the Workflowy here. Click through that and take a listen to this demo. I want you to see what it is you’re hearing.

[unintelligible audio clip plays]

**John:** Craig and Megana, what was it that you heard?

**Craig:** I’ll go first. That was Scottish. It was a Scotsman speaking with a strong Scottish accent. I heard helmet. I heard three holes. I heard something about weather. The rest of it was unintelligible to me.

**Megana:** I heard something about Merlin, but it was a Scottish accent. It was a man with a Scottish accent who was outside. There was a lot of bird noises.

**Craig:** Yes, I heard the birds as well.

**John:** Great. This is the actual transcription. “One of the most famous landmarks on the borders. It’s three hills, and the myth is that Merlin the magician split one hill in three and left the two hills at the back of us, which you can see. The weather is never good though. We stayed on the borders with the mists on the Yildens or Eildons. We never get the good weather, and as you can see today, there’s no sunshine. It’s a typical Scottish borders day.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** The model could actually figure out what this guy was saying, which is really impressive.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** I thought he was saying holes and helmet, and he was saying hills. You got Merlin right.

**John:** You got Merlin. You got Merlin.

**Craig:** Well done, Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Boy, that is… Wow. The program understood? It knew that that’s what that guy was saying?

**John:** It did. It was able to take that. Even with some of the tools we’re using to do Scriptnotes, we have transcription stuff built in, but it’s really trained on very specific English accents. It’s murky at times and doesn’t get a good sense of this. Here, because they trained it on all the languages, it can hear French and give you a real-time transcription in English. It’s really impressive. As great as all of the “draw me a flying cow” stuff has been, this is so useful and practical. You can imagine a year from now, five years from now, how important and impressive this is going to be.

**Craig:** We’re getting close to that day where everybody understands everybody. Then we can all be yelling at each other faster.

**John:** That’s what you want.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Speed. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Our outro this week is by MCL Karman. If hearing this outro has inspired you to write one of your own, let us provide you with some motivation, because we really do need some more outros. Send us your outros to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Hoodies too. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on insects. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you!

**Craig:** Thank you!

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, you have an insect infestation in your apartment, correct?

**Craig:** Infested.

**Megana:** Yes, absolutely. My place is overrun.

**John:** How many did you see?

**Megana:** So far, I have seen one earwig.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god. This is like that Creepshow episode where the guy was completely surrounded by cockroaches. You are surrounded by ones of bugs.

**Megana:** I went to bed at 8 p.m. last night because I saw this in my living room, and I was like, “I can’t.”

**Craig:** Wait a second. I got to roll back. You in your 20s went to bed at 8 p.m. like somebody who lives in a rest home, because you saw… Now, by the way, I hate earwigs. We can discuss my horrible run-in with an earwig many, many years ago. It sent you to bed. You were that shaken. You had to get into bed. Did you fall asleep?

**Megana:** I did not fall asleep, no, actually, because once I identified what this bug was, and I Googled earwigs, the second entry that came up on Google… You know how they have those suggested questions?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** The second entry was, “Can earwigs get in your bed?” The answer was yes.

**Craig:** Of course they can.

**John:** They are mobile.

**Craig:** Exactly. They’re mobile. Unless your bed is surrounded by some sort of force field, yes.

**John:** A moat would be a choice.

**Megana:** I don’t know, I don’t really think of spiders as being in your bed.

**Craig:** Oh, they are.

**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had spiders in my bed.

**Megana:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Did you not know?

**John:** I’ve been bit by spiders in my bed in college.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I get bit by spiders. We have so many spiders in La Cañada. I get bit by them all the time.

**John:** That’s why he’s moving.

**Craig:** You wake up, and you have a bite. It’s not itchy. It’s just a bite. You’re like, “The hell is this?” Then you realize it’s a spider.

**Megana:** I guess I just had this willful ignorance that bugs-

**Craig:** Respect your bed?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They know, like, “You know what? Guys, she’s in bed. Let’s leave her. It’s her private place.” No, they don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** While Megana’s dealing with her one earwig, at our house, because of all the heat… This happens whenever it gets super, super hot. A bunch of ants get into our house.

**Craig:** They look for water.

**John:** Ants just suck, and they’re annoying. You see the line going through. It’s like, “Why are you here?” Their entire mission is to get to one little piece of toothpaste that is left on the counter. That’s going to be their meal for the whole colony.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** It’s so, so much.

**Craig:** See, the bugs in your house are cute. The bugs in her house are nightmares that need to be extinguished in fire.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**John:** Then we put out the ant traps. The ant traps do work. It takes the poison, and it kills the colony eventually. It is still just so annoying to have ants and to wake up in the morning and see now there’s a new line headed from point A to point B [crosstalk 01:00:00].

**Craig:** There is a real life horror show when you pick something up… I was actually at a hotel a couple of months ago. It was a really nice hotel, but they had an ant problem. I lifted something, and a billion ants went nyah. I was like, “Oh, god.”

**John:** As we established last week on the podcast, there’s 40 quadrillion ants on Earth. Ants outnumber us 25 million to 1.

**Craig:** There are so many.

**John:** They’re going to win.

**Craig:** No, they already have won. That’s the joke. We are here on ant planet. We have all of our debates. We fight wars where millions of us die. Ants are like, “What? I’m sorry, millions? Lol. That’s not a number. Call us when you’re into the trillions. We’re in the quadrillions, jerks.” We’re just guests on ant planet.

**John:** Craig, you promised us the earwig story, which we heard pre-show. Obviously, this earwig changed your life, and we want to hear about it.

**Craig:** I’m so angry about it. Growing up on the East Coast, I just never saw one. I assume there are earwigs on the East Coast, but there weren’t any in New York. There weren’t any in New Jersey as far as I could tell.

**John:** You had roaches.

**Craig:** Roaches, of course.

**John:** I hate roaches. I did not see roaches until I came to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Roaches in New York, sometimes they’ll cosign a lease with you. That’s no problem, but earwigs, no. I’m in LA. I’m in West Hollywood walking down… I believe it was Fountain. I believe I was on Fountain, John.

**John:** Take Fountain.

**Craig:** I suddenly feel this stingy, pinchy, nasty, bitey pain on my neck, like on the nape of my neck. I reach my hand back, spasm, like ah, and there’s something there, which is the worst feeling in the world. You never want to feel anything. You just want to feel your own skin.

**John:** You want it to be an illusion.

**Craig:** You just want to think, “Oh, this was one of those weird exogenous, no, endogenous pains that just come out of nowhere,” but no, there’s something there. I’m like, “Ah!” I throw it down. Then it’s on the ground. It’s on the concrete. I look down at it, and it’s a fricking earwig. I didn’t even know what it was called.

**John:** Because we have international listeners who may not know what an earwig is, we’re describing an insect that is maybe an inch long. Is that the size for both of yours?

**Craig:** Yeah, I would say.

**Megana:** I would say five inches.

**Craig:** That’s not correct, Megana.

**John:** [Crosstalk 01:02:14] five inches.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** Largely flat. It has just way too many body parts and limbs to it. It’s flat and [crosstalk 01:02:23].

**Craig:** The worst part is-

**Megana:** It has this weird pincer thing.

**Craig:** That’s the thing, its butt.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Its butt has two pincers sticking out of it like a lobster claw. It bites you for no reason. I didn’t ask it. First of all, how did it get on my neck? How did it get on my neck?

**John:** Did it drop? Did it climb up to it?

**Craig:** It dropped down. It paratrooped down onto me. Then it bit me. That’s the thing. Essentially, it bit me with its ass. It ass-bites you. It doesn’t die. At least bees have the dignity to die. They sting you, their stinger breaks off, and they die. You think, “You sacrificed yourself stupidly, but fine.” There’s some poetry to that. No, not this little bastard. This little thing just bites you for no reason. To that day, I have hated earwigs. We’re talking about 20 years, 30 years, still, if I feel a sudden pain, I think earwig. I’ve never been bitten by one again, or ass-bitten.

**John:** We cannot discuss insects without discussing the worst of all insects and the insect that must just be banished from the Earth, which is the mosquito, because when you and I moved to Los Angeles, Craig-

**Craig:** There were none.

**John:** … there were not mosquitoes.

**Craig:** There were none. It was actually one of the best things about coming from the East Coast, which is 98% mosquito, to Los Angeles where there were none. No one ever got a mosquito bite.

**John:** Then we imported some sort of-

**Craig:** What the hell happened?

**John:** Apparently, it was a slow roll-up from the South or some other place. We got these little mosquitoes that are down on the ground level.

**Craig:** They bite your ankles.

**John:** They’re ever-present. They’re always biting your ankles.

**Craig:** Ankles.

**John:** They’re the worst.

**Craig:** The worst. They’re just so terrible. Megana, I can’t explain what a paradise it was here. I have a friend named Linus Upson. I’ve known him since college. I think I’ve talked about this before. He was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google Chrome. He’s since moved on to a much more noble effort, which is trying to get rid of mosquitoes entirely.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** He has one of these groups that is essentially genetically engineering a mosquito to… The women are the problem. The male mosquitoes don’t bite you and make you itchy. It’s the females, apparently.

**Megana:** Oh, really?

**Craig:** Yeah, apparently it’s entirely the females. Basically, they’re genetically engineering these male mosquitoes to only get female mosquitoes pregnant with male mosquitoes. I’m probably butchering this. The point is, through some crazy breeding thing, they’re going to get rid of mosquitoes. Basically, the population eventually just goes completely sterile. They run out of women and they die.

**John:** [Crosstalk 01:05:12].

**Craig:** Like a lot of the corners of the internet. All the girls are gone, and it’s just guys angry at each other, and then it’s over. Mosquitoes are awful. They have been killing people forever with malaria. They’re no good. They’re everywhere now.

**John:** Their role in the food chain must exist, but it’s not substantial. Some bats and other things eat them, but we’ll make it work.

**Craig:** Exactly. I feel like we’ll be okay. We’ll be okay without them. It’s not like ants. We probably need ants to decompose everything.

**John:** They do. They help chop stuff up, which is really useful.

**Craig:** Help chop stuff up. Do we need roaches? Probably not, although again, they probably also break down a lot of garbage. They do show up where the garbage is. Maybe there’s a reason, but mosquitoes?

**John:** My first year at USC in grad school, I was living in campus housing. I had never encountered roaches before. I was in this apartment I shared with a guy. At one point, I unplugged the power adapter for my phone answering machine. This is way back in phone answering machine time. I unplug it, and all these tiny baby roaches were swarming around it because of the heat of the transformer for the adapter. That’s where I first learned about boric acid, the powder acid that you put out that they walk through and it kills them horribly. It’s the worst. Finding a roach on my pillow one morning was just-

**Megana:** Oh, no, your bed?

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** … terrifying.

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** I still have nightmares from that.

**Craig:** We’re not helping. Megana, we haven’t talked about spiders much. Do you hate spiders? Are you afraid of spiders?

**Megana:** I am very afraid of spiders. I do not like them. I feel like I’m slowly making my peace. Is the spider going to eat this earwig?

**Craig:** That’s the thing. The spider is your friend. My daughter is terrified of spiders. She will fly out of her room in tears over this. I’ve tried to explain to her that these little spiders that we get in our house, they’re wolf spiders, they’re not going to be a problem. That said, we do have a lot of black widow spiders up where we are. Megana, can I tell you a little bit of a ghost story about the black widow spiders?

**Megana:** Okay.

**Craig:** I’m going to get real close to the microphone. Here we go. When my daughter was young, she was in the Girl Scouts. One day, we had a Girl Scout event at the house. The girls, as the evening came, they wanted to sleep outside, like camping. We had tents. We have this pretty large lawn on our property, down in the back of the property. We set up the tents. Me and another dad were setting up the tents. There’s this little retaining wall with these little river rocks in it that bound that little lawn area. As the sun went down, the other dad was shining a light, and he said, “What are those?”

**Megana:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I shone my light on the wall, and Megana, I’m not saying there was a black widow or 5 or 10. There was thousands of them.

**Megana:** What?

**Craig:** Thousands, all emerging, because they had been living inside the wall, in the cracks of the rocks. As the temperature lowered, they came out. They were swarming, all of them, black widows. I said, “Okay, let’s calmly get these tents down, go back inside.” Here’s the thing. I didn’t think that the black widows were going to be leaving the wall. It was like, “There’s a lot of them, so let’s go back inside and tell the girls they’re sleeping inside, because… We’ll just make something up.” I can’t remember what we made up. Wolves. “There are wolves.”

**John:** Wolves.

**Craig:** Megana, you would’ve died.

**Megana:** I would’ve died. I’m very close right now. Is that real? Do they live that close to each other?

**John:** They can. They can live in groups.

**Craig:** Why are you asking John, as if I told you a lie? Megana, first of all, John’s not a bug expert.

**John:** I have been bitten by a black widow spider. I’m, out of all the people on this call, the only person-

**Megana:** He’s a Boy Scout.

**John:** … to actually survive a black widow spider.

**Craig:** He is a Boy Scout. That is true.

**John:** I used the venom extraction tool and got it all out and was fine.

**Craig:** That’s good. Did you think that black widow spiders were just loners, where they’re like, “I don’t want to talk to another black widow spider.”

**Megana:** Yeah, I thought you would just, worst-case scenario, see one.

**John:** I’ve only seen one at a time in my life.

**Craig:** There were so many of them. I’m looking up swarm of black widow spiders right now on the internet.

**Megana:** I’m so glad you’re moving.

**John:** He’s going to bring the spiders with him though.

**Megana:** I just want to put out a request to our listeners. If anyone is cool with bugs and they want to be my friend or if they have a good solution for being really scared of bugs, I would love to hear either possibility.

**John:** To be honest, cognitive behavioral therapy is probably the way to get through any of those kind of phobias. Basically, they desensitize you to it.

**Craig:** Some things we’re supposed to be afraid of.

**John:** It’s an overreaction of a natural innate fear.

**Craig:** Megana, you’re supposed to be afraid of black widow spiders.

**John:** We’re hardwired to be afraid of snakes. You can show a baby monkey a piece of hose, and they’ll freak out because, oh, it’s a snake.

**Craig:** (singing)

**John:** We need more baby monkeys, less black widows.

**Craig:** Aw, baby monkeys.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Megana, you’re not afraid of baby monkeys, are you?

**Megana:** I’m not, but monkeys are vicious.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. You’re not wrong.

**Megana:** Growing up, going back to India all the time, monkeys are more of a pest than I think people realize.

**Craig:** I saw those things where in the early days of the shutdown of COVID, there was a town. It was a village. It was a city in India where everyone had just gotten off the street because of the shutdown, and the monkeys took over. Oh my god. They were fighting each other, like monkey gangs fighting. It was amazing.

**John:** Eventually, they formed a society of their own. Were there problems? Yes, but eventually they found a good leader and democracy ruled.

**Craig:** Damn dirty apes.

**John:** Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Starbucks Seam Life Hack](https://www.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/16pvai/does_your_starbucks_cup_leak_sometimes_make_sure/)
* [John Scalzi’s Blogpost: Find the Time or Don’t](https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/09/16/writing-find-the-time-or-dont/)
* [Happy The Last of Us Day!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBRRDpQ0yc0) Check out this trailer.
* [Whisper by Open AI](https://openai.com/blog/whisper/)
* [Tick Tock the Game](https://www.ticktockthegame.com)
* [Sign up for the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/) for more writing resources!
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/writing-as-acting).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, oh, right, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 568 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, there are actors and there are writers, but deep down, what is the difference between writing and acting? How can writers use the techniques of acting to help build effective scenes? We’ll also discuss retirement, cutting characters, and how the central dramatic argument applies to TV. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss the future and what we owe it.

**Craig:** Nothing!

**John:** Nothing. No, we owe the future something. It’s a question of how much and how much we should prioritize near-term solutions versus long-term solutions and other such things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Great. We’ve got some follow-up here. First off, Writer Emergency Pack XL, which we launched last week, is now fully funded. Thank you for everyone who backed us on Kickstarter for that. You still have a couple, maybe 20 days left to back us if you’d like to. We funded it in the first couple hours, which is great.

**Craig:** Great. Congrats.

**John:** Thank you for everybody on that.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Hooray. Some more follow-up. Last week we were discussing burials for some reason and coffins and concrete vaults.

**Craig:** Just stupid.

**John:** We have some feedback on how to do that in a more environmentally sound way. Megana, help us out.

**Megana Rao:** Ben wrote in and said, “I just heard the September 19th episode, and your dislike of caskets/concrete burials reminded me of the Green Burial Council and other organizations/movements. In case you didn’t know, there’s folks trying to reduce the carbon footprint of laying people to rest. I’m definitely planning to be memorialized this way. Hope you check it out, and maybe I’ll be a One Cool Thing or Premium bit.”

**John:** Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes to Green Burial Council. There’s also an LA Times article about human composting as an alternative, where they put you in a muslin bag and stick you in the ground. I’m for it. Good for me.

**Craig:** Until we get the instant atomizer, which would be fun. I would love to be atomized.

**John:** Cremation takes a lot of energy. It’s not as much energy as making a casket and burying it. As energy becomes cheaper and cheaper, cremation will get cheaper and cheaper too.

**Craig:** I would like to be shot into the Sun.

**John:** That would be nice, but that’s experience. Isn’t that what Johnny Depp got in trouble for with Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes?

**Craig:** He tried to shoot them into the Sun?

**John:** He put them into space.

**Craig:** Oh, Johnny Depp.

**John:** Oh, Johnny Depp. That’s the most controversial thing he ever did.

**Craig:** Otherwise, spotless record.

**John:** Spotless record. Hey, let’s go right to our main topic, which is actors and writing. This is all based around this article we ran in Inneresting this last week, which is an old blog post of mine from 2010 where I was talking about my then young daughter was trying to practice how to seem sad, how to cry. It’s this thing where little kids, they’re like, “Oh I’m so sad, I’m crying,” and they’ll cover their eyes, but they’re not really tears. They’re trying to get you to see things. It got me realizing that she’s trying to act, she’s learning how to act.

I was thinking about how as writers we are acting all the time. We’re all experimenting with how do I portray these emotions that we’re putting on the page rather than on the stage. Craig as a writer and actor, I thought we might have a few minutes to talk about the experience and what you see as the similarities between the craft of pretending something is real for the purposes of writing a scene versus pretending something is real for the purposes of staging a scene.

**Craig:** Thank you for introducing me correctly as a world-famous actor. I think that actors probably have as much diversity in their approach to how they perform as writers do in their approach to how they write. Some writers are organizers and thinkers, and then they write. Some writers are just, “Wee!” and they write and see where it goes. Most people are combinations of the two.

I think that holds true for actors as well. There are actors that are very thoughtful and are perfectly aware that they’re acting. This would be the Laurence Olivier, “Have you tried acting, my boy?” school. Then other actors seemingly can’t do it unless they disappear inside their character and just go bananas. Everybody’s different. For me, I guess my approach is pretty similar to the way I write, which is to think about what I’m supposed to be feeling and thinking and then feel and think it.

**John:** That is a relatively modern incarnation of the actor’s, I don’t want to say method, because that breaks into a whole conundrum of other things that are involved in the actor’s method. The idea that a performer on stage is supposed to be believably in the moment that they are portraying isn’t actually all that old of an idea. If you look back to old plays, there was a more presentational quality to it. You were playing to the back seats there. Now, also I think partly because of the arrival of film cameras, we’re in close, and we’re hearing whispers, this sense of like, oh this is a real person in a real situation is much more crucial. That’s often what we’re trying to do on the page as well.

**Craig:** Over time, I think there has been a general movement towards realism, which was not always a thing, as you point out. For a long time, drama was never intended to be real. It was entirely representational, and it was intentionally so. It would’ve been strange for people to see things presented hyper-realistically. They would’ve been bored to tears or confused. As time has gone on, we seem to have found our way more and more towards a very naturalistic style, some more than others.

I think that holds true for writing as well. The vast quantity of television I think has done more to advance a naturalistic writing than anything else, because there’s so much of it. It all seems to be trending in that direction, not all of it, but some of it, and to varying levels of success. Naturalism and truth, trying to create something that seems real and believable, while yet being not at all real, and rather dramatic, that seems to be the name of the game.

**John:** It strikes me that so much of what we learn about how an actor prepares goes back to whatever their education was, whatever the techniques they learned along the way. This is how an actor approaches a role. They’re doing some work to figure out, okay, this is how this character stands, this is how this character sits, this is how this character relates to a space, this is the vocal affectations this character uses, this is how they approach these things. To some degree, we may do that as writers, but writers don’t tend to study the same way that actors study. I think there is some things we could probably take from that. Actors practice. They go through rehearsals playing many different characters. They have to swap roles. They have to make changes on their feet. They have to respond in ways that I think sometimes as writers we’re not being forced to do that.

So often as writers, we’re always being pushed on structural things or like, “Oh, this scene should move here.” We’re always looking at the bigger picture. We’re not necessarily doing that in-depth scene work, which I think is part of the reason why we keep coming back to these Three Page Challenges, is that we’re really looking at, moment by moment, how are these dots connecting on the page.

**Craig:** You can do similar exercises with acting when actors perform a scene and other people watch and then they critique. That’s what acting class generally is. It’s like endless Three Page Challenges or scenes. You’re getting at a fundamental difference. Acting is interpretive. Writing is purely creative, meaning unless you’re adapting, even in an adaptation, you are creating. There’s nothing there, and then there is something there. That is very different. So much of what acting is is about the choices you make of how to interpret the text that is there. That’s where it gets interesting.

You’re right, they do have to incorporate elements of themselves that we generally don’t, like their bodies. When we’re writing, our bodies probably do very similar things, form terrible postures. Not you, I guess. The rest of us. You apparently get even better posture when you write. Everybody else is just slouching and tightening up their neck muscles. It’s all mental. Acting is very physical.

One of the things that you do think about when you’re acting is what do I do with my arms. The answer is nothing. Unless you have something to do with them, just ignore them. Normally, during the day, when you’re talking to people, your arms are just there. You don’t think about them. Suddenly the camera goes on and everyone’s like, “My arms. What do I do with my arms?” They’re just fine. They’re fine. You’ll be okay. Just ignore them.

Figuring out all that stuff is about making choices based on something that has already been created, and you are bringing it to life. That is an aspect of things that we don’t quite do, or sometimes I think we also misunderstand how complicated that process is.

If you are a writer who is dealing directly with actors, the best advice I can give you is respect what they’re doing, even if you think it looks silly or sounds silly or sounds pretentious or confusing or pointless. Doesn’t matter. Respect what they’re doing, because it’s what they need to do to get where they need to go. You, when you were writing, didn’t need to do anything other than the stuff in your head, including get dressed, take a shower, or stand.

**John:** Let’s talk about the stuff that you were doing in your head as a writer, because I find that so often, I’ll be doing press on a movie, and they’ll say, “Oh, what was it like to have this person play this character?” or, “What was your relationship with the director? How do you talk to the director about the characters?” and stuff like that. I find myself saying, yeah, it’s a weird thing that I am all the characters in the movie, and then one by one, they get assigned away. It’s not like it goes through the directors. It was my character, and now suddenly, it’s their character. I have to watch what they’re doing with their choices of the choices that I made. There is this strange handoff.

I played Edward Bloom for many, many years. I played Will Bloom for many, many years. I knew internally how all those scenes worked and played and what the dynamics were that are driving them. Ultimately, I can do no more to affect that down the road than what I could put on the page and what I could help communicate to the actors if they ask me questions, but I can’t do that for them. Ultimately, it is entirely in their hands now.

**Craig:** You will find yourself landing in a strange middle world where if you are directing things you’ve written, you have to pay attention to the intentions and the imagined performance that went on in your head, because it does inform how things ought to be. You also then have to pay attention to the reality of the actors in front of you. Then you have to guide those actors towards what would be a better performance that gets more truly and cleanly and interestingly to the heart of what you’re trying to do but isn’t necessarily accountable to the imaginary performance in your head, but rather accountable to them. It’s a really interesting emotional and mental gymnastics routine you have to do inside your head.

On top of all of that, there are trust issues, because you need to make sure that actors trust you. Trust is everything. They’re not going to trust you if they feel like you have an ulterior motive. For instance, let’s say that I cast a movie with, we’ll go with Harrison Ford. I shot a week with Harrison Ford, and then he died. Sorry, Harrison. In this story, you die.

**John:** Bleak.

**Craig:** We have to replace Harrison Ford, so I get somebody else. Who would be a good replacement for Harrison Ford, by the way? Who should I go for here?

**John:** That’s a good question. Not too far off in range. Josh Brolin?

**Craig:** Great. I get Josh Brolin. We’re halfway through the day, and I keep saying things to Josh Brolin that make him think, “He just wants me to be Harrison Ford. I get it. He doesn’t want me. He didn’t want me. He wanted Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford died. I can tell he’s just pushing me to do a Harrison Ford impression, but that’s not what I do. It’s not even fair to me. I’m Josh Brolin. I’m my own person, my own actor. I need to get to this part naturally, or else it’s going to stink. It’ll just seem like I’m doing a bad impression of another guy. I’ll never be connected to it. No one will like it anyway.”

That’s kind of the same thing. If they feel like you keep steering them back towards whatever was going on in your head as you were writing this, then that is not the same as acting for them. That’s just chasing your phantom, because the phantom that you have in your head, they don’t have to be accountable to being in physical space, standing there, doing anything you don’t want them to do. They literally disappear into your blind spot when you don’t want to see them. You have to work with the people there. They have to trust that you are working with them and not someone else in your head.

**John:** A thing that strikes me that actors and writers are both responsible for doing, that’s a difficult skill, and they’re analogous skills, is they have to remember and forget at all moments. For example, actors have to forget that the camera is there. They have to forget that one of the walls is missing. They have to pretend that the space is real so that it feels natural, all the while also being aware of where the camera is, because that is important, also being aware of what the other people’s lines are, even though they need to be able to react as if they’ve never heard those matching lines before.

Writers have to be aware of what is the purpose of this scene, what is going to happen next, what’s going to happen 20 pages from now, why is this scene here, and at the same time, make it feel like this is just a natural moment that’s happening between these characters that is not there just to set up the next thing. That kind of remembering and forgetting at the same time is a skill.

**Craig:** Good actors, I think, know that they need to divide their attention in weird ways. They need to have an external understanding of what the whole point of the scene is. Good actors need to understand where they sit in the scene. Are they in the middle? Are they the person that’s being shot against the middle? They need to know why the other person’s saying the things they’re saying. Then they need to forget all that and just be them. They need to know those things before they can forget those things.

When you are writing, you are hearing music in your head, and you’re putting notes down. Then you show up with performers on stage. There they are with their instruments. Now if you’re directing, you’re a conductor. Your job is to make sure that they’re all moving in the same fashion, towards the same goal. There you have it.

**John:** I like it. Director’s conductor. Composer is writer. Actor is the first chair violin.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Good analogy. Reaching back to another Inneresting blog post from the past, this was on cutting a character and saving a scene. It actually feels related to what we’re talking about with actors. I found myself in a situation where I could not make this scene work. I realized there was just one more character in there than I could actually support. Once I cut that character out, the scene felt very natural.

Similarly, just this last week, I was working on a scene where because of changes, I actually had to add a character into the scene. It was important this character be in the scene. It was impossible to take the existing scene and just add that character in. It seems like it should be the simplest thing, like we’ll throw one line to this new character. It just never works that way. A development person’s note might be just to stick them in there. If you just stick an extra body into a scene, it tends to fall apart. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this great video of Patton Oswalt on King of Queens. He was a small part of King of Queens.

**Craig:** He was the best. He was the greatest.

**John:** There’s this one scene where Patton Oswalt is in this scene. He has to be there, but he has no lines for a long time. He chooses to stand just completely still the entire time.

**Craig:** Frozen.

**John:** Frozen.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** No one notices.

**Craig:** No one notices. I could be wrong, but I feel like when he did it, he didn’t tell anyone either. It wasn’t like he said to everybody, “Hey, let me just do this. It’ll be funny.” I think no one knew. It’s wonderful. He’s the best.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** I think he’s such a great stand-up comedian. He’s got a new Netflix special.

**John:** Let’s plug his Netflix special.

**Craig:** He’s not even on the show. I’m plugging his stuff.

**John:** One day.

**Craig:** One day.

**John:** Let’s talk about that. Craig, you’ve had this experience throughout your entire career, I’m sure, is that so often the challenge is not just what is the scene about, it’s who’s in the scene and how do you support those people being in the scene. There are times where this would be so much easier if I could get rid of this character. You can find a way to get rid of them if you can. Other times, the simplest version is impossible because of who’s there.

**Craig:** Everything is a souffle. I say souffle all the time. When things are arranged correctly… It’s very hard to get things to be arranged correctly. It’s very hard to make a souffle. It’s hard to get the souffle to rise. Then someone comes along and says, “Oh, but just throw one more thing in,” or take one thing out or do this or do this or do that. It seems very small to them, and it’s not. It makes the souffle fall apart.

By the way, this goes right to acting again. There are things you can do where you might ask an actor to do something, and you can see them tense up. I think for a lot of people who don’t quite get what’s going on there, they may think it’s just a defensive actor being defensive, but sometimes it’s just, in fact most of the time I’d imagine, it’s just I’m going, “Oh, you’re going to mess up the souffle. It’s a little tiny thing, but you’re messing it up. Now I know it’s just not going to be as good.”

There’s no magic to removing a character and suddenly everything’s amazing. You probably put that character there for a reason. There’s nothing wrong with being right. Sometimes we’re right. We’re allowed to say, “I know, it seems like you could just move that one little piece, but as it turns out, it’s a load-bearing wall.” Just fill in whatever, souffle, structure, metaphor you’d like.

**John:** I can talk about the sets I’ve been on in my experience as directing, but I’m curious what yours has been. Do actors know when a scene is working, or do they sometimes not know when a scene is working? I’ve definitely seen cases where the actors are convinced this is great and golden, and what we’re seeing on the monitor is like, “Oh, that’s not the scene. We’re not there yet.”

**Craig:** It’s been my luck or good fortune to work with actors that tend to worry that it’s not working than rather just be thrilled with themselves. We’re all the same way. We’re all very nervous and trying to make sure it’s great. There are times where it’s easy enough when you’re behind the camera to go, “That’s it. Cut. I have it.” Then they’re like, “Do you? Do you? Do you? Do you?” “Yes, trust me. I have it. We have it.” There are also times where they may say, “We had it on take two, and now it’s take five.” There can be disagreements.

By and large, I think good actors question more than they presume that things are great. They are reasonably concerned that they’re going to look stupid, because no one’s going to see me. They’re not going to see me. They’re not going to see the screenplay pages. They’re going to see the actors. In movie theaters, they’re enormous. If they look stupid, everyone makes fun of them, especially now. Now you can’t even be stupid and be made fun of briefly. You’re made fun of forever. You live forever on the internet.

**John:** You become a meme.

**Craig:** You become a meme.

**John:** You’re this little slice out of there.

**Craig:** It’s not fair.

**John:** I would say that like you, more cases, the actors are not convinced it’s working when it actually is working, because they’re just not seeing what we’re seeing. They may feel and think about the space between this character and I, the lens is just seeing things differently. I’ll grant that.

There’s also times where an actor is making a choice that they believe is great and it’s working, and it just comes across differently. Those are just difficult conversations to have, because you as the director, you as the writer, you know how all the pieces also need to fit together.

So often, actors are only thinking about this one moment, this one scene, where am I at in this one scene. They don’t know emotionally where they need to get to, what came just before this. Those can be the challenging conversations to have, because it’s not even necessarily that they’re making a wild choice for this moment. It’s just that choice is not going to fit overall what needs to happen around the scene.

**Craig:** I do try and talk about the moment before and the moment after. I think the moment after is just as important. I just remember everybody what’s happening before and what’s happening after, because we don’t shoot things in order, especially when you’re shooting across lots of episodes, where it’s a lot of stuff. Yes, there are times where they think something is spot on, and maybe you disagree.

Other people are different, but my general philosophy is that directing actors is a little bit like being a parent and thinking I can guide my kid as I’m raising my kids. I’m not saying actors are children. Just go with me for this. I can teach them some things. I can give them some values. I can say I don’t like that or I do like this. Basically, they are who they are. I can gently nudge this way or that. What I don’t want to do is parent them in such a way that I’m saying you should not be who are you, because that’s not possible, and everything will go bad.

I think with actors, you can nudge, you can massage. If you know they have three different gears, and they’re in the wrong one, get them to the other one, but don’t ask them to be in a gear they don’t know. Don’t fight against their natural nature. Oh my god, I just said natural nature. Let’s leave it in. I think people need to know how bad I am at talking.

**John:** I’ve had a few mistakes this episode too, so I think we’re all good.

**Craig:** No. There are none in evidence. See, there are none in evidence. Mine will stay there forever.

**John:** Craig, what you’re really saying though is that casting is absolutely crucial, because casting is when you actually decide what is the fit between this actor or this role, and who is the person who can basically… They have the innate sense of how to play this character. Within that, you could make some changes. You could amp some stuff up and down. They have to be able to be that person on the camera.

If you have the wrong person, it’s just not going to work. That’s why sometimes you start shooting with somebody and recast them, because that’s just not going to work. It’s just not going to fit. There’s nothing you could do to change that person’s performance along the way. They were just the wrong person in that role.

**Craig:** There are times when somebody above may send a note. This didn’t happen to me, happily. There was a movie I worked on where this did happen, where the studio said, “Listen, we’ve been watching the dailies for two weeks, and we think the actor should be more like this.” I wasn’t directing the movie, but I remember thinking, “That’s not going to happen. You don’t even want it to happen.” In fact, the worst possible thing would be if that actor went, “Oh, okay, got it,” because then they wouldn’t be themselves. They would not be acting out of their own body and face and brain and heart. They would be just acting towards something artificial. You got to dance with the date you brought.

**John:** I had a situation early on in my career where there was an actor in a role, and the big studio note came like, “This is not the character we want. This is not the performance we want. This is not working.” I had to go and try to do as much as I could in what days were left shooting it, but also in ADR to bring that performance up to a more comedic place. We did get 10% of the way there, but ultimately we had to recast and re-shoot. That was the wrong person in the role. I hadn’t picked this person for the role. It had been forced upon me. The other alternative could’ve been, if we had to keep that actor in the role, was just rewriting what they were doing, because it just wasn’t going to work with this actor.

**Craig:** That’s okay. While it may be disappointing, I’m sure it would be disappointing for that actor, the only thing worse than being recast is being forced to be something that you can’t be, and every day, day after day, 12 hours a day being told you’re not doing it right, do something that you don’t understand how to do. That would be terribly frustrating.

**John:** Our friend Rachel Bloom is in a new show called Reboot on Hulu. It’s delightful. In the second episode, there is an actor who’s cast in a role onto this rebooted TV sitcom. She’s wildly miscast. Everyone has to scramble around to figure out, “What are we going to do with this character who cannot possibly play the scene? Do we rewrite the scene or do we somehow teach this person how to act in a completely different way?” To its credit, it goes through all the different permutations of what it could do, including have her act with her hands or not act with her hands. As Craig would teach you, don’t act with your hands.

**Craig:** Don’t act with your arms. You can absolutely act with your hands.

**John:** Hands, but no big arm movements.

**Craig:** Between shoulder and elbow, you really just want to isolate that.

**John:** You got to keep it small. I would recommend anybody who’s enjoying this conversation to check out this show called Reboot. Rachel Bloom is not the only great actor in it, but Rachel Bloom is a friend, and so you should see it for her.

**Craig:** You should always see Rachel Bloom.

**John:** Let’s go to some questions. This first one is a big one from JP.

**Megana:** JP asks, “Quick question. While listening to Episode 76, How Screenwriters Find Their Voice, I was shocked, simply shocked to hear Craig say that after turning 50 he was going to start seriously thinking about retirement. Does that plan still stand, or is it safe to say Craig’s shift from feature writer to TV writer/producer/emperor changed his view on things?”

**John:** Craig, did you renege on your promise to retire at 50 because Chernobyl did well? What happened?

**Craig:** No, I didn’t promise anything, first of all. I said I would seriously think about it. I think about retirement all the time. I think most of the time when I talk about thinking about retirement, what I’m really talking about thinking about is failure and everyone just going, “Oh my god, enough of this guy,” and then that’s that, so then I have to force retire.

I’m not currently thinking seriously about retirement. I’ve got a few more things to do. I just turned 50 not too long ago, year, year and a half ago. That’s not to say that five years from now I might be like… At some point, I have to decide, what do I like more, working or not working, which is a nice problem to have, because I do really enjoy what I do a lot. There are days, man.

**John:** There’s days you prefer to play D and D.

**Craig:** By the way, honestly, that’s what saves you. D and D saves you. If I didn’t have D and D, I’d probably be retired by now.

**John:** I don’t consider retirement at all. I think Mike would probably love me to take some time off and just be more freely available to do other stuff. I intend to be one of those people who I die with a script half written and 19 things. I want to die with things being messy and unfinished because there was stuff. I want to owe somebody a script when I die.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s just aggressive. That feels hostile. That feels like you’re punishing everybody, like, “You! You!”

**John:** Writers could write for a very long time. Directors can direct for a very long time. We see people in their 70s and 80s working hard. I want to be one of those people. I really enjoy what I do, so I can’t think of that. We also have friends who are involuntarily retired. Basically, the phone stops ringing. It becomes harder and harder to make a living. That also happens. I think we have to make sure that we are structurally planning for the work may not come forever and that we are setting aside our own money, but that we also have Guild money and other things that are keeping us potentially afloat in our later years.

**Craig:** You certainly plan for forced retirement, and then make your choice. If you’re not forced, then it’s a choice. I think right now I can’t imagine retiring, because I feel like I’m getting better. I think I’ll think about it much more if I feel like I’m getting worse. If I get worse, I’ll just stop.

**John:** If for whatever reason you are not allowed to write film and television anymore, is there a career switch you would make?

**Craig:** A career switch, I don’t know about that. I think I would do a lot of volunteer stuff. A bit like this podcast, I like that we don’t have ads, so it’s not a job. We don’t work for anybody. We don’t have to listen to their nonsense. We don’t take any guff. We can take guff from Megana.

**John:** I really liked teaching my daughter to read. I think I would probably do more volunteering in teaching elementary school kids to read, because I really dig that. Once a kid can read, they can do everything.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do. What I wouldn’t do is go teach at USC or anything like that, not that they would have me. I wouldn’t do it, because it’s sick enough already. How much more can I talk about this stuff?

**John:** I would consider teaching one semester at a time at different universities around the country, because it would be fun to just live in different places.

**Craig:** It’s not about them.

**John:** It’s not about them. It’s about me.

**Craig:** Just the thought of having to stand there and have people ask me questions about the central dramatic argument and such, I can’t bear it. Anyway, what’s our next question?

**Megana:** Taylor wrote in. She says, “In Episode 403, Craig discusses how to write a screenplay beginning with the central dramatic argument. Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before, but I’d love to hear thoughts on how the central dramatic argument maps onto a television series. If the protagonist is undergoing change in each hour-long episode, does that mean there’s a unique dramatic argument for each episode and an overarching dramatic argument for the entire season, or is there simply one dramatic argument that you continuously work towards in each episode. Mad Men’s Don Draper is put through a new ringer in each episode, but every episode is also part of a unified whole, his season-long journey.”

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about this, because you just did a TV series. Is there a central dramatic argument? How does the central dramatic argument map onto either Chernobyl or Last of Us? What were you thinking along those lines as you were doing it?

**Craig:** I think you basically have it right, Taylor. There is a big one, and then there are little ones episodically. I’m not a big fan of the whole, “My television series is just a really long movie.” I hope not, because then how do I know why did an episode end in a particular way?

I think every episode does need to be its own short movie with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there does need to be some sort of resolution. The characters that are undergoing those things change very typically from episode to episode. There is one character who’s probably the central protagonist. That central protagonist’s central dramatic question is the one that gets answered by the end. You have a circle made up of circles. You don’t need to be particularly pedantic about it. You don’t have to make drawings or sketches. You just need to know. Otherwise, it’s like, “What was the point of that episode, and what did I learn? What was the point of this whole season? What did I learn?”

There are shows where it’s different. Purely episodic television cannot have a central dramatic argument, can’t, because it needs to go on forever. Soap operas need to go on forever. Soap opera covers all sorts of genres. There is this new limited series-ish vibe that goes on where certain television shows are not meant to go on for 20 seasons, but maybe 3 or 4. Each one of those seasons has a point and an impact and a statement to make. All those questions need to be thought through and answered. I think if you’re doing a television series that has an ending, a circle made up of circles.

**John:** Craig, while you were off doing Last of Us, I’ve had a bunch of showrunners on, talking about their process. I think they would largely agree with what you’re saying. When you talk with them about how they were setting up their writers’ rooms and how they were thinking about the season, how they were thinking about each episode, they really would come down to, either call it theme or call it central dramatic argument, what is the unifying principle behind this episode’s story, and how is it progressing the character development and what we want to see these characters be doing over the course of this season, be that a 6-episode season or a 22-episode season. They are mapping out where they are going overall, what are their arcs that are happening.

These were shows that were long movies in the sense of characters would have big transformations and enter one place and exit another place. You look at Girl From Plainville or you look at Liz Meriwether’s show The Dropout, they were movie-like arcs, but they were very clearly set up to have each episode have a point of entry, a point of exit, and you could really feel like that was the conclusion of this episode, that was the conclusion of this part of the story. It was all fit together. That’s from the outlining stage. That’s when you’re on the whiteboard figuring out what are the important beats in this episode. You figure it out then.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s how you get to interesting ends of episodes. That’s also how people get a sense that you’re being intentional and thoughtful, that it’s not haphazard. You’re not just going, “There, stop this one here. We’ll start it up again next week.” Everything’s crafted, should be ideally crafted, so that every single episode feels satisfying in its own way and yet drives you with interest to the next one. Then after all is said and done, when you look at all of them as a whole, you go, “Okay, everything that was being said here and here and here and here and here was all being reflected back here, here, here, here, here. This was all part of one big thing and not just a haphazard bucket of narrative bolts.”

**John:** It’s also much easier to apply this kind of framework to an 8-episode season versus a 22-episode classic broadcast show. You look at what Lost had to do or what Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to do. They could start a season with real intention, but they couldn’t really know where the end of their season was. They couldn’t quite know how things were going to progress, how quickly they would burn through storylines. Sometimes they do have to do a mid-season reset to get you to a new place. I think that’s incredibly difficult to do that level of quality for 22 or 24 episodes per season. I’m glad we’re not trying that hard to do those giant mega shows anymore.

**Craig:** I just don’t think it’s possible.

**John:** No, not with the expectations we have, both in terms of what has to happen narrative-wise but also what production value has to be. We just can’t do it.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Another question, Megana.

**Megana:** Citizen asks, “I’m a writer living and working outside the US. A pilot I wrote was optioned by a company based in Los Angeles with the intention of selling it to a bigger production company. After a couple years, things seem to be gaining momentum, because they recently approached me to discuss the fact that if they sell the series, then I would most likely be replaced as the writer. I’m realistic. I know most things don’t happen. I know my leverage as a new writer from another country is very little. In any case, I would like to know, what would be the best-case scenario for me or someone like me? Is it possible to even get hired as a writer? Can I get proper credit as a creator if I’m not WGA? Can I be WGA? I have no idea. I suppose it’s all up to whoever negotiates my contract, but any guidance on what’s possible or what to look out for would be immensely appreciated.”

**John:** Oh, Citizen. Let’s talk about the good news. Apparently, you wrote something that was so good that they feel like they can get this set up, and they were optimistic, and they’re trying to warm you up to the idea of being replaced, which is shitty, but also it means that there could be some interest in you going forward, this project going forward. What is your contract with these people? They’ve optioned this thing, but in what way did they option it? Is there anything in there about keeping you on as a writer? It feels like there should be. It’s not clear that there is. At the very least, if this project gets set up someplace and might have a different showrunner or something, you created the underlying material, and that is always going to be there. Your name is always going to be on it in some way. Craig, what’s your thinking for Citizen?

**Craig:** There’s a term in the feature side of the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement that says that if a writer sells literary material, meaning you’ve written it, you’re not employed to write it, but rather you’ve already written it, and then you sell that like a spec, and copyright then gets transferred over to sign, the purchasing company is obliged to hire you to do the next rewrite of that material. They can’t just buy it and then kick you off. They buy it, then they employ you, and you write the next draft. I don’t know if there’s a similar version of that for the television side of things. There should be. I wish there were, if there isn’t.

**John:** Citizen, you definitely can become a WGA member. There are people all over the world who are WGA members. The fact that you’re living outside of the US is not going to prohibit you from doing that. Ultimately, the work you’re doing for this company, if they’re [inaudible 00:39:43] this will be US work, so it will still count. You can become a WGA member.

**Craig:** Yes, if you are employed by a signatory, then yes, you will be a WGA member. If they’re saying you will most likely be replaced as a writer, the thing you need to be aware of is that the people that optioned your pilot may have optioned it because they love the idea, they like a character, but they may not love the writing. It seems a little odd that they’re immediately saying this now. It may be that they’re also thinking, “Oh, nobody’s going to want to develop the show with you, because what have you done?” to which I would say, “The thing that you optioned, and the thing that they would be buying.”

Hard to say without more details, other than yes, it is possible to get hired as a writer. In fact, it may be mandatory. I would have to take a look at the MBA on that. Getting proper credit as a creator if you’re not WGA, I’m not sure. Can you be WGA? Yes. You need a lawyer. You should probably have one already, since you’ve signed an option agreement.

**John:** It would be a great idea to have, either if you’re in the UK, a UK lawyer who’s used to working with Hollywood companies, if you’re not in the UK, I would say just see if you can find an LA-based lawyer who has some experience in this field, just because I just worry that a French lawyer coming into this is not going to have the expertise that would be useful for this situation. You can do it.

The general case for Citizen, let’s say you were an American writer, you wrote this thing, and you get the call like, “We would need to bring in another writer.” The idea like this is going to be a TV show, this is going to need a showrunner, so we’re going to bring in a showrunner, that’s really common for some writers, for a new showrunner to come on board. That can be a good experience. It’s also possible that that was the conversation they meant to have with you, that they weren’t going to just toss you aside. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Hard to say.

**John:** Hard to say. Craig, should we do our One Cool Things? I feel like jumping ahead to that.

**Craig:** I have no problem with that.

**John:** I have two One Cool Things. First off, this article by Dino Grandoni, which I’m sure you read, for the Washington Post, about how many ants there are in the world. Craig, do you know how many ants there are in the world?

**Craig:** You’re talking about the sisters of your mom?

**John:** The sisters of your mom, no. I’m actually talking about the small insects who ruin picnics.

**Craig:** Oh my god. It’s got to be like a trillion.

**John:** 20 quadrillion.

**Craig:** There we go.

**John:** It’s an unbelievably massive number.

**Craig:** That’s too many ants.

**John:** There’s more ants than there are all other birds and mammals on Earth combined.

**Craig:** Combined.

**John:** The mass of it is immense. For every person on Earth, there are 2.5 million ants.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. That’s so great. I want mine. Where are mine?

**John:** All of my ants. Sometimes during these hot days, it does feel like I can feel all 2.5 million of them in my house, because Megana will testify we have ants certain times.

**Craig:** You have an ant problem.

**John:** We have some ant problems. The little bait things do work, but it takes two days for it to work. That kills off the colony.

**Craig:** I hear you. Ants.

**John:** How do you feel about ants?

**Craig:** I have no strong feelings about ants. I know this is probably shocking. It’s just not a thing I think about. I don’t think about ants, although I did enjoy that, I don’t know if it was one time they did it or multiple times, where they pumped an abandoned ant colony… They put a bunch of concrete in there, and they just kept pouring concrete in, and then they excavated it. It’s insane.

**John:** It’s like tree roots everywhere.

**Craig:** It’s huge. It’s huge. It’s quite beautiful.

**John:** I’m sure it is. Ants versus spiders, which do you prefer?

**Craig:** I like spiders.

**John:** You like spiders?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think Megana must love spiders, because she’s now decorated her desk area with spiderwebs for spooky season.

**Megana:** No, I hate spiders. I decorated with that because it’s spooky and scary.

**Craig:** Spooky season is upon us.

**Megana:** It is upon us. Why do you like spiders?

**Craig:** They’re brilliant. They can weave webs. Look at the webs alone.

**John:** Webs are cool.

**Craig:** They’re incredible. They’re predators, which is cool. They wrap you up, and they drain your blood and such. They eat annoying bugs that no one likes.

**John:** Whenever I see spiders in the house, I always remind myself, “Oh, that’s right, they’re here to eat some other bugs that I’m glad don’t exist.”

**Craig:** When they are combined with other creatures, they become like the driders, the drow spider creatures.

**John:** Or they become Spider-Man.

**Craig:** Or they become Spider-Man, exactly. Now, there is an Ant-Man, but he’s just big. He’s big.

**John:** He’s just big. He really has nothing to do with ants. They try to retcon into some ant-

**Craig:** Ish.

**John:** It’s not the same.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I have a second One Cool Thing, which is a question for you. In English, our question words start with W-H, generally, so when, which, where, why, what.

**Craig:** Who, whom.

**John:** Who. Why is that?

**Craig:** John, I don’t know.

**John:** It actually goes back to proto-Indo-European, the root of all our European and Indian languages. A thing I just learned this last week, [inaudible 00:45:17] a podcast, but I found a good article about it, is it’s actually the same system that gives us, in Spanish, quien, quando, all the Q words, and same in Italian and same in Latin, because it’s just how English drifted and changed. The W-H used to be a hard H-W. That hard H was more of a K. It would be quich, quen, quere. That was the thing.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** With spelling reform, they switched the W and the H, but W-H is really the same thing as Q-U. Isn’t that cool?

**Craig:** Quow?

**John:** Wow, quow.

**Craig:** Quow.

**John:** I just like the fact that in every set of languages, it’s so tempting to look at the letters that are written down, but it’s generally the sounds are how you figure out how things are related, because spelling has just drifted so much over the years.

**Craig:** Here’s a person who’s drifted so much over the years. Bo Shim.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** I don’t have a One Cool Thing this week, so I said, “Bo, can you help me out and give me a One Cool Thing?” What resulted was a cascade of restaurant recommendations, which if you know Bo-

**John:** Bo is a foodie. Am I correct to say she’s a foodie?

**Craig:** She’s both a gourmet and a gourmand. No one eats more than her. No one. She is the tiniest person. This isn’t like a, “Oh, you little thing, you ate a lot.” No, I mean I have seen her eat food that would make me barf in quantity terms. It’s amazing.

**John:** Give us some recommendations, because Mike will add them to our shared note of all the restaurants we want to go to.

**Craig:** These are all going to be for local folks who listen to us here in the Southern California area. Her favorite K-Town noodle spot is MDK Noodles.

**John:** I’ve been to MDK Noodles. I completely back that up.

**Craig:** Her favorite hole-in-the-wall spot is Western Doma Noodles. Western Doma. Her favorite fried chicken is KyoChon, honey wings she says. KyoChon honey wings. Zzamong for Jjajangmyeon. Jjajangmyeon is my favorite Korean food. Have you ever had Jjajangmyeon?

**John:** I don’t know what it is, no.

**Craig:** It’s Korean comfort food. It’s noodles in a fermented black bean sauce. It’s ramen-like but not soup. It’s more spaghetti-ish, but with this delicious, salty black bean sauce, and with little bits of tofu and flakes and things. It’s so good. It’s so good. It’s bad for you, but it’s really good. Now I have to go there [inaudible 00:47:55]. She said she recently went to Mandarin Noodle House in Monterey Park and it was three fire emojis. Finally, also incredibly beautiful, but also delicious, lava mooncakes that she got Mid-Autumn Festival a couple weeks ago from Aliya Lavaland in Monterey Parks. She showed some pictures, including a mooncake that is in the shape and design of an orange. It looks amazing.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Lots of recommendations for people.

**John:** For our listeners outside of Los Angeles, some geography to help you understand where things are. What Bo’s describing, the Korean places are in Koreatown, which is the edge of where I live and where Craig is going to be living soon. Koreatown’s great. I love Korean food, but it’s hard for me to eat a lot of Korean places, because beef and pork tend to be in everything, and I don’t eat beef and pork. I have to find the vegetarian options there at those places. I love Korean food. Monterey Park has a big Chinese population and a lot of really amazing Chinese restaurants. Those are places you want to check out if you’re in Los Angeles and want that kind of cuisine.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Thank you, Bo.

**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 the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on the future. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, the future.

**Craig:** Future.

**John:** The future and what we owe it. I guess this got put in my head because on the New York Times podcast, The Daily, they’ve been hyping this book called The Future and What We Owe It by some person. I should remember it as often as they’ve said it. I’ve also been reading articles about long-termism and this notion of thinking about how much we should be making policy choices or taking actions that affect the short-term versus the long-term and how we find the balance between what we want to do in the world right now versus what’s going to be important for people living a hundred years from now, 300 years from now, our children versus our grandchildren. What’s your general thinking about how much we should value a person’s life 50 years from now versus today?

**Craig:** It’s a fairly privileged question, because I think that people that are struggling can’t really afford to worry about the rest of us 50 years from now. They’re just trying to take care of themselves and their kids. This is a legacy question that I think is certainly something that people of means ought to be thinking about.

There are people who are very wealthy who just think about transferring the wealth generationally to their children and their children’s children, which is the way it’s generally always been, but perhaps not for the best, in fact almost certainly not for the best. Then there are other people who are very, very wealthy, and they do think about legacy. They create endowments. Endowments, from a financial point of view, are an interesting way to blindly but eternally give to the future. They grow. As they grow, they kick off funds. Those funds go out to support things and so on and so forth for eternity.

Then there are these other choices that we have to make that are based on guesses. We don’t have to guess that money would be helpful to people in the future. We do have to guess whether or not stopping A versus B will have a better impact on things for the future, because sometimes we guess wrong.

I think we collectively should be thinking about the future. We tend to define it entirely in terms of our children. If you listen to politicians, they’re always talking about a better world for your children. I think people who don’t have children are also interested in a better world for the people that are coming. Seems reasonable. The more we can disconnect it from our immediate children, probably the better. Let’s just try and help as many people as we can with the choices we make. We think about these things, and we work on these things, but it’s very difficult to disentangle them from our current situation if our current situation is lacking.

**John:** I find myself alternating between pessimism and optimism about the future and the future being 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now. Compared to some of my friends, who believe that the world won’t exist in 100 years, I’m certainly much, much more optimistic. I think I always go back to, I’ve mentioned this on the show many, many times, The Big Book of Horrible Things, which lists the 100 greatest atrocities in history. You realize the world has been through some terrible shit many, many, many times. Stuff gets really, really bad, and then we come out of it. If you look at how bad things could get, they can get really bad. You look at how things could bet better, they could actually get a lot better. I totally understand why some people would say, “I don’t want to have kids.” Great. To say, “I don’t want to have kids because I think the world is going to be on fire and terrible,” I don’t vibe with that, because I don’t think that’s accurate.

**Craig:** No, it’s defeatist. I think it’s selfish, actually, in a weird way, selfish and indulgent to go, “Oh my god, everything’s so bad. We don’t have to do anything. What’s the point?”

**John:** Weirdly, sometimes the most pessimistic and the most optimistic make the same choices. You see some of these [inaudible 00:54:00] saying, “We have to think about where humanity’s going to be 1,000 years from now and plan for that.” They’re using that to skip over worrying about the people who actually need the help right now. That’s incredibly frustrating.

**Craig:** Yes. As always, even though everyone hates the middle, the mushy moderate, that’s where the truth generally is. You’re absolutely right that things have been horrible in the past and I think in many ways are improving. Obviously, there are areas where things are getting worse. Climate is the big one. I think that sticks out for everyone. Here we are. It is 2022. We are about 80 years separated from World War Two, which is not a long time. There are people obviously who were alive during World War Two who are still alive now. John, do you know how many people died during World War Two?

**John:** God, I knew that number at some point. Is it 40 million?

**Craig:** Depends. There’s a range. 40 million is the bottom estimate. Top estimate, about 85 million.

**John:** I know that people always under-count Russia. Russia took the huge brunt of losses there.

**Craig:** Soviet Union took an insane amount of losses, probably about 20 to 30 million people. Then there are these associated deaths that aren’t necessarily attributed to World War Two but were almost certainly exacerbated by World War Two. Bengal Famine comes to mind. Things were so horrible all the time, and that time still was somehow better than all the times before, when things were even worse. We don’t get how great it is. We don’t get it. We don’t get it. All the complaining and whining that we do, I think… We’re allowed to complain. Don’t get me wrong. I’m Jewish. It’s part of our religion. You can’t excuse then trying to figure things out.

I think it’s important to think ahead. I’ve always been a think-aheader and a planner. We think about the future. Like I said, endowments I think are wonderful things. I’m a big fan of the concept of the endowment.

**John:** I used to be a bigger fan of the endowment. Give me your pitch for why endowments versus just pay the money to the government and get rid of the generational wealth.

**Craig:** An endowment isn’t really about generational wealth. A trust is about generational wealth, where you’re saying, “I’m going to put this money into a trust. It is going to accrue, to the benefit of my children and their children,” and so on and so forth. An endowment is ideally a charity that supports some cause or segment of society that is not about your blood relations. It grows in time with the marketplace and continually puts money and funds out to that end, and in theory would do so in perpetuity, and is not subject to the whims of various governments.

The federal government is not a particularly brilliant manager of funds. We know that. Simply just take a walk down Defense Department budget road, and you will see some shocking things. Also, government has a lot to do.

Let’s say your passion was female reproductive health. Creating an endowment might be really valuable. It could kick out money. The endowments don’t have to just send money off to individuals. The endowments can also, as part of their charter, send money to other charitable organizations. An endowment can make an annual donation every year to Planned Parenthood.

We have an endowment that supports our public schools in La Cañada. Every year, that endowment makes a gift to exactly one organization, which is the annual charitable fund that supports the public schools in La Cañada. This is a good thing, I think.

**John:** I think people can [inaudible 00:58:18] better con case. To me, they can be a way of sheltering money that should be the public’s money, that ultimately was generated through the possibilities made possible by government and other things to specific causes. While it’s great to think here’s this endowment that is supporting this noble cause that we want to believe in, like education or reproductive health, endowments can also be used for less noble purposes and can have salaries to pay certain people to do certain things that are not maybe good for the function of society. Basically, it’s a way for wealthy people to maintain their power and control after their deaths. That’d be the case against endowments.

**Craig:** I think if there is a, and this is a big if, if there is a fair taxation system, then the money the people are earning is fairly taxed, and the taxes go to the government, and that’s the government’s share. Then what’s remaining behind is up to people to do with as the would. Whatever it is, we can choose to leave what remains just to our children. We can choose to light it on fire. We can choose to leave it to our cat.

**John:** The Patagonia CEO who created basically a charity that now owns the company.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Which I guess is really a form of trust or form of endowment.

**Craig:** Exactly. If you want to eliminate the concept of the endowment, you have to essentially presume that government will always be the better manager and distributor of funds. I have not seen strong evidence for that.

**John:** Megana, how far away do you think of as the future? Is your notion of the future 10 years from now or is it 50 years from now? What is the future to you?

**Megana:** That’s interesting. I guess it’s 10 years down the line.

**Craig:** You’re young.

**Megana:** Also, I don’t know, tomorrow feels like the future. I feel like as I’m getting older, I see more immediate consequences to the decisions I’m making, mostly in terms of candy I’m eating or how much I’m sleeping or drinking.

**John:** The present and the near future do muddle in a way. I feel like the near future comes quicker and quicker and quicker in terms of like, “Oh, this thing that seemed like it was going to be five years away, that happened just now.” That speed does seem to be increasing. There’s the distant, more murky future, where it could be one of a thousand possibilities. It’s harder to ascertain and unavoidably vague. We can have some broad prognostications about what is possible, but we don’t really know. Just for a little humility, you look back and look at what everyone thought 2020 would be like, and they were not correct.

**Craig:** No. We’re actually quite terrible at it. That’s probably not going to change. I think the best we can do is have a little care in our hearts for the people that are going to be here after we are. That’s about all we can do.

**John:** Just to leave it on a more hopeful not, the UN Secretary General was talking about extreme poverty in the world and how we need to continue the progress we’ve made. In that, the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty has dropped hugely since our childhood. That’s real, meaningful progress. It’s always confusing to look at things from our privileged Western perspective. When I went to visit Malawi, it was tough, and yet it was better than it had ever been before. Recognizing that you’re coming from a place and you want everyone to keep moving up that ladder, but at least in most parts of the world, there are ladders, which is progress.

**Craig:** Megana?

**Megana:** Mm-hmm?

**Craig:** I was thinking about what you were just saying about looking ahead to tomorrow and the candy you eat and drinking. I was thinking about how it’s spooky season. I thought I would just Google this, and it paid off.

**Megana:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Would you like a recipe for candy corn-infused vodka?

**Megana:** Yeah, sure. Those are both things that I enjoy.

**Craig:** They might as well call this the Megana.

**Megana:** I really love candy corn. I can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet wax.

**Craig:** What is it? What is it? It’s corn starch, I assume.

**Megana:** I don’t know. It shouldn’t be edible, but it is.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be. I’m with you. I like candy corn. I’ve always liked it.

**John:** I liked it as a kid. I can’t take something that sweet anymore. As a kid, I really loved candy corn.

**Craig:** What is the flavor of candy corn, actually? What is that flavor?

**John:** I don’t know. I associate it with a color, but that’s of course not what it actually is.

**Megana:** It’s white, orange, and yellow.

**Craig:** Somebody asked The Jelly Belly Company, because they’re obviously amazing with candy flavors. This is what they said. “Candy corn is meant to be a blend of creamy fondant, rich marshmallow, and warm vanilla notes.”

**John:** That feels right. Wikipedia has it as a waxy texture and a flavor based on honey, sugar, butter, and vanilla.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Those are all there.

**Craig:** That’s about right. I think it’s delicious.

**John:** Megana’s future is going to involve some candy corn vodka.

**Craig:** They’re going to find her facedown on her carpet.

**John:** It’s going to be the new Nyquil chicken. That’s what killed her.

**Craig:** Candy corn vodka and Nyquil chicken, what a night.

**Megana:** This is what my future has in store for me.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Thank you both.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://writeremergency.com/) is funded! Support [here on Kickstarter!](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnaugust/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Green Burial Council](https://www.greenburialcouncil.org/) and [Is California ready for ‘human composting’ as an alternative to casket burial, cremation?](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-30/is-california-ready-for-human-composting-as-alternative-to-casket-burial-cremation) by Anabel Sosa for the LA Times
* [John’s Blogpost on Fake Tears](https://johnaugust.com/2010/fake-tears)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 76: How screenwriters find their voice](https://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 403: How to Write A Movie](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-to-write-a-movie)
* [Patton Oswalt on King of Queens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA90rOwmkJ4)
* [Cut A Character Save A Scene](https://johnaugust.com/2010/cut-a-character-save-a-scene) on John’s Blog
* [Ants Outnumber Everything](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/19/ants-population-20-quadrillion/) by Dino Grandoni for the Washington Post
* [Why Question Words Start with Wh](https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/61ijtu/why_do_question_words_why_who_where_when_etc_all/) on Reddit
* [Bo Shim’s](https://twitter.com/byshim?lang=en) LA Food Guide: [Western Doma Noodles](https://www.yelp.com/biz/western-doma-noodles-los-angeles) hole-in-the-wall treasure, [MDK Noodles](https://www.yelp.com/biz/mdk-noodles-los-angeles?osq=mdk+noodles) in K-town, [Zzamong](https://zzamongrestaurant.com/) for Jjjangmyun, [KyoChon](https://kyochonus.iorderfoods.com/users/login) for fried chicken–especially the honey wings, [Aliya Lavaland](https://www.toasttab.com/aliya-lavaland-141-n-atlantic-blvd-ste-103/v3/?mode=fulfillment) for (lava) mooncakes, [Mandarin Noodle House](https://www.mandarinnoodlehouseca.com/) in Monterey Park
* [What We Owe the Future](https://whatweowethefuture.com/) by William Macaskill
* [Candy Corn Infused Vodka](https://www.kitchentreaty.com/candy-corn-infused-vodka/)
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* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/568standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20522).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 567 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, when do you want to cast a recognizable star, and when do you not? We’ll talk about how much fame you want and need in a given role. We’ll also talk about cutting characters, juggling multiple projects, and staying nimble.

**Craig:** Oh, nimble.

**John:** Nimble. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana says I’m too good of a liar. We’ll see whether she’s right when we play Two Truths and a Lie.

**Craig:** That’s worth the $5 subscription right there. You know why you’re too good of a liar. You know why.

**John:** Why is that? Why is that?

**Craig:** It’s because you’re synthetic.

**John:** No, it’s because I prepare. We prepare the outline overall, but I will say that I spent at least 45 minutes yesterday thinking through some options for Two Truths and a Lie.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It’s going to be a barn burner, because usually you play Two Truths and a Lie with strangers. It’s an icebreaker. We all know each other pretty well, so I have to really think about what you would know and expect.

**Craig:** Oh, boy. Megana.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Megana, why do I feel like the two of us have just been set up? We’ve just been set up.

**Megana Rao:** He just admitted it.

**Craig:** He admitted that. He said it exactly. He laid it out how he set us up. Listen, if you’re not a Premium subscriber now-

**John:** This is my magic trick really, because a magician sets up your expectations, like, “I’m going to perform a trick for you,” and then you have to see if you can identify when he’s performing the trick.

**Megana:** I still feel good about our odds, Craig.

**Craig:** I love your optimism, but I think we’re dealing with a criminal sociopath. If you’re not subscribing to the show by now, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Don’t you want to see John just pick us apart like the budding Hannibal Lecter that he is?

**John:** That’s what it is. A reminder about our live show, October 19th in Los Angeles at the Dynasty Typewriter.

**Craig:** Hey, can I get tickets to that?

**John:** No, you cannot.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** It is sold out.

**Craig:** Of course it is.

**John:** You cannot get in-person tickets, but for the first time ever, we are going to have a livestream of the show, so you can watch it. No matter where you are in the world, you can watch it live. The streaming tickets are $25. You can find them at dynastytypewriter.com.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. It doesn’t go to us. It goes to charity.

**John:** What is the charity that we’re doing this with?

**Craig:** Hollywood Heart.

**John:** Tell us about Hollywood Heart, Craig.

**Craig:** Hollywood Heart is I think our, I don’t know, seventh or eighth benefit show for Hollywood Heart. They’re a wonderful organization here, based here in Los Angeles, that we were introduced to by a friend of the show, John Gatins. They run a summer camp for underprivileged kids. It is centered around arts, I believe. They just do terrific work. Everybody deserves a chance to get outside, have some fun in the summer, learn, be safe, and get exposed to arts and culture, which are not frivolous, but rather really the only thing that keeps our humanity intact.

**John:** Agreed. If you would like to support that but also see us live on stage, you can go follow the link in the show notes or just go to dynastytypewriter.com and click a little thing there for live show tickets.

**Craig:** Hey John, what did you think the odds were that I was going to say I have no idea what the charity is and I don’t know what Hollywood Heart is? Come on. Be honest. What’d you think? 50/50?

**John:** No, I think you definitely knew what Hollywood Heart was, but I thought there was maybe a small chance you didn’t know that there was a Hollywood Heart benefit rather than a Writers Guild Foundation, which we’ve also done events for.

**Craig:** Megana, just to point out, that’s the second time John has attempted a setup. We know what the theme is. If this episode isn’t called John Sets Craig Up, I don’t know why it should be called anything else. That’s what this episode is.

**Megana:** I wonder if I can get a little tally to ding every time it happens.

**Craig:** A little setup chart, ding. So far we’ve got two setups.

**John:** We’ve got a third setup here, because Megana put this follow-up question in from a listener. Megana, do you want to read this?

**Craig:** Megana setup.

**Megana:** Craig from Sydney wrote in and said, “I would like Craig to clarify something. In Episode 564, Craig says editing is a puzzle. Yet in previous episodes, Craig says a jigsaw is not a puzzle.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Megana:** “Both involve taking small fragments of an overall image and arranging them to make a complete image. Can Craig please explain his nuanced view and bias against jigsaws?”

**Craig:** Craig from Sydney, first of all, I see you. What are you, some sort of industry lobbyist for the jigsaw factories, for Big Jigsaw? Let’s absolutely demolish your premise. You say that editing, like jigsaw puzzles, involves “taking small fragments of an overall image and arranging them to make a complete image.” Hey, Craig from Sydney, when you get a jigsaw puzzle, the image is on the box, is it not? You know exactly what you’re supposed to put together. In editing, you don’t. In fact, you can put it together any way you want. You are creating something ultimately that will be an image, a moving image with Kuleshov effect positioning and contrast. It’s just simply not the same at all. I can make anything I want out of editing. I cannot make anything I want out of a jigsaw. In fact, if I try and put this piece with that piece, and the box is like, “No, that’s not where we wanted you to put the old mill piece,” then I can’t, because jigsaws are crap. I reject your premise. I reject you. I may not ever visit Sydney now. Actually, I would love to go to Sydney. It looks beautiful.

**John:** Sydney’s great. We like Sydney.

**Craig:** It would be incredible. Also, I don’t reject you, Craig. You’re a Craig. I love you, Craig. You’re a Craig, which is different than Craig, but still, you’re a Craig from Sydney, and I love you.

**John:** While I greatly enjoy jigsaw puzzles, I will agree with Craig in that I don’t think the analogy really holds, because editing is not merely a visual puzzle. It’s really a narrative puzzle. It’s like, “How do I get this meaning to come across as a series of images and sounds that I can put together? How do I make this make sense?” Editing is much more like writing, which is just how to make these thoughts to actually cohere correctly in the receiver’s brain. I don’t think it’s a great analogy, honestly.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. Craig, I need you to work on your analogies, because you’re representing me in the land down under, unless you’re from Sydney, Ohio, in which case I don’t know what to say.

**John:** There’s a lot of Ohioans. Let’s talk about our main topic here, which is about stars. We’re going to title this episode No Stars, Please, but I want to make it clear that I’m not anti-actor, I’m not anti-celebrity, I’m not anti-star. We love movie stars. Movie stars are great. If it sounds like I’m crapping on anybody individually or collectively, certainly that is not my intention.

**Craig:** This feels setup-ish right here.

**John:** I want to talk about the fit of an actor and a role and why sometimes you don’t want a big star in certain roles.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** I think that is a thing you run into. I remember having a conversation with a casting director early on, maybe even for Go. We were trying to put the right people in the right spots. For international financing, we needed a big male star between 30 and 50 in the movie. There wasn’t a role for that person. It was going to break everything to try to do that. The casting director said, “Yeah, it’s so frustrating that people want to wedge somebody into a part which is going to actually be wrong for the movie.” Let’s talk about star, actor, role fit.

**Craig:** First question is not do we need a star, but should we have one. Everybody I think probably defaults to the belief that everybody wants a star, but there are certain situations where you really don’t. That in and of itself if a strange kind of alchemy where you ask yourself, given the nature of the work I’m doing here, whether it’s a television show or a movie, and the characters and the tone, would having a star in this role swamp everything? Would that person draw so much attention and focus to themselves that the souffle will collapse, and worse, will it puncture the tone we’re going for? Will it puncture the reality of what we’re trying to do?

There are levels of stars. There’s Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, which they are luminous to the point of swamping everything around them. Brad Pitt was just in a movie where he… Bullet Train. Bullet Train! Great title. He’s on a train. He’s killing people. It’s like John Wick on a train. That’s great, but really if you had asked anybody, “Do you know that train movie?” they’d be like, “Oh, the Brad Pitt train movie,” not the anyone else train movie and not what the story of the train movie is, because he just… Honestly, you needed him for that. Otherwise, what was the point? What was the point of making that? You can’t make that movie with just a guy. Then there are things where you really have to avoid that phenomenon or it’s going to sink everything.

**John:** Let’s talk about the situations where you do want the star, where you do want the Brad Pitt in the role. How does having a star help? A lot of cases, it’s easier to get made because those stars attract money. You could make the movie Bullet Train at the budget you want with Brad Pitt in that role because everyone’s just like, “Oh, there’s a safety of having Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt will be able to open that movie. Brad Pitt can do the marketing for it,” and just what you said, “Let’s go see that Brad Pitt movie.” The title of the movie’s important, the concept of the movie’s important, the trailer’s important, but also that star is the anchor that you’re centering everything around. That’s a great reason to put that star in a role.

The other reason, maybe because they’re a terrific actor, because they are uniquely talented at being able to do that one thing. That’s why you want that star. It’s not just that they’re bringing their luminance, but what they’re good at is exactly what you need in that movie. That’s a great situation when you have both things happening at the same time.

**Craig:** There are also situations where… Let me stipulate, the number one reason you’ve mentioned, people are like, “Hey, we’re not making this unless we have a star,” because that’s the economics involved, but there are also times where you have a kind of story that requires a star, because you’re asking the audience to focus on and care about an individual for a long time.

When we were casting The Last of Us, we felt quite strongly that, unlike when we were casting Chernobyl, where we didn’t feel like we needed what we would call a star star, that we did need one for The Last of Us, because we were going to ask people to focus for so long on one man, and whereas with Chernobyl I felt like I wanted great actors, but there wasn’t a need for what they would call these bankable movie stars or anything like that, because that person would probably puncture the reality of being in Ukraine in 1986. That tonal thing is important.

This is another reason why you want to try and work with people that get it and have taste, because sometimes they do jam these things in, and it’s actually dead before it begins, because of miscasting, essentially.

**John:** Craig, before you brought up there’s levels of movie stars, let’s talk in a very rough sense about what we’d mean by those levels of movie stars. There’s these mega stars. There’s the Tom Cruises, the Will Smiths. There’s The Rock. They’re just these gigantic presences independent of the movie. You know who they are independent of all the roles they play.

**Craig:** They’re brands.

**John:** They’re brands. Weirdly, Leonardo DiCaprio, I would say, is that too, even though we don’t know a lot about Leonardo DiCaprio outside of his movie roles, because he doesn’t do a ton.

**Craig:** He’s iconic.

**John:** Iconic.

**Craig:** He’s an iconic actor. There are actors that are perfectly global. Everybody knows their name. We’re talking about billions of people. Billions of people now who Brad Pitt is. There aren’t that many of those people left, men and women, very few of them, because of the way we make things now. It’s just different.

**John:** For Aladdin, Will Smith was important. Could you have done Aladdin without Will Smith? Sure, you could’ve found somebody else who was great in that part, but Will Smith’s personality and his star presence was incredibly important to making Aladdin possible.

**Craig:** At that time.

**John:** At that time. At the time that we made Aladdin, you absolutely wanted Will Smith in that role. There’s another tier of actor, and I don’t mean tier in terms of quality, but that you recognize that person, but you’re not going to see that movie or see that series specifically for that person in most cases, so Ed Harris, Michelle Yeoh, Fantastic, Michael B. Jordan, any of the Chrises, like the Chris Pratts, the Hemsworths, the Chris Pines. They can be big stars, but they’re not iconic. They’re not going to drive everything.

**Craig:** I think I would make an argument that Hemsworth is now in that zone.

**John:** In a certain kind of role. Paul Rudd in a certain kind of role, yes, but Paul Rudd in a dramatic role, not so much.

**Craig:** It does depend on which thing you put them in. There are actors that are known for being brilliant and wonderful actors, but they don’t necessarily sell tickets. Selling tickets is not necessarily an indication of quality. It’s rare. When there’s this overlap of talent and selling tickets, that’s the holy grail. I think about Denzel Washington or Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep, where they sell tickets and they’re also great. That’s an even smaller subsection of huge stars.

There are incredible actors that are known, that do great work. That was actually kind of the fun when we were casting Chernobyl was just I had my dream cast. We got the dream cast. The dream cast was made up of three actors that were extraordinarily good. People did know their faces and their names, but they weren’t necessarily movie stars or anything like that. They needed to be able to be subsumed by the context, as opposed to overpowering it. There are incredible people like that.

It’s a really important thing to think about when you’re putting your movie together, you’re writing your script. Is this the kind of thing where you do in fact need that big wattage mega star, or will you be better off looking at people that aren’t about the wattage, but rather about, say, the quality?

**John:** We’ve been talking about movies and people who can open on opening day weekend, but TV is also a factor. Sometimes you want a recognizable person, and sometimes you don’t. I thought that casting Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us was really smart, because the people who want to like that show are going to know who Pedro Pascal is. A lot of other people who are going to watch that show really don’t know who Pedro Pascal is, because they’re not that familiar with Game of Thrones, they didn’t see him in Wonder Woman. He’s just the right size of star for that part. I’m sure that went into your consideration for him.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I think he’s about to be in a much bigger one because of the work he does in the show. He is a star. He has the star thing, which is you have to stare at him. He does that thing. He is widely known. It’s interesting, Mandalorian is such a strange show for him, because he doesn’t show his face for 98% of it. Having made a show now with Pedro, the thought of making a show with that face and not showing it just seems crazy, because it’s the best face.

You’re right, he was exactly the right thing. He was the right guy for us. I don’t think we could’ve done better for all sorts of reasons. We knew that we needed somebody that was a real star. Just the center of this thing had to have that in it, not only to hold your attention across many episodes about a man, but also to signify to people that this was quality.

That’s the other thing is when stars do things, there is a kind of imprimatur. There’s a stamp, because they get sent everything. Pedro Pascal is asked to be in 4,000 things, and Brad Pitt’s asked to be in 12,000 things and da da da. When they make a choice finally, you think, “Brad Pitt agreed to be in Bullet Train. This is probably pretty good.” That actually matters.

**John:** Agreed. A bit of a sidebar here, because you’re talking about Pedro and having star quality. A question for you. Who is the most attractive celebrity, famous person you’ve ever seen in person? Megana, you can answer this question too if you have an answer.

**Craig:** That’s a really good one.

**Megana:** Craig can’t choose me.

**John:** You’re radio famous, Megana, so it’s really not going to be fair for the audience.

**Craig:** I like that Megana just hurdles between wildly shy and self-hatred and then just crazy confidence.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** There’s nothing in between.

**Megana:** The extremes.

**Craig:** Just the wild extremes. There’s somebody in my mind that I remember thinking was astonishingly beautiful in person, just hard to wrap my mind around how beautiful they were.

**John:** I have a very distinct answer to that.

**Craig:** Who’s your answer?

**John:** I was in London. This was doing notes on Aladdin. I was staying in a hotel. I was leaving the hotel. I walked past this woman, and I actually audibly gasped. She was so beautiful. I was just dumbstruck for a moment. I left, and then I realized, oh, that was Lupita Nyong’o. Lupita Nyong’o was in London to do press for Queen of Katwe. I’d seen many photos of her before, but seeing her in person… I guess she was probably also made up for the press junket. She was actually just an unearthly beauty. She was radiant in a way that I’ve not ever experienced before. Lupita Nyong’o is the person. Her beauty does translate to screen. I’ve seen her in a lot of other things, but wow, in person, she just knocks you down. I’ve heard the same thing about Julia Roberts in the day too. People would say that with her. In her presence, you’d be like, “Oh my god, this person.”

**Craig:** Here’s my answer. I saw both of these people in person for the first and last time the same night. It was at the premier of Huntsman: Winter’s sequel. Charlize Theron-

**John:** I’ve heard that.

**Craig:** … and Chris Hemsworth individually are so beautiful, it’s hard to understand how they’re here. How does that happen? It’s hard to not feel like, “Oh wow, if I looked like that… ” I know I’m not supposed to beat myself up or anything. I’m not Chris Hemsworth. If I did the Chris Hemsworth workout, I would still be so far from Chris Hemsworth. That’s kind of crazy. Charlize, jeez, man.

**John:** I’ve definitely heard that about her.

**Craig:** Tall. She’s all Charlize-y.

**John:** Megana, have you encountered any celebrities in person that you’re like, “Oh my god, that person.”

**Craig:** Yeah, but other than me.

**Megana:** I haven’t run into that many celebrities, but I did pass Andrew Garfield on the street outside 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood. I was like, “Whoa, that guy had a really cool vibe.” Then I realized it was Andrew Garfield.

**Craig:** Nice. Well spotted. That guy has an interesting quality about him. It’s amazing.

**John:** Now that we’ve talked about what star quality is, let’s talk about the kinds of roles you might slot these people into, because that’s really where things break down. Roughly, I’ll say there’s three levels of roles. There’s your principals, so that’s your hero, your villain, the people who are going to have a lot of screen time. They’re going to be driving the action. You have your supporting roles. You have the spouse, the friend, the boss, the commander, people who have multiple scenes, but they’re not so crucial to everything.

Then you have barely-theres. You have your waiters, your assistants, cashiers, your neighbors. Where I find I can take it out of the movie is when you have somebody who has that star quality wattage or is just legitimately famous, and they’re in one of those supporting roles, your barely-theres. You’re like, “Why is this person here? What is that person doing in that role?” It does throw everything out of whack.

**Craig:** There is a reasonable and warranted technique of putting a very high wattage star in a small cameo part, because whatever it is that they’re playing needs instant gravitas. When somebody finally shows up, everybody’s been talking about the boss, and then the boss shows up, and you’re like, “Oh my god, it’s Tom Hanks. We get it. No wonder they’re all worked up about him.” If some guy shows up, then you don’t feel as anchored in. Generally speaking, actors of that quality and wattage, they’re not going to show up unless it’s something like that. They sense as well as anyone what their value is. That in and of itself feels like it would be exhausting to just be aware of your own value and think about it all the time. At least as writers, we can just come and write stuff and then go home. Nobody sees our face.

**John:** Craig, I want to try to distinguish between two different things you’re describing there, because there’s a cameo, which I feel like is a self-limiting scene, where it’s clearly like, oh, this character’s going to show up and do their little bit, and we’re not expecting them to ever come back. It feels self-closing. Matt Damon shows up in the Thor movies playing a pudgy version of Thor. That feels deliberately self-limiting. Or Melissa McCarthy also shows up in Love and Thunder. You know that is a cameo.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** It has an entry point, an exit point. It’s fun. The other thing you’re describing reminds me of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, where they’re talking about he’s going to show up, and then Alec Baldwin shows up and does one scene, does incredibly well, just knocks it out of the park, and leaves. You needed somebody with that stature in that part. It was crucial.

**Craig:** Alec Baldwin was not actually a huge star at that time.

**John:** I guess you’re right.

**Craig:** What he had was star power. They needed somebody to essentially start that movie as a human manifestation of an angry Old Testament God to lay down the law, establish the tone, and then leave. All the wreckage in his wake is where the drama is, and you needed somebody to just hold the center of it. This was an actor who had to intimidate Ed Harris, had to intimidate Jack Lemmon, had to intimidate Alan Arkin, these great actors, put them in their place, knock them down. You need somebody who can hold that position. If they don’t, you won’t buy it. Again, it’s all a souffle. Everything is so delicate. There are a hundred ways for it to go wrong and really generally one or two ways for it to go right. That is the terrifying part of casting. Every time you cast somebody, you might be ruining things. That’s the scary part.

**John:** It also plays into audience expectations. There’s a well-known story, which may be apocryphal. Ed O’Neill, between Married with Children and Modern Family, he’s a very good actor. He’d be cast in non-comedic roles. Everyone would be like, “I don’t believe him at all,” or they’d laugh when they see him, because it’s like, “Oh, he’s Al Bundy. He’s supposed to be funny.” When he’s not being funny, that’s a problem. That’s a limitation for an actor. It’s frustrating for them, but also, you as the person who has to make the movie, you got to know what those expectations are going to be of the audience.

It’s one thing if you’re casting Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me, because she is the center of that movie. Everyone that sits down to watch the movie knows that it’s not a funny part and that she’s playing something different than what you’d usually see. If Ed O’Neill shows up as a judge in a drama, it’s going to throw you for a bit.

**Craig:** I think that that has changed somewhat. It used to be much worse. Typecasting was a real thing. Now I feel like people actually look forward to these switch-ups. Ed O’Neill is a terrific actor. He’s older. As actors age, sometimes they just get less interested in doing a lot of stuff, and they just do fewer things. The great Gene Hackman just retired. He didn’t want to do it anymore. A few years ago, he was like, “I’m done.”

Tom Hanks was always the example of the guy that somehow magically was able to start his career on a sitcom where he was cross-dressing to get into farcical situations. Then a few years later he’s in Philadelphia, and you’re like, “How the hell did this even happen?” because he was just that good. Also, there was just a humanity there that crossed back and forth. Again, some people have it. I think nowadays, it’s a little easier. I think people kind of like it. I think they like watching people go back and forth. There’s something exciting about it.

I would say to anybody that’s making a drama to heed well the words of the great Vince Gilligan, who said that he just makes a practice of casting funny people in not funny parts, because funny people are the best. They just have this remarkable sense of drama and humanity. That’s why Vince Gilligan, a genius, truly a genius, I don’t use the word often, cast Bryan Cranston, the dad-

**John:** From Malcolm in the Middle.

**Craig:** … from Malcolm in the Middle, a sitcom, an Ed O’Neill part, in the most wonderful, dramatic part in Breaking Bad. It’s why he then took Bob Odenkirk, and he elevated him. It’s just what he does. He’s so smart about that. It is remarkable. Funny people are the best people, I will say.

**John:** The last example I’ll put up is just casting somebody who the minute they show up, you’re expecting them to be more important to it. Heartstopper is a Netflix show that I thought was delightful. Olivia Colman plays one of the boys’ moms. She’s great. She’s lovely, a flawless performance, but it throws you a bit, because you’re just like, “Wait, that’s Olivia Colman. She can do more than that. Why is she only doing this stock mom role?” We did interviews where she talks about why she wanted to do it. I totally get it. I do wonder if casting somebody else in that part would’ve actually been a better choice, because I cannot watch the scenes with her and not think, “Oh, that’s Olivia Colman.” I wonder if a better choice might’ve been to put somebody else in there who did not have that stature.

**Craig:** That’s the weird math you have to do, where you go, “Okay, this person puts out this much light and heat. This role requires this much light and heat.” If there’s too much, then it’s going to break things. It’s tricky. It’s hard, because when you’re putting things together, if someone says, “You’re not going to believe this, but Olivia Colman read the script, and she wants to play the mom,” who’s going to be like, “No.”

**John:** That’s exactly the point. No one’s going to say no. Of course. It’s great.

**Craig:** That’s the tricky part.

**John:** Let’s wrap this up by saying a reminder. There’s a reason why stars are stars sometimes. They actually have these magical abilities to just inspire us to look at them and pay attention to them. That’s why you want them in those principal roles a lot of times, because they’re just so good. Sometimes we’ll identify folks who are not even famous yet, but like, “Oh, you’re going to be famous.”

I think I’ve said this on the podcast before. Josh Holloway came in to audition. He played Sawyer on Lost. He came in to audition pre-Lost for this one show I was doing. He was completely wrong for the part, but I said in the room, “This is not the role for you, but Jesus, you are a star. I can absolutely tell you’re going to be a thing who’s going to break out.” He was really nice about that and said thanks and left the room. I was right.

Some people just have that ability. You want those people in those principal roles or smaller roles where they can actually expand and maybe they can steal some stuff. Once they’re famous, you don’t want to stick them in places where even though they might have the skills to play that role, they’re just going to break your movie or your show.

**Craig:** They’re going to break your thing. What it comes down to, since everybody listening has access to all the stars, just be careful about which stars you choose.

**John:** We have all these listener questions that say like, “Hey, so this megastar wants to be in movie. Should I let him be in the movie?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The answer is yes.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, absolutely not. You’re not allowed in this movie.

**Craig:** Brad Pitt for that? I don’t know. I didn’t meet Brad Pitt. Once I stood next to Brad Pitt. Have you ever met Brad Pitt?

**John:** I think I shook his hand.

**Craig:** I never shook his hand. I was at the AFI Television, whatever the hell it was. I don’t know. It’s called the AFI Celebrates. It’s the best event. It’s better than all the awards shows, because nobody wins anything. It’s just like, “Here’s 10 things we liked. We love all of you.” You feel great. Brad Pitt was there. I was standing near him while he was talking to somebody, and I was so aware of my proximity to Brad Pitt. I had a para-social relationship with Brad Pitt.

**John:** How can you not?

**Craig:** How can you not?

**John:** The women he’s been with and the career he’s had and the stars, it’s a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a whole thing.

**John:** Our next topic is a Megana suggestion. Megana, help set us up here. You want to talk about committing to an idea and its execution by staying flexible. What are you thinking here?

**Megana:** Yes, I did. Craig, do you watch The Bachelorette?

**Craig:** You know. That’s a setup. Now you set me up. You know I don’t watch that.

**Megana:** You’re watching this season, right?

**Craig:** You know I don’t watch The Bachelorette. You know that. Is it a television show?

**Megana:** It is a television show.

**Craig:** Then you know I don’t watch it.

**Megana:** It’s a reality dating show. It starts off with a lead, the single woman, and she has 30 contestants.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** By the end, she whittles them down to one, and they propose to her.

**Craig:** Then they abuse the institution of marriage, yeah.

**Megana:** Exactly. We’re in the later weeks of this season. The Bachelorette has several contestants. She’s like, “Maybe I’ll marry Jason, or maybe I’ll marry Eric, or I’m also in love with Johnny.”

**Craig:** She sounds terrible. Go on.

**Megana:** I’m on my couch, locked in, committed to one of these men and devastated when they go.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Megana:** I was watching it, and I was like, “Maybe I’m over-committing.” Then I was reading a notes email, and I was like, “I think this also shows up in my writing, perhaps, the impulse to take an idea and just death grip onto it.” I was hoping that you guys could talk about staying nimble, being open, but also, I don’t know, moving forward.

**Craig:** I get it.

**John:** I get that too. Let’s put it in the context of notes, because a lot of times when you get notes, an instinct will be to seize up and protect and defend, rather than say, “Okay, I get what they’re saying. This is another way I could go. This is another way I could go.” If you are too flexible and too nimble, you will not actually have the drive to finish a thing and not be able to complete it, because you would take every note. Over-flexibility can be a problem, but rigidity is not good for a writer either. Craig, how do we balance this?

**Craig:** I think haphazardly and clumsily and with great potential for error. This one goes actually to the heart of what is most miserable I think about what we do, Megana. There was a talk I gave years ago. I can’t even remember to whom it was. They were asking me to talk about creativity. I brought up this example that I think about all the time. I’ve been thinking about it since I was a kid. You guys I assume have read The Little Prince.

**John:** Oh yeah, of course.

**Craig:** Classic.

**John:** Saint-Exupery.

**Craig:** Saint-Exupery, classic children’s book. The Little Prince begins with this foreword where he is talking about his own childhood, the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He is talking about how he drew a picture as a young person. The picture was the snake that had eaten an elephant. When he would show it to the adults, the adults would look at it and say, “That’s a hat,” because the snake was roughly hat-shaped, because the elephant was inside of it, if you can imagine. He was like, “No, you idiots. It’s an elephant inside a snake. Why can’t they see?” Then he meets the Little Prince, this Jesus-like child figure from the stars above. He shows the Little Prince the picture that he drew. The Little Prince says, “Oh, that’s an elephant inside of a snake.” He goes, “Aha, you see, children can see these things.”

I was a child, and I was like, “No, MF-er, that’s a hat. You cannot put that on people. It’s a hat. It’s a hat. It’s not their fault. You cannot blame the audience because they didn’t Jesus their way into your head and see the beauty of the elephant inside the snake. It’s not their fault.”

What he was putting forth was something that I do admire in people, which is this artistic confidence and self-assurance. “I’m not the problem. You’re the problem. I am committed to this elephant inside the snake. I will meet somebody that gets it. Then that person and I will go on to make great things,” or in the case of the Little Prince, the Little Prince will die. Then Saint-Exupery will also die. Regardless, I have always had the opposite issue, which is I’m so panicked that people will think it’s a hat, and then the first person says it’s a hat, I’m like, “Oh god, it’s no good.”

It’s unfortunately one of those things that is a dichotomy you have to navigate. The only advice I can give you or anybody is to just be aware if you feel like you’ve gone too far in one direction. That’s all I can say. You don’t want to be the person that just changes everything all the time. It’s impossible to write things if you’re not committed to them. As John says, if you’re too rigid and you get stuck, you just are incapable of either improving it or recognizing that everybody will look at it and say, “That’s a hat.”

**John:** Megana will know that there’s a project that I’m in discussions to write that is very complicated and has a lot of moving parts and pieces and people involved. A thing I’m reminding myself at all times is that I need to be flexible and not over-commit to one way of doing a thing because of all the different people involved.

What I can do is commit to a vibe, like, “This is the feeling of the movie that I wish to make here. This is what I want. This is the vision for what I have that’s going to happen.” I cannot be, at this point, too specific about which elements will make it through, what is the actual plot, story, beats, how does it all fit together, because of just the people involved. I need to be able to be incredibly open and embracing all these different things, and at some point synthesize this down to a place where I can say, “Let’s do this,” and we will all hopefully agree on what this is. Even in that, even as I deliver them a draft, I will have to say, “Now if that is not going to meet the needs of everybody else here, I’m going to have to be flexible to do the next thing.” At every point, I need to be true to the vision for the overall movie that I want to do rather than this plot sequence is how I want to get there.

My most frustrating moments as a writer over the course of my career have been those times where I held on too strongly to one thing I wanted to defend in my project and lost sight of the overall goal of getting this to be a movie that got made in a certain way or had a certain kind of feel. At every stage, you have to be both committed to the overall vision, but flexible in how you’re going to get there.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. That’s the scariest part, because you describe the nightmare scenario is you cling too hard to a thing, you lose sight of the big picture, and the whole thing dies. I think it was the line that they put on the poster for Pet Sematary, “Sometimes dead is better.” There are certain circumstances where the things you would have to do to bring it all to life would not be worth bringing it to live, because once it’s alive, everybody will look at it and be repelled in horror, because people don’t know what they want. They think they know what they want, but they don’t know what they want.

I always felt like when you do test screenings for movies and such, you should get all of your data, ask all the questions, have them fill out the forms, but then also a week later, do it again, not the viewing, but just come back to all those people and just say, “Do the forms again,” because sometimes it takes people time to figure out that they either love or hate something. You won’t know unless you check. You may put something out there that in its horrible form presses enough for an hour, but then everybody settles in and hates it. Sometimes dead is better.

I guess, Megana, the difficult answer is that there is no answer other than to say if you feel yourself drifting hard right or hard left, head towards the center. Don’t give up the notion of committing to something. It’s really important. I don’t know how you write something without it. You have to be able to commit and then divorce yourself and then remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry, just like you do in your real life.

**John:** To bring it back to The Bachelorette, maybe the overall vision would be this young woman sees herself married to a fantastic man and having a life ahead, and she’s not committing to which of these men it’s going to be quite yet, but she wants to make sure she stays true to that vision. She’s not going to pick a guy who’s not going to be able to get her there. Is that a fair way of thinking through the decision process?

**Megana:** I think that that’s right. Right now, we’re at the point where it’s like whoever wants to propose to them, they’re going to pick, because that is what the vision is.

**Craig:** So weird.

**John:** So weird.

**Craig:** I swear to God, these shows. John, as a gay man living in a country where there was not gay marriage, when you watch these shows, are you just like, “You sons of bitches. I’m over here in a water shortage, and you people are just having water balloon fights all day long on this show called Let’s Waste Water.”

**John:** Yeah, it was largely frustrating. That’s part of the reason we were involved in the lawsuits we were involved in to try to get marriage equality to happen. I think we’ve talked about this on the show before. They’ve tried to make the gay Bachelor, and it just doesn’t work, because everyone can just hook up with everybody else. It just doesn’t work.

**Craig:** That’s going against the best part of being gay, as far as I can see from the outside. That’s the part I yearn for the most and will never have.

**John:** Megana, we have a question from Joe in Rancho Cucamonga. Anybody from Rancho Cucamonga moves to the top of the queue.

**Craig:** Rancho Cucamonga.

**Megana:** Joe says, “I just got hired to rewrite a script for an indie thriller. It’s technically my first paid gig, and I’m really excited for the opportunity.”

**John:** Hooray, Joe.

**Craig:** Nice job.

**Megana:** “Meanwhile, I have two scripts in development with a big producer and two other projects that my manager is trying to set up at different companies. My question is, in the unlikely but totally awesome scenario that I sell all of these in the immediate future, how should I go about managing my time to actually write them? Two are currently outlines, while the other two would be rewrites. How do I prioritize which scripts get written first? Is it common to tell people that I’m already working on a script and you have to wait? Would I be in danger of not selling them because I’m too busy? Or could I just block out certain periods of time and say these eight weeks are for this script, and these next eight weeks are for that script? These are First World problems to have, for sure, but in the case I’m confronted with this reality, I’d love some guidance on how to navigate these awesome waters.”

**Craig:** Awesome waters.

**John:** Awesome waters.

**Craig:** That’s a good name for a water park.

**John:** That is one of my favorite theme parks.

**Craig:** Awesome Waters in Rancho Cucamonga. Thursdays, water slide free.

**John:** Joe has an imaginary problem. I’m guilty of this a lot. I’ll catastrophize ahead and think, “Oh, what if all this stuff happens.”

**Craig:** What if the Oscars and the Nobel Prize ceremony are in the same night?

**John:** There are real situations where I’ve been on two things at the same time. It’s challenging. I have to level with people. I was working with Spielberg on a thing, and I was working on a Charlie’s Angels thing. There was too much stuff that was happening simultaneously.

It’s actually rare. The reason why it’s rare is that you can set up to do a rewrite, you could do this other thing, but the way the deals come out and how the timing happens, it’s rare that you’re going to be stuck on two things, and Joe, in your situation, that you’re going to be stuck on two things at the same time, and where you’re going to have to schedule your time so carefully. Your overall plan of, “This eight weeks will be this, and that eight weeks will be this,” it’s going to work out for you in most cases. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I had something lined up that needed to be written after the thing that I was writing for 27 years now. I have had moments where I was a little panicky and saying to my representatives, “Oh god, yes, I want to do that, but this and that.” They’ve always said the same thing, which was, “It’ll work out.” It always works out. It always does.

There was one time where I got yelled at by a producer who was angry that he had to wait four weeks for something. I called the studio, and I said, “Look, I just got yelled at by this guy. I thought I was clear about how this works and all the rest of it. I’m trying to do a good job. I want to do a good job. The people that I’m working for right now would be very upset, just as you would be upset, if I suddenly just stopped working on their thing.” The studio said, “Don’t worry about that guy,” because I guess he was an idiot. Other than that, everybody just understands.

I would say, Joe, it’s not a problem to be in demand. If you say to people… Rather, your representatives. Hopefully you are well represented. You say your manager, so I’m annoyed, but fine. Your manager can just say, “Yeah, you got to wait. He’s in demand.” That just makes people want you more, generally. No one is going to say, “Oh my god, I want to buy this script, but oh god, I got to wait seven weeks for you to be able to rewrite it? No, then I don’t want to buy it.” Of course not. You know how long it takes to just buy things anyway? It will work out. Stuff will work out.

As you go on in your career, if it develops and you are doing well, you will end up in places where sometimes you do have to say no because of your own schedule. That’s annoying, but what you don’t want to be is somebody that says yes to something that you know you just are not able to responsibly do in a reasonable amount of time. Don’t do that. Other than that, it’ll all work out.

**John:** The only situations where the time really matters is production or very close to production, where they absolutely need this thing next week, or else everything’s going to fall apart. In those situations, I’ve had things where on a given day, I’ve had to work on three different projects. That is tough. That context switching is tough. You can do it. It’s really rare. It’s such a high-class problem to have, because you’re generally being paid really well for those situations. Don’t worry about it, Joe.

**Craig:** Don’t worry about it.

**John:** You’ll be fine.

**Craig:** You’ll be fine. Nobel Prize, Oscar, same night.

**John:** Megana, another question.

**Megana:** Haley wrote in and said, “I have a pitch to a production company coming up. I’m one of four writers pitching on the project. The pitch to the head of the company will be via Zoom. The creative executives have asked if it’s all right to record it. I’m reading the pitch off a detailed written document. If it’s recorded, doesn’t that function effectively as a leave-behind of the unpaid work I’ve done? Can I say, ‘No, sorry, that’s against the Guild’s No Writing Left Behind policy?’ or am I at a disadvantage against the other writers if I decline?”

**Craig:** This is actually a very interesting copyright discussion that involves the difference between a recorded performance and writing. First of all, Haley, I’m a little concerned that you’re reading a pitch off a detailed written document. That just sounds like the most boring way to pitch something ever. Side note, you didn’t ask me for my advice on that, but don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t read the pitch off the detailed written document. Pitch it. Pitch it like you know it. Pitch it like you care pitch your passion. That’s what we always say here, pitch your passion.

That said, no, if it is recorded, if you did in fact read the pitch off a detailed written document, what they have is a recording of a performance of something you’ve written. That does not give them the rights to the thing you’ve written. Writing is a literary material in fixed form. It is not a performance. If I go to Hamilton and I film it on my phone, which I should not be allowed to do, I don’t own that recording, nor do I own Hamilton. No, it’s not writing. Writing is literary material as the Guild defines it. That said, I just wouldn’t do it, because it sounds boring.

**John:** Megana will testify that-

**Craig:** Testify.

**John:** I went out with a pitch. We pitched to a bunch of different places. During the Zoom, I keep my notes up to the top of the screen, and so I’m keeping eye contact. It feels really spontaneous. As Megana was the person who had to advance the slides in the Zoom, she will-

**Craig:** Testify.

**Megana:** John is a very good actor. It always felt very spontaneous. I felt very betrayed when I saw the actual document.

**John:** She saw the actual document, but she also recognized that I was giving the exact same performance on every one of these things. Really, I should’ve just recorded it once and hit play for that, because it was exactly the same thing. Then of course the Q and A’s and all the other stuff like that were all unique discussions and vibrant. I get what Haley’s describing, because you end up giving a performance that is kind of scripted to these people, which always was the case in pitches also. It’s just that now on Zoom, you can actually look at your document and it doesn’t feel like cheating.

**Craig:** Looking at a document, notes, and all the rest of it, this is a separate thing about what’s an interesting way to pitch something, totally fine to do. Zoom allows you to do that, whereas once when you were in rooms, they could tell. That’s perfectly fine. Straight reading off of a detailed written document just sounds terrible.

**John:** Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Either way, whether they record your performance, however you perform it, no, that’s not writing. That is not writing at all.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see you have a One Cool Thing who is an actor.

**Craig:** Yes, my One Cool Thing is one cool person. We had the Emmy’s, John. Did you watch the Emmy’s or were you watching Monday night football?

**John:** I watched one frame of the Emmy’s.

**Craig:** Oh, because you were watching Monday night football, of course.

**John:** I’m 100% about all that American football.

**Craig:** You called it American football.

**John:** I did. For our international listeners, I called it American football.

**Craig:** It’s amazing how you can do that even when you’re not trying to do it. It’s incredible. Lots of wonderful stuff went on at the Emmy’s in terms of the shows. Lots of good choices were made. White Lotus, big winner. Mike White, big winner. Also winning for White Lotus for Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series, the great Murray Bartlett.

**John:** Terrific Australian actor.

**Craig:** Wonderful Australian actor. He’s been around for a long time doing wonderful work in Looking and Tales of the City. He was amazing in White Lotus as Armond the hotel manager who, if you have not seen the show, I won’t tell you how it all ends for him, because it’s remarkable. His fellow countrymen of course refer to him as Murray Bartlett. He’s also wonderful as Frank in the upcoming HBO series The Last of Us. He’s the nicest guy in the world, by the way, and a terrific actor.

**John:** Seems like he should be.

**Craig:** He’s wonderful. Seeing wonderful, lovely people win, especially in Hollywood, is just so gratifying. He’s so lovely. I was just thrilled for him. I was also thrilled for Melanie Lynskey. Even though she did not win, she was nominated for Best Actress in a Dramatic Series, I believe. She is also a terrific human being.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** She’s from New Zealand, so really, this is about that whole area.

**John:** I’m going to keep the tradition going, because my One Cool Thing also involves an Australian.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** An Australian megastar. Yeah, big star. Nicole Kidman. My One Cool Thing is actually the David Mack article for Buzzfeed that goes into the backstory of how the AMC Nicole Kidman ad came to be. Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this, Craig.

**Craig:** Can I just confess something? I saw this, and I was like, “This seems reasonable.” I thought it was pretty cool. It was a nice ad for returning to the movie theaters. Was it eager? Yes.

**John:** Was it a little earnest? Yeah.

**Craig:** It was earnest and eager.

**John:** As a person who’s often eager and earnest, I can completely appreciate that. Through repetition, it became a meme. If it had just been out there for a week, it would’ve vanished, but the fact that it kept playing and kept playing, it became a cultural meme. This David Mack article digs into the history of that, including the involvement of Billy Ray, one of our previous Scriptnotes guests, who’s one of the writers on that advertisement.

**Craig:** Was he really? I didn’t know that.

**John:** Yes. I thought he directed it. Apparently, he did not direct it, but he did some of the writing on that. Now that I know that, it feels some Billy Ray-ness to it, in the sense of just it is earnest in a way that I sometimes associate with Billy Ray.

**Craig:** I thought it was very nice. I thought it was very sweet, very nice. Nicole Kidman is remarkable. That’s another megastar, by the way. So much wattage there. I guess it seems like this world around the Nicole Kidman thing has been somewhat with it. It’s not making fun of it as much as enjoying it with it. Any time I feel like drag queens are doing parody versions, it means that it’s beloved.

**John:** It’s like the boy who loves corn.

**Craig:** I love the boy who loves corn. It’s corn.

**John:** It’s corn. It’s specific, and it just feels like a great moment of public performance. Anyway, check out this David Mack article, which I thought did a nice job of explaining the phenomenon of it.

**Craig:** I think it’s great. I think it’s great. Sometimes just lack of cynicism is a lovely thing.

**John:** I agree 100%. Finally on the show, if you’re listening to this on Tuesday, October 20th, when this came out, we are now deep enough into the podcast that the Kickstarter for Writer Emergency Pack XL should now be live.

**Craig:** Live!

**John:** Craig can click through the little link there to see. Longtime listeners will know that back in 2015, my little company did the original Writer Emergency Pack. It was a deck of cards designed to help get your story unstuck. Back then, we hoped to print 100 of them. We ended up printing 8,000 of them to ship them to backers-

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** … and 8,000 to classrooms across the country. I think, Craig, you described it as the Toms shoes strategy of give one, get one. For every pack we sent out to backers, we sent one to a classroom. They’re now in classrooms all over the country, which has been great, but we want to do a bigger, better version of them. This is the version that Aline always wanted us to do, which is putting all the information for the cards on one side, so it’s a physically bigger deck. It’s a tarot-sized card deck.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** It’s good. We got brand new artwork, a new hard box that will last longer. If you would like one of these, and you live in the US or Canada, back us on Kickstarter, because we will be sending them out to you soon. I think they turned out really, really well.

**Craig:** What is the material that you use for the cards? Is it a plastic, or is it a paper?

**John:** It is a paper. One of our goals in this version of the project is to really lower our environmental footprint, our carbon footprint. We are using certified paper. The box is proudly cardboard, shipboard. Even our packaging materials are 100% recyclable and compostable. We want to make sure this thing is durable and lasts, but when you’re done with it, it’s not going to stick around for a thousand years.

**Craig:** Put it in your compost pile.

**John:** That’s what you can do. I can’t promise you that it’s compostable, but I think it probably will be.

**Craig:** That’s not a great slogan for a new product. “You can throw it out.”

**John:** “Probably compostable.”

**Craig:** “You can rot this.”

**John:** “This will eventually rot. Like all things, this will disintegrate.”

**Craig:** I think that actually is a great slogan for this. “This is garbage.”

**John:** “One day, this too, like you, will rot.”

**Craig:** Will just be a loam, just a loamy soil.

**John:** This could be another Bonus topic, but let’s talk about burial at some point, because I am really opposed to corpse burial and casket burial.

**Craig:** So am I. It’s so stupid. I can’t believe we’re doing it. I can’t believe we put people in boxes and then put the box in the ground.

**John:** No, we don’t put the box in the ground. We put the box in a concrete vault in the ground.

**Craig:** Really? I thought it was just dirt.

**Megana:** What?

**John:** You cannot put a casket in the ground. You have to put a concrete vault in.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** Then the casket goes in the concrete vault.

**Craig:** No, but I’ve seen… What?

**John:** No, Craig, they’re lowering the casket down into a concrete vault they’ve already put there.

**Craig:** Wait, but why do I see dirt then?

**John:** Because they’re throwing dirt on top of it, but then they’re putting a lid on top of that before they throw all the other dirt in.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. In almost every jurisdiction in the US, you’re not allowed to just put the box.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You have to put a vault.

**Craig:** Because you don’t want rotting bodies in the water table?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That makes sense. Everybody should be burned. Everybody. Burned instantly, by the way.

**John:** If you are as opposed to casket burial as I am, please back us on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter will be running for 30 days. We only need to hit $26,000 to send these things to people. I think we’ll hit that. I’m just really happy with them. We’ve been working on them for a long time.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It’s good to finally get them out there in the world.

**Craig:** Congratulations. Hopefully, people do back that. Does this Kickstarter require this many people do it before it activates?

**John:** We have 30 days to hit our goal of $26,000.

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** I think we’ll hit that.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** We have to hit our goal. Beyond that, we can do stretch goals and things. We decided to limit it to only the US and Canada, because international shipping is not only financially expensive, but also the carbon footprint of that is a lot. If you are an international backer who wants one, hold still, because we will find partners to make them in other places so we’re not having to ship these things across oceans.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. Do you know what I would love?

**John:** Tell me what you’d love.

**Craig:** I would love for you to read some boilerplate.

**John:** Oh my god, I’m going to do it. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Oh my god, yes.

**John:** Our outro is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, which is where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting.

**Craig:** Inneresting.

**John:** Which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You could get the brand new Scriptnotes double S T-shirt up there now. We’re about to print a new batch of those. 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 Two Truths-

**Craig:** Two Truths-

**John:** … and a Lie.

**Craig:** … and a Lie.

**John:** Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** I’ve got a couple of these. I’ve got a couple different categories here.

**Craig:** Oh my god. So set up.

**John:** Megana, are you also going to do Two Truths and a Lie yourself?

**Megana:** I have some prepared, but I don’t need to do them, because I’m a terrible liar.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** I think you absolutely have to do them.

**Craig:** John, you’re saying you have four truths and two lies?

**John:** No, I’m saying I have three different categories. I have nine truths and lies.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** I broke them into categories. We’ll start with in high school.

**Craig:** So set up.

**John:** You have to think back to high school John.

**Craig:** High school John.

**John:** In high school, I was first chair clarinet in the Colorado All State Orchestra. In high school, I was bitten by a black widow spider. In high school, I competed in the World Championships in Future Problem Solving in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Two truths, one lie.

**Craig:** I have my choice.

**Megana:** I think I have mine too. You don’t want to discuss, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m happy to discuss. Let’s workshop this. My instinct is that the clarinet is a lie.

**Megana:** Yeah, mine too, because I feel like otherwise you would’ve been hearing him play the clarinet. First chair?

**Craig:** Also, I was the first chair clarinet in the, I should’ve used this as one of my things, the Staten Island All Borough Junior Orchestra when I was 12.

**Megana:** Do you recognize John as being first chair?

**Craig:** Don’t recognize clarinet. That’s right. I played the clarinet, and I played it well. It’s a part of my life that honestly I’ve almost forgotten, but it was there. I don’t recognize that. I don’t believe that. I think the black widow sounds like a lie, and therefore I believe it’s true. Also, he was scouting a lot.

**Megana:** Also, according to office lore, Nima tells a story about how John picked up a black widow spider by the hands and just waved it off.

**Craig:** That does sound like something a robot would do in defiance of nature and God.

**Megana:** Or that he’s already experienced and knows it’s not that bad.

**Craig:** It’s not good. Yes, I hear what you’re saying, that maybe he’s like, “Look, I’ve survived it once. I can survive it again.” Then the Ann Arbor thing, there are so many words. It’s so specific and weird.

**Megana:** I believe it.

**Craig:** It sounds like something he would do, a future problem solving conference.

**Megana:** We’re locked into clarinet?

**Craig:** I think we’re locked into clarinet.

**John:** You’re touching that card?

**Craig:** We’re touching it.

**John:** You are correct. Fascinatingly, you’re correct for the wrong reasons. This is a thing I just learned about you, Craig. I was first chair of the middle school, the junior high, first chair clarinet middle school, junior high All County, which is All Borough, Orchestra.

**Craig:** We were the same. Wow.

**John:** You and I both, we’re going to have a clarinet duo, clearly.

**Craig:** No, we’re not.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** That’s beautiful.

**John:** Here’s the thing.

**Craig:** Actually, let’s just take a moment and just recognize the beauty of life.

**John:** Weirdly, like you, I was really good at clarinet, and I realized at a certain point, I don’t care about being really good at clarinet. It is pointless to be good at clarinet.

**Craig:** I can’t believe anyone cares about being good at clarinet. I saw the LA Philharmonic. They ran Back to the Future at the Hollywood Bowl. The Philharmonic played the score along with it. It was fantastic. There are clarinetists in there, and they’re amazing.

**John:** They’re incredibly good.

**Craig:** How did that happen? At some point, did they not go, “What am I doing? Why am I playing this?” Clarinetists have a chip on their shoulder, because everyone’s like, “Oh my god, the oboe. The oboe, it’s so hard.”

**John:** By the way, the clarinet though is the heart of most of the sound you’re hearing.

**Craig:** Clarinet, it really is the unheard glue of everything. It really is. It’s the alto in the chorus.

**John:** We’re tuning the whole band to us, so yeah.

**Craig:** That’s right. The oboe is typically the one doing that.

**John:** If there’s an oboe, then you’ll take the oboe.

**Craig:** That’s the thing about oboists is that they’re dicks.

**John:** Because they have all that pressure in their head, because they’re having to squeeze through such a narrow thing.

**Craig:** Because they’re like, “I have two reeds. You only have one reed.” Oh, shut up. Shut up, oboists, with your two reeds.

**John:** Megana, when you come into the office later, I will play you a clarinet solo.

**Megana:** I look forward to it.

**Craig:** Playing the clarinet was… I don’t know, I was good at it. I don’t know why I was good at it, but I was.

**John:** I was good at it, because I practiced.

**Craig:** You know what, John? We had excellent embouchure.

**John:** We did. Craig, tell some truths and some lies.

**Craig:** They’re all about my childhood. I’m going to go back to early childhood. All of these things took place between the ages of 8 and 11. The first thing, I was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder related to hemophilia. The second thing was that I escaped a minor house fire. I define minor house fire as the house was not completely engulfed in flames. Third, I was hit by an automobile, a moving automobile I mean. I guess it would have to be moving if you were hit by it. I was hit by a car.

**John:** Megana, let’s talk through these. The blood disorder feels like, huh, that’s a strange thing for us to have never heard about.

**Megana:** Hear about, yeah.

**John:** Yet at the same time, it’s like, oh, but that feels-

**Megana:** It’s so specific.

**John:** I want to believe it. Hit by a car feels like it could happen a lot. People get hit by cars, and they’re all right. The house fire feels… Again, the specificity of it makes it tempting.

**Megana:** I think I’m going to go with the car. I bet that he was hit by a car later in his life.

**John:** I’m going to back you on car. Craig, we are touching the car story.

**Craig:** Guess who’s a better liar than you, John?

**John:** Is it Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** I was hit by a car, John.

**John:** Which was the lie?

**Craig:** The lie was house fire. I did not escape a minor house fire. There was no minor house fire. There was no house fire at all.

**John:** I think minor house fire is a really… That minor does a lot of work there. It’s so smart. Well done.

**Craig:** Thank you. I was diagnosed with this very strange blood disorder that they said I would eventually outgrow, and they were right. Basically, if you’re a hemophiliac, you’re missing this key blood factor. I think there’s 14 clotting factors or something. I was missing one of them that wasn’t the hemophilia one. For a while, when my teeth would fall out, it would just bleed and bleed and bleed.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I needed to get my tonsils out, and they were like, “No, you can’t. You’ll die.” It didn’t really stop until I was in high school, and then it was okay.

**John:** Nice. I’m glad you’re okay.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Megana.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Tell us some truths and some lies.

**Megana:** Do we have to categorize them?

**John:** No, you don’t have to.

**Megana:** One, the CIA tried to recruit me out of Harvard. Two, I have my doubts about the moon landing. Three, I ran the Boston Marathon when I was 19.

**Craig:** Let’s discuss, John, because there’s something I’m drifting toward, but maybe I’m being suckered here.

**John:** Being recruited by the CIA overall makes sense but also feels like everyone in Harvard probably is, and she could be taking a story from a friend who was recruited.

**Craig:** The CIA was certainly on the Princeton campus. Yes, you’re right. It’s the kind of thing that feels incredibly believable, and yet they may have just passed her by.

**John:** She has her doubts about the moon landing. She also kind of believes in some astrology things, so maybe.

**Craig:** I think the fact that she said some doubts is her Get Out of Jail Free card on that one.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Because I think if she said, “I don’t believe in the moon landing,” we’d all point our fingers and say, “That’s a lie, and also you can’t produce the show anymore.” If she has some sort of Megana-like doubts, because Megana slightly believes in ghosts… I think that one is actually believable. It’s distressing, but it’s believable.

**John:** Remind us of your third.

**Craig:** The marathon.

**John:** The marathon. She is a distance runner. She has run distance before. Boston Marathon I feel like is a hard one to get into.

**Craig:** She said she ran it or completed it?

**Megana:** I said I ran it when I was 19.

**Craig:** That implies complete. I think she might’ve been able to do that.

**John:** I think she might’ve been able to do that too. I’m going to say CIA is my-

**Craig:** I’m touching CIA card.

**John:** CIA.

**Megana:** Oh god, you guys are right. I so want it to be true though.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** You definitely had friends who were recruited by CIA.

**Megana:** Yeah, they were not at all interested in me.

**Craig:** Yeah, because you just seem so nice. You’re like, “I don’t want this misuse of intelligence.”

**Megana:** I have a lot of notes for them.

**Craig:** That’s weird that you wouldn’t want to support the CIA, Megana. Wow. Also, doubting the moon landing? Megana.

**Megana:** I said doubt. If you’re going to make me bet my life on a fact, I’m not going to choose that fact.

**Craig:** There are so many facts to choose from. I’m just saying, what are your doubts about the moon landing?

**Megana:** I have some YouTube videos I’m going to send you.

**Craig:** No, you don’t. You have them, but you’re not sending them.

**Megana:** I think the JFK speech like, “We’re going to go to the moon at the end of this decade,” incredible piece of rhetoric.

**Craig:** Yes, and also, they did it. They did it. Megana. Oh god, Megana, no. No.

**Megana:** We just had an amazing episode about visual effects. That’s all I’m going to say.

**Craig:** You know what? 1969, those visual effects were not there. No. Megana, for God’s sake, no. No. No. No.

**Megana:** No?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Thank you for Two Truths and a Lie.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** I think generally it’s used as an icebreaker to learn facts about strangers, but I learned something fundamental about Craig Mazin in this conversation. I can’t believe all these years, all these podcasts-

**Craig:** Same.

**John:** … that clarinet has never come up. I still have my clarinet.

**Craig:** Wow. You do?

**John:** I do. It’s a good old wooden clarinet.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Does it smell like that weird reed grease?

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Or the cork grease.

**John:** Cork grease, yeah.

**Craig:** Cork grease.

**John:** It looks like ChapStick.

**Craig:** It’s that smell. I can still smell it.

**John:** Oh, 100%. Love it. When you suck up the spit through the reed and-

**Craig:** Gross.

**Megana:** You guys have been popular for a really long time.

**Craig:** Nothing is as popular-

**John:** As a male clarinetist?

**Craig:** … as a male clarinetist. You’re right. Male clarinetists, so sexy.

**John:** Yeah, the best.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

**Craig:** The shame of it all.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([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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